Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 22, 1995                   TAG: 9503220051
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

SPENT FORCE

Not about U.S. editorial boards, which seldom betray their place within the bosom of capitalism by straying too far from middle-of-the-road pragmatism.

But about socialism. The question: What, these days, can the term possibly mean?

The collapse of the Soviet Union beneath the weight of its own economic creakiness brought an end to socialism in the sense of command economies on the communist model.

A spent force, too, is the noncommunist or anticommunist democratic socialism of the traditional parliamentary democracies of Western Europe. The British Labor Party, for one, has now formally renounced its commitment to national ownership of basic industries and services. The party had to, if it was not to become permanently irrelevant; in doing so, however, it abandoned defining tenets of socialism.

In now-democratic Hungary, a Socialist Party-led coalition that includes erstwhile communists came to power less than a year ago, following four years of control by a coalition of conservative parties. The new government's agenda: an austerity program - cutting welfare payments, charging university tuition fees for the first time, capping wage increases for public workers, and so on - to deal with the trade deficits and debt in a way that the previous government had failed to.

In America, socialism never got very far in the first place. When problems arose from the excesses of unfettered capitalism, Americans much preferred for government to regulate the market's players than to take over from them.

More potent in this country have been such isms as populism and nationalism. Indeed, some argue, populism and nationalism - and not conservatism vs. liberalism or Democrats vs. Republicans - is what American politics today is all about.

Which leaves Gingrich's comment all the more puzzling. In the United States, to fret about socialists is an anomaly. Almost anywhere in 1995, it's an anachronism.