Review: 'The Big Scary "S" Word' Demystifies Today's Most Popular Political Slur

Director and producer Yael Bridge demystifies socialism in the informative, hopeful documentary "The Big Scary 'S' Word."

The word socialism has been the catchall scapegoat of American politics, used by fearful opponents of equal rights and fair pay for working people to heap derision on opponents. But the movement has been a crucial component of our culture for over a century.

The 90-minute documentary follows social democrats across the country in quests to uncouple the term from scare politics and to elevate citizen dignity and respect. An Oklahoma educator who participated in the 2018 state-wide teacher strike, a Virginia state legislator from Manassas, and a cooperative worker/owner in Cleveland are some of those profiled to show the lives and motivations of movement proponents working to bridge the "obscene wealth disparity."

In addition to these grassroots activists, the film also interviews academics and historians who trace the roots of socialism from fundamentally egalitarian hunter-gatherers in early human history, to European feudalism where surpluses created hierarchies, to Wisconsin, which elected socialist mayors in several cities, including prominent leader Eugene Debs.

The litany of democratic socialists includes Francis Bellamy, who wrote the Pledge of Allegiance; Katherine Lee Bates, who penned "America the Beautiful"; Helen Keller; Walt Whitman; W.E.B. Du Bois; Albert Einstein; James Baldwin; and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The Republican party was founded by socialists.

Socialists and their union supporters helped workers secure safer work environments, as well as a minimum wage, unemployment compensation, and, naturally, Social Security benefits. Social democrats helped engender what became the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, only to see those protections assaulted by Senator McCarthy and subsequent presidential administrations. An interviewee notes that "change happens when powerful people are forced to make concessions."

The control of society's wealth is traced back to the U.S.'s original sin, slavery, as more money was invested in four million enslaved people than in factories, banks, and railroads combined. Emancipation was the largest transfer of wealth in history at that point.

The Bank of North Dakota is also briefly profiled, a state-sanctioned banking system founded a hundred years ago to serve the community, not to make profits for shareholders. The COVID pandemic is mentioned, too, an event that showed the U.S. healthcare system is designed to make insurance companies richer, not to protect and improve the health of citizens.

This important cautionary tale reminds viewers that the "unceasing pursuit of profit and addition to growth" is moving towards a crisis point, since the lifestyle based on limitless growth and endless consumption is impossible to sustain on finite resources. The doc also shows that socialism and social democrats can't, and won't, be linked to Stalin anymore.

"The Big Scary 'S' Word" will be released on September 3.