The Big Scary “S” Word traces the stigmatization of socialism in America
Bernie Sanders campaign spurred Yael Bridge to make documentary, at DOXA’s Rated Y for Youth
The Big Scary “S” Word
The Big Scary “S” Word streams online at the DOXA Documentary Film Festival as part of the Rated Y for Youth series, May 6 to 16
BELIEVE IT OR not, the party that gave us Richard Nixon, the Bushes, and Donald J. Trump—the Republican Party—was founded by socialists.
Or some socialists, at any rate, like Alvan Bovay, who presided over the meeting at the little white schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin where the GOP was conceived in 1854 to organize against slavery.
Not long after, Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, would pursue a friendly correspondence with Karl Marx.
The man who composed the Pledge of Allegiance, Francis Bellamy—he was a socialist.
Helen Keller, Einstein, James Baldwin, MLK—they were all socialists.
From 1916 to 1940, Milwaukee was consistently praised as the healthiest city in America under the 24 year administration of legendary Mayor Daniel Hoane—another socialist.
When FDR proposed the New Deal in 1933, later successfully pulling America out of the Great Depression, who did he consult with? The Socialist Party.
As Cornel West states in the documentary The Big Scary “S” Word, and despite powerful myths to the contrary, “Socialism is as American as apple pie.” So how could such an enormous and vital part of the nation’s story be so invisible today?
“It’s just been systematically erased,” is the blunt answer from filmmaker Yael Bridge, speaking to Stir from Oakland, California. “It’s not something you learn about in history. And it’s not just socialism; it’s radical thought in general. Moneyed interests that run the government and set up the whole system don’t want that to be part of our legacy here.
Bridge began work on The Big Scary “S” Word—which comes to the Rated Y for Youth section of this year’s DOXA Documentary Film Festival—after seeing the wave of popular support that made Bernie Sanders a viable candidate during the 2016 Democratic Party presidential primaries. She also observed an inexplicable wave of caution.
“So many people, including my parents, were saying, ‘Oh, I agree with everything Bernie Sanders is saying but it’s just not realistic, it’s not gonna work, we need to reign it in.’ That was really who I was thinking about, these quote-unquote ‘good liberals’ who don’t dare to dream, and don’t expect better, and think that you need to compromise.”
So began the dive into the country’s most publicly reviled political philosophy. Naturally, the Cold War accelerated a dramatic rightward shift inside both parties. And the Republicans “did their damnedest” to stigmatize the very word socialism, transforming it into an all-purpose smear levelled against political opponents who were materially not much different from them. “It’s something that we saw Barack Obama really run away from very hard,” she says. “Which was so silly. He was very clearly a capitalist; he wasn’t a socialist in any way.”
Along with the ever reliable Cornel West, The Big Scary “S” Word rounds up some of the better talking heads to grapple with the issue, including economist Richard Wolff, Seattle city councillor Kshama Sawant, and author John Nichols, who provided something of a framework for the film with his book The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition . . . Socialism.
Meanwhile, Bridge’s camera wanders across the country to find people like the radicalized Oklahoma schoolteacher Stephanie Price, who receives a transforming lesson in 21st-century union politics right before our eyes. Equally inspiring is a visit to the publicly-owned Bank of North Dakota, founded in 1919 to protect its users from predatory out-of-state lenders. Discussing its origins, former publisher/editor of the Grand Forks Herald Mike Jacobs states: “North Dakotans did not rally to ideological socialism. They rallied to a practical solution to a problem.”
Inside our realm of “capitalist realism”—the modern condition, proposed by philosopher Mark Fisher, that makes alternatives to capitalism impossible to imagine—Jacobs’s words are wonderfully clarifying. The film is no less effective in isolating capitalism for the arbitrary system it really is, as when an animated graphic traces millennia of human history from hunting/gathering to our current situation under a mutant economic/political regime.
“When you see the timeline, of course, capitalism is just a blip and who knows what happens next?” says Bridge, who confesses that she was radicalized by the very act of making the film. “Let’s try to be intentional. What do we want to happen next? What would be better? That was really empowering for me. That was my own intellectual journey.”
It was also a physical journey for the filmmaker. If popular support for Bernie Sanders was the question, Bridge believes she found the answer as she met with people and organizations across the States. “I think the country is quite progressive,” she says. “When you poll people on these policies, they want an increase in the minimum wage, they want gun reform, the majority want free college tuition, they want Medicare For All—these are things that poll incredibly well and yet our elected officials don’t do them.”
Capitalist realism casts a mighty spell. A corporately-owned, somewhat rigged two-party system presents another seemingly insurmountable obstacle. Mainstream media force multiplies the problem. But Bridge suggests that a fatal flaw might have been fostered over those 70-odd years of hectoring propaganda, especially in light of the stadium-sized crowds that turned out for Sanders in 2020, bringing more attention to the "S" word than ever. “It felt,” she says, “like an opportune moment to come in and say: let’s define what socialism is, and you can see it’s just not as scary as you think.”
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