If you are tired of the “weaponization of words” and the lack of respect for women’s contribution to the creation of our nation as we know it today, you may find the following article of interest.
Here is my take. Socialism and Capitalism are not good or bad. And they are not mutually exclusive. We have our lifestyle and society because of both of them.
Socialism can be good for the people. It can be a way to fairly distribute assets, provide healthcare and a basic retirement. It can provide our kids with care and education. It can provide us with electricity and communication tools. It can give us good roads and efficient public transportation. It can protect our natural resources and parks. It can protect the air and the water. It can prevent us from destroying our home.
But socialism can become too bureaucratic and stifling - only if we allow it. Red tape is not an item of socialist dogma. It is an unfortunate side effect - easily dealt with.
Capitalism can be an engine for prosperity and employment. A competitive capitalism can innovate and develop science. If monopolies and duopolies are prevented, small businesses can thrive and provide good jobs. True free markets are dynamic and creative. Capitalism can be a force for improving the quality of life for all of us.
But capitalism can smother political freedom and funnel money from the poor and middle class to the ultra rich - unless we regulate it properly. Allowing oligarchs/capitalists to buy elections doesn’t lead to broad prosperity. It takes us to widespread poverty and fascism.
So. Ya got your “Yin and Yang” - which with some intelligent, thoughtful strategies could make us a model civilisation.
Forget the emotions attached to the names. Use the concepts as tools to find a blend. Several countries (much older than ours) have achieved various versions of this balancing act. They are prosperous…and happy.
And speaking of interlocking dynamics, please never again remember FDR without remembering Frances Perkins. We HCR followers know Perkin’s story well. But it bears repeating. And she had friends.
Please read this from Matthew Cooke:
August 18, 2026
The Founding Mothers of the Middle Class Got the Blueprint from Socialists
The faces most worthy of celebration in the last 200 years are not the men on Mt Rushmore, or made into statues like Churchill or Captain Cook.
The origin story of the majority middle class is as dramatic as any nation’s history. The difference is this story is actually true.
In 1911, a factory fire in New York killed 146 people in twenty minutes -- most of them young immigrant women -- because the owners had locked the doors to stop workers leaving early.
In the crowd below, watching people jump, stood a young woman named Frances Perkins. She called that day “the day the New Deal began.”
Twenty years later she walked into Franklin Roosevelt’s office and named her price for becoming the first woman in a U.S. cabinet: a 40-hour week, a minimum wage, unemployment insurance, an end to child labor, and a national pension system.
She would take the job only if he backed all of it.
He did. She built almost all of it through public policy.
Where does someone put together a list like that? It was handed to her.
In her final year at Mount Holyoke, a socialist named Florence Kelley came to speak.
Kelley had translated Engels (as in Marx and Engels) into English and spent her life fighting child labor. Perkins said that hour turned her life around, and she went on to work for Kelley’s National Consumers League.
The list she carried into Roosevelt’s office was, in large part, Kelley’s unfinished one.
Her faith pushed in the same direction. Perkins was a devout Episcopalian formed by the Social Gospel, the movement that read the Sermon on the Mount as instructions for running an economy rather than a private comfort.
She belonged to the Church League for Industrial Democracy, which refused to let the church bless an industrial system that ground people up, and to a religious society whose leading light was Vida Scudder -- a Wellesley professor, a Christian socialist, and a member of the Socialist Party.
All through her years in the cabinet Perkins vanished one weekend a month into a convent for silent retreat.
She said she went to Washington to work for God, for Roosevelt, and for the millions of forgotten, plain common working people.
None of this was a secret at the time, and it was used against her. In 1939 members of Congress moved to impeach her for refusing to deport a labor leader they called a communist. The move failed. She kept the job for twelve years.
And she did not do it alone.
Mary McLeod Bethune ran the Division of Negro Affairs at the National Youth Administration and convened the Black Cabinet, becoming the highest-ranking Black woman in the federal government.
She had trained as a missionary and been refused the mission field because she was Black, so she built schools instead.
Eleanor Roosevelt used the most watched position in the country to push her husband further than he would have otherwise.
Molly Dewson (a democrat) moved women into federal posts by the hundreds. Rose Schneiderman (a socialist), who had organized garment workers before the fire, sat on the labor board that wrote the new rules.
The Romans had a word for leaders who govern as citizens instead of warlords: civilitas. That is what these women built. The beginnings of an advanced, modern civilization.
And it was only a first step.
Social Security left out farm workers and domestic workers, which excluded roughly two thirds of Black workers and most Black women in paid work.
Native Americans, many in that same excluded farm labor, were reached late and unevenly. Housing policy handed white families the mortgages that became middle class wealth, and drew red lines around everybody else.
A blueprint that leaves out that many people is not even a first step. It was a half-step.
The next move forward was supposed to be universal economic rights.
In January 1944, Roosevelt went on the radio and proposed a second bill of rights: a job, earnings enough to live on, a home, medical care, education, and security in old age. For everyone.
FDR was blunt about why. “People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”
He died fifteen months later and the second bill of rights died with him.
So Eleanor Roosevelt brought the demand for economic rights to the whole world. She chaired the commission for a Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, where economic rights have sat, dormant, ever since.
The middle class has been squeezed, decade after decade. And when people are made frightened and poor at the same time, they are always handed somebody to blame.
History repeats: Scapegoating, then fascism, then atrocities and finally, collapse. That sequence is not a theory. It is what our Founding Mothers of the middle class had just watched happen in World War 1 and 2, and it’s what we are witnessing again right now.
The United States and the entire western world is complicit in another genocide, ethnic cleansing campaigns, the return of concentration camps, wars for conquest.
The majority of political leaders are puppets of oligarchs, paid to maintain the fundamental conditions that brought us to this very point.
So when you are told the middle class was a gift of capitalism, or that free markets produced it, understand that this is completely backwards. Markets did not produce rising standards of living. Labor did that.
A majority middle class society was built, deliberately, against the fiercest opposition money could buy, by massive strikes, walkouts, sit-ins, activists working out of a religious tradition, an ethical tradition, and a socialist tradition.
We are living on the crumbs of what they won. And we still have the blueprint for the next steps, toward an ethical, advanced society. We know what to do.
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The roots of American anti-intellectualism run deep. Remember that Republican woman who famously said “Keep your government hands off my Medicare”? Politics is just a good guy vs bad guy competition to most folks. Trump (the government) can take a large stake in a business and his fans still think he’s a capitalist. It’s because he’s on a white horse, to his acolytes. It’s all id; there’s no thinking involved.
Unfortunately for them, their democracy and freedom depend on their being informed and acting responsibly, and democracy will fall for them even as it does for us all. Even worse, it affects the entire world. We’re interconnected. That’s just fact, not a progressive talking point.
Good post, Bill. I never tire of reading about the monumental Frances Perkins.
Interesting and thought-provoking, Bill! We tend to label movements and leaders with pejorative names, and then propagandize them to try to gain advantage. There are many aspects of various social, economic, political, and religious realms that are not only similar, but are harmonious or synergistic. If only mankind were smart enough to allow for differences and serve the common good.