I was struck during the presidential election when the McCain campaign referred to Barack Obama several times as a socialist. Nothing I had heard about him indicated that he should be considered a socialist.

His proposal for revamping the health care system and his support of a regressive taxation scheme don’t seem to be particularly radical.

Many other mainstream candidates support the idea of a national health care system, and the wealthy paid a much higher tax rate in the ’60s and ’70s than anything Obama has proposed. My guess is that the McCain campaign strategists thought that if they could attach a negative label like “socialist” to Obama, perhaps a few voters would change their minds about voting for him. Apparently it didn’t work.

Here in Slovakia, which was part of the former Czecho-Slovak Socialist Republic (the official name of Czechoslovakia), accusing someone of being a socialist can be taken more seriously.

Many people whom you meet here, whether they are teachers, nurses, clerks, bus drivers or bakers, were in fact socialists, or even straight-up card-carrying Communist Party members, for most of their lives. From the time shortly after the communist takeover in 1948, if you wanted to be anything resembling successful here, you had to be a Communist Party member. Many people joined just to get a chance for a better life. But many people were firm believers in Marxist ideology.

Over the decades following the beginning of communist rule, more and more people accepted their government’s version of strong-state socialism. Of course there were many who opposed everything about communism.

But as a result of heavy propaganda and socialization of children, by the 1980s, in spite of the opposition and resistance by many, lots of people accepted the basic ideas of socialism and were registered members of the Communist Party, the only party that was legal.

Nowadays, you never know if a person you meet on the street or in an office was a rebellious dissident opposing the party at every turn, or a true party man who lead the charge for years against the Western version of freedom, democracy, and capitalism.

After the Velvet Revolution, which ended more than four decades of socialism on Nov. 17, 1989, Czechoslovakians decided to quietly forgive their fellow citizens who had been supporters of the previous regime.

That of course was after they had run them out of offices throughout the nation. But there were no high trials or lengthy prison terms for the communists.

They just decided to move on, based on the presumptions that everyone was ready for a change, and that everyone knew someone who had supported the socialist system.

Occasionally when I am at work or with a group of friends, and someone comes along whom I haven’t met before, after the new person leaves one of my friends will whisper into my ear, “He was a big communist.” I am typically pretty surprised.

“Him?,” I will ask. “But he seems so normal.” I have found that you cannot tell a difference between those who supported the party and those who didn’t.

Many current politicians were Communist Party members, but now they belong to a party with a name like “The Democratic Peoples Movement” or something similar. When I ask someone if it isn’t strange that a former communist represents a new democratic party, I am told that one of two things has happened: either the person genuinely changed his or her perspective, or he is basically the same person, but knows that he cannot win office without belonging to a democratic party.

The Communist Party still exists here, along with a few parties that advocate some form of strong socialism. But they seldom get more than a couple percent of the vote.

No, Czechs and Slovaks are true democrats and capitalists these days. They have embraced the free market along with all of the ordinary freedoms of belief and personal independence that we are used to in the West.

Poles, Hungarians, Romanians, Slovenians, and the people of most of the rest of the former East Bloc countries have too.

Slovaks have even adopted one of the right’s pet issues: the flat tax. In Slovakia there is a flat 19 percent tax on all income and sales (except for food, which has a lower rate).

There is no itemizing, no deductions, nothing. If you earn a dollar you pay 19 percent tax. If you spend a dollar you pay 19 percent tax. Everyone pays the same rate every time. Until now, in a rapidly growing economy, it has worked.

But Eastern Europeans aren’t willing to give up all of the social programs and services that they expected in the old days. They still have universal health care, paid for in part by the insured, but heavily subsidized by the state.

Education is still free at all levels, including university. Public transportation is extensive and heavily subsidized.

One can get from just about anywhere to just about anywhere else without a car, always cheaply, usually conveniently. They have pension programs and worker benefits similar to what we have in America.

Considering the fate of many of the countries that once proudly claimed to be socialist, it seems very unlikely that Obama as president will propose any big new socialist programs.

People from throughout the world have accepted that a free market with active entrepreneurship and independent initiative leads to prosperity and opportunity for the greatest number.

If Barack Obama proposes a program that takes public money collected via taxes and spends it in a way to help less fortunate people, perhaps instead of calling him a socialist, we should call him a humanitarian.

Brian Green is an associate professor of Sociology at Keene State College. He is on a sabbatical leave this year in Slovakia, where he will teach courses on environmental politics and globalization.


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