Wayne O'Leary

The ‘S’ Word

To hear Donald Trump tell it, this country will soon be hell-bent for the Finland station in company with the ghost of Vladimir Lenin, if such dangerous, un-American types as Sen. Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have their way. The benign, indeed beneficial, form of democratic socialism they espouse will be the end of our way of life and everything we hold dear, according to the Donald.

The resuscitated bugaboo of socialism, the evident Trumpian response to the Democratic victory in last fall’s congressional elections led by the party’s resurgent left, made its first formal appearance shortly before Election Day. On Oct. 23, the White House Council of Economic Advisors, chaired by right-wing economist Kevin Hassett, issued a 72-page report linking contemporary Democrats to the Soviet-style communism of the last century with its manifold economic failures.

The partisan screed mentioned the word “socialism” 144 times (twice per page), along with multiple references to Stalin’s Russia, Mao Tse-tung’s China, and Castro’s Cuba, in case anyone missed the point; it was followed shortly thereafter by a press release highlighting the more bizarre administration claims. Among the frightening possibilities Americans may have to face under a future Democratic government, Chairman Hassett warned, are Medicare for All, tuition-free college, and the horror of expanded Medicaid, otherwise known as “socialized medicine.” The innocent victims of the looming Marxist oppression would include America’s large corporations, which would be taxed and regulated by leftist extremists and could even see their property threatened.

The poster child for what is apparently a recurring Republican nightmare turns out to be Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela, the subject of 60 mentions in the Hassett treatise. Emulating the nationalized Venezuelan economy, which President Trump insists (on no evidentiary basis) that progressive Democrats want to do, would cause the American economy to shrink, he says, by 40%. Putting aside the fact that Venezuela’s economic difficulties stem largely from an overreliance on its besieged oil industry, suffering from the worldwide drop in petroleum prices and lately from US sanctions, no one in American politics (left, right, or center) has suggested copying this failed state’s policies in any way whatsoever.

Nevertheless, Donald Trump, who parrots Sean Hannity’s fear-mongering about socialism and Democrats on Fox News, has swallowed that whopper whole and internalized it. More particularly, he and his advisors have obviously decided repeating the McCarthyite refrain could be the key to victory in 2020. In February’s State of the Union speech, Trump rhetorically slayed the straw man of his own invention by affirming, “America will never be a socialist country. … We are born free and will stay free.” (In Republican circles, conservative stances are always sanctified as being pro-freedom.)

The red-menace theme popped up again two weeks later at an anti-Maduro rally in Miami, where Trump, joined by Florida’s opportunistic Sen. Rick Scott, appealed to Democratic-leaning Venezuelan-Americans to desert “socialist” Democrats in the name of overthrowing the unpopular successor to Hugo Chavez, whose strongman government is nominally socialist (though not democratic). Floridians were subjected to a similar tactic last fall, when GOP gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis tarred his progressive Democratic opponent Andrew Gillum with the socialist brush as part of a grab for anti-Castro Hispanic legacy voters. DeSantis won, so we can expect more of the same two years hence.

With all that, the Gallup organization has discovered in recent months, socialism remains a popular philosophical alternative to capitalism as currently practiced. Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, polled last August, registered a 57% to 47% preference for socialism, a gain of 10 percentage points since 2014, when the two systems had equal theoretical attraction. And American young adults aged 18 to 29 told Gallup pollsters they felt more positive about socialism than capitalism by 51% to 45%, a 12-point decline for capitalism’s favorability in the past two years.

That still hasn’t stopped jittery Democratic presidential aspirants, no doubt harboring vestigial memories of the red-scare 1950s, from running away from the “S” word on the campaign trail, as Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren have done, explicitly denying they are socialists, democratic or otherwise. Which raises the question of what exactly a democratic socialist is in the American context, because democratic socialism is what’s at issue here, although Republicans would prefer to think it’s Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism.

As defined by its leading contemporary practitioner, Bernie Sanders, democratic socialism is really pure Rooseveltian liberalism reconstituted, incorporating FDR’s visionary 1944 Economic Bill of Rights (the right to adequate food, housing, education, employment, health care, and retirement security) with some mixed-economy additions for the 21st century, such as the Green New Deal. It’s nothing to be alarmed about unless you’re a one percenter, but the GOP will nevertheless try to alarm as many voters as possible with images of financial gulags.

Republicans, who labeled Roosevelt’s New Deal socialistic in the 1930s, have already preemptively set about trashing Scandinavian-style democratic socialism (or social democracy), the “Nordic model” touted by Bernie Sanders, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Britain’s Labourites, among others; the Nordic model combines regulated free markets and selective public enterprise with an extensive social safety net funded by sharply progressive taxation, but it rejects confiscation of private property or government ownership of the means of production. In other words, it’s not classically Marxist. Regardless, Republicans have gone down the rabbit hole in search of communists, emerging with apocryphal hair-raising tales of expensive pickup trucks in Sweden.

None of this is by accident; the GOP has nothing in its campaign arsenal except fear and loathing — that is, when all else fails, scare the bejesus out of the voting public. But the litany of socialist horror stories is more than strategic or tactical. Republicans really do hate government — not dislike, mind you, but hate; it’s part of their political DNA. The recent federal shutdown was about more than building the president’s wall; it was the latest GOP attempt to shrink government to bathtub-drowning size, following on the heels of austerity-budget proposals for fiscal 2018 and 2019, and federal hiring and wage freezes for 2017 and 2018.

Socialism of whatever description necessarily involves government, so slashing government undermines socialism. If cutting government means cutting, in turn, such “socialistic” programs as Social Security and Medicare, so much the better; it’s the Republican way. As Trump’s Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney once said, “We have to end Medicare as we know it.”

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, April 1, 2019

Populist.com