The Democratic National Convention opens today, suffused in patriotic high spirits about the American future. But lowdown in the MAGA bunker, the old lunatic awoke this morning and pawed his phone: “The Democrat party” is “ready to break into a full blown party of Socialism.”
Good grief. Can’t he come up with something original?
Republicans have been peddling that scare word for nearly a century, with virtually no success. Trump tried it a few times during his failed presidency – in 2018 he said that Democrats “want tio impose socialism on our country” – and now he’s knee-jerking it again, having apparently decided that “Lyin’ Kamala” and “Crazy Kamala” aren’t getting any traction.
I assume that his MAGA fans are trembling on cue, mindlessly conflating liberalism with socialism with communism with totalitarianism, but cognitive Americans surely know that, under a real socialist system, the government owns and controls the means of production. Not a single Democrat, not even Bernie Sanders and certainly not Kamala Harris, wants the government to own and control the means of production. There is no constituency in this country for nationalizing factories, financial institutions, farms, or anything else. Invoking the S-word, using it as a cudgel, is merely another symptom of the convicted felon’s intellectual bankruptcy.
The S-word got quite a workout 60 years ago when Republicans inveighed against Democratic proposals to guarantee health care for the elderly. The plan that came to be called “Medicare” was equated with “socialism,” and the charge was led by a right-wing actor named Ronald Reagan. He warned in ’61 that if the Medicare concept became law, the government would dictate to doctors where they’d be allowed to practice. If that brand of socialism took hold, he famously said, “you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.”
I get emails all the time from angry elderly conservatives who rail against “socialism.” In response, I often ask whether they’ve refused Medicare coverage as a matter of conservative principle. They never answer. (By the way, when Reagan was president during the ’80s, he signed a law that raised taxes in order to better fund Medicare and signed a law to expand the benefits of Medicare.)
Ditto Social Security. I’ve yet to hear from an elderly conservative reader who rejects those “socialist” benefits as a matter of conservative principle. Nearly 90 years ago, Republicans tried hard to stop FDR’s Social Security legislation by hurling the S-word – Pennsylvania Congressman Robert Rich said, “Roosevelt is a socialist, not a Democrat”; Ohio Senator Simeon Fess said, “The president’s recent statements remove any doubt of his policy of state socialism” – but their caterwauling went nowhere.
Now the tiresome word is back again. Harris is purportedly a “socialist” (and “a communist”) because she’s proposing to help first-time home buyers, fight price-gouging food corporations, cap prescription drug costs, and give tax breaks to parents of newborns. Perhaps the best way to refute Trump’s predictable slur is to quote something that Democratic President Harry Truman said in 1952, shortly before he left office. He was speechifying about the Republicans:
“‘Socialism’ is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years…’Socialism’ is what they called Social Security. ‘Socialism’ is what they called farm price supports. ‘Socialism’ is what they called bank deposit insurance. ‘Socialism’ is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations. ‘Socialism’ is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.”
The S-word epithet is as archaic as Trump, and just as tiresome. What Harris wants – what virtually all Democrats want – is capitalism with strong guardrails, a free market economy with a durable safety net. That’s not “socialism.” That’s common sense.