[ Some Democrats apparently thought voting for the GOP’s
ludicrous anti-socialism resolution would keep them safe from
Republican attacks. They’ll find out soon enough how wrong they
were. ]
[[link removed]]

DEMOCRATIC LEADERS’ CRAVEN “SOCIALISM” VOTE IS A SYMPTOM OF
POLITICAL CLUELESSNESS  
[[link removed]]


 

Luke Savage
February 4, 2023
Jacobin
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Some Democrats apparently thought voting for the GOP’s ludicrous
anti-socialism resolution would keep them safe from Republican
attacks. They’ll find out soon enough how wrong they were. _

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries,

 

For decades now, the Right has rallied around more or less the same
reductive and Manichean narrative of American politics. In one corner
— or so successive generations of reactionaries from Ronald Reagan
to Sarah Palin to Donald Trump have insisted — stand the forces of
freedom and liberty; in the other, adherents to a creeping,
tyrannical, and godless ideology bent on strangling the American way
of life. In defining and identifying the latter, the Right has never
been especially discriminating. “Socialism,” at least in the hands
of your average Republican politician, can in fact be applied to
almost anything if partisan conservatives are opposed to it.

In 2018, Mitch McConnell deemed
[[link removed]] strong
borders the opposite of “socialism.” During the 1990s, Bill
Clinton’s rather tepid strategy for health care reform was branded
as “socialism now or later
[[link removed]]”
by Newt Gingrich, who declared it a plan to seize “control of the
health care system and centralize power in Washington.” The
Obama-era Affordable Care Act, whose architects ironically drew
inspiration
[[link removed]] from
the right-leaning Heritage Foundation, was similarly denounced. While
running against Barack Obama in 2008, the late John McCain deemed his
opponent’s tax plan “socialist,” adding, “at least in Europe,
the socialist leaders
[[link removed]] who
so admire my opponent are upfront about their objectives.” At a 2005
event in honor of Ayn Rand, future House speaker Paul Ryan warned
[[link removed]] that
Social Security represented a “collectivist system” that, if
preserved, would inevitably lead to socialist tyranny.

Pejorative use of the label, of course, goes back much further.

Barry Goldwater once wrote
[[link removed]] to
Lyndon B. Johnson urging him not to “embrace the socialist
platform” of his party by running alongside John F. Kennedy. When
Kennedy first unveiled the legislation that would eventually become
the Civil Rights Act, conservative opponents branded
[[link removed]] it
as socialist. In a 1930s speech denouncing Franklin D. Roosevelt and
the New Deal, former presidential candidate and New York governor Al
Smith declared
[[link removed]]:
“There can be only one Capital — Washington or Moscow . . . There
can be only one flag, the Stars and Stripes, or the red flag of the
godless union of the Soviet. There can be only one national anthem,
the Star Spangled Banner or the Internationale.”

All of this is to say nothing of McCarthy-era red-baiting or the
widespread use of the same tactic to justify the repression and
criminalization of actual socialists. Regardless, what matters here is
that the Right’s long-standing use of the label has been defined by
its virtually boundless applicability and thus near-total incoherence
as an actual political descriptor. Which brings us to the ludicrous,
GOP-sponsored resolution
[[link removed]] condemning
“the horrors of socialism” that this week passed the House of
Representatives by a whopping margin
[[link removed]], with the support of
some 109 congressional Democrats. True to form, the resolution’s
text links socialist ideology to a range of atrocities and to regimes
and administrations that functionally had quite little in common,
concluding with the proposition: “That Congress denounces socialism
in all its forms, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies
in the United States of America.”

Intellectually, it’s a total mess — full of bad and incomplete
history. (Pol Pot, for example, is name-dropped, with the critical
details that the United States played a significant role
[[link removed]] in
his ascent to power and offered support
[[link removed]] for
his regime predictably omitted.) As Ben Burgis has pointed out
[[link removed]],
authoritarian concentrations of power have occurred in countries
identified as both socialist and capitalist, and plenty of the
policies socialists traditionally advocate are actually concerned with
democratic decentralization. Countries with far more redistributive
states and collective ownership of wealth, such as Sweden and Norway,
also boast high levels of civil and political freedom — quite
clearly demonstrating that the presence of the former does not
necessarily imply the absence of the latter.

In a sense, however, there’s always been a deeper coherence at work
in this genre of left-punching: namely, to brand everything from the
most bloodlessly technocratic liberal reforms to popular and
commonsense social democratic policies like free tuition or Medicare
for All as inevitable steps toward authoritarianism. Historically
speaking, one of the principal objectives of red-baiting has been to
defang and neutralize not only socialism and social democracy in their
various forms but liberalism as well.

With that very fact in mind, liberals have periodically sought to
inoculate themselves by performatively distancing themselves from the
Left. Some, of course, come by that posture honestly. The likes of
Hakeem Jeffries (who condemned
[[link removed]] the
GOP resolution as a “cover” for an “extreme MAGA agenda”
before dutifully voting for it
[[link removed]] this week), Nancy
Pelosi, and Jim Clyburn (both also Yeas) are all openly hostile to
even moderate social democracy and ideologically committed to
preserving the institutions undergirding American inequality. More
progressive liberals, like California congressman Ro Khanna,
apparently calculate
[[link removed]] that by
eschewing the label, they will somehow be better placed to champion
things like free college and Medicare for All (Khanna’s own vote to
denounce “the horrors of socialism” should raise more than a few
eyebrows, given his role as a two-time presidential campaign surrogate
for the only democratic socialist in the US Senate and his willingness
to be interviewed by this very magazine
[[link removed]].)

Regardless, House Democrats who opted to side with the GOP’s absurd
resolution — progressive, centrist, and conservative alike —
effectively endorsed the long-standing right-wing narrative of
American politics. In doing so, they not only undermined their own
positions — you can bet that GOP lawmakers will continue to brand
everything even an inch to the left of Attila the Hun as Stalinist,
notwithstanding who voted Yea on a resolution that will be forgotten a
week from now — but engaged in the most basic kind of political
error. Accepting your opponent’s premise or conceding their
rhetorical frame is a more or less guaranteed way to lose any debate.

There are, of course, plenty of good and noninstrumental reasons to
embrace rather than run away from the socialist label. If nothing
else, two Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns that vastly
outperformed conventional expectations are as good a sign as any that
ordinary people are in fact much less scared of it than some would
like us to believe. In any case, Democrats who voted Yea this week
failed to grasp a very basic reality of politics concisely summed up
[[link removed]] by
Khanna’s colleague Pramila Jayapal: “However you vote on this
bill, they’re going to use it against you, so it doesn’t really
matter.”

_[LUKE SAVAGE is a staff writer at Jacobin.]_

_The new issue of Jacobin is out now. Subscribe today
[[link removed]] and get a
yearlong print and digital subscription._

* socialism
[[link removed]]
* red-baiting
[[link removed]]
* House of Representatives
[[link removed]]
* GOP
[[link removed]]
* MAGA
[[link removed]]
* Republican Party
[[link removed]]
* Freedom Caucus
[[link removed]]
* Kevin McCarthy
[[link removed]]
* Democrats
[[link removed]]
* Hakeem Jeffries
[[link removed]]
* Democratic Party
[[link removed]]
* Progressive Caucus
[[link removed]]
* The Squad
[[link removed]]
* McCarthyism
[[link removed]]
* Bernie Sanders
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]