Why Trump’s War on Socialism Will Fail

The Democrats will commit political suicide by embracing socialism

Political scientist Mason Williams cited this cheeky but accurate comment by New Deal lawyer Jerome Frank to make a point easily lost in the new war on socialism President Trump has launched: Socialism goes back a long way in the United States, and it has taken doses of it to keep the market system alive.

Going back to the late 19th century, Americans and Europeans, socialists and liberal reformers, worked together to find creative ways to solve problems capitalism alone couldn’t, and to humanize the system’s workings. This has been well documented in separate books written by historians Daniel Rodgers and James Kloppenberg. “The New Deal,” Rodgers wrote, “was a great, explosive release of the pent-up agenda of the progressive past.”

Think about this when pondering the Green New Deal put forward last week by Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. It’s sweeping and adventurous. There is virtually no way it will become law as long as Republicans control the Senate and Trump is president. And if something like it eventually does get enacted, there will be many compromises and rewrites.

But there would be no social reform, ever, if those seeking change were too timid to go big and allowed cries of “socialism” to intimidate them.

In his State of the Union address last week, Trump cast himself as Horatius at the bridge standing against the Red Menace: “We renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.”

Yet in referring to “new calls to adopt socialism in our country,” he had a point. Open advocacy of socialism is now a normal part of our political discourse. Ocasio-Cortez is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., won over 12 million votes in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries running explicitly as a democratic socialist. Some recent polls even have Sanders running ahead of Trump in hypothetical 2020 matchups.

We should be clear that Trump’s words are entirely about re-election politics. He wants to tar all Democrats as “socialists” and then define socialism as antithetical to American values. “America was founded on liberty and independence, and not government coercion, domination and control,” he declared. “We are born free, and we will stay free.” Cue Lee Greenwood.

But attacking socialism isn’t the cakewalk it used to be. During the Cold War, it was easy to frighten Americans with the S-word because the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics offered a powerful example of the oppression that state control of all of the means of production could unleash.

The Soviet Union, however, has been dead for nearly three decades. China is communist on paper but a wildly unequal crony capitalist dictatorship in practice. Young Americans especially are far more likely to associate “socialism” with generous social insurance states than with jackboots and gulags. Sweden, Norway and Denmark are anything but frightening places.

The 2018 PRRI American Values Survey offered respondents two definitions of socialism. One described it as “a system in which government provides citizens with health insurance, retirement support and access to free higher education,” essentially a description of social democracy. The other was the full Soviet dose: “a system where the government controls key parts of the economy such as utilities, transportation and communications industries.”

You might say that socialism is winning the branding war: 54 percent said socialism was about those public benefits while just 43 percent picked the version that stressed government domination. Americans aged 18 to 29, for whom Cold War memories are dim to nonexistent, were even more inclined to define socialism as social democracy: 58 percent of them picked the soft option, 38 percent the hard one.

Oh, yes, and on those tax increases that conservatives love to hate — and associate with socialism of the creeping kind — a Fox News poll last week found that 70 percent of Americans favored raising taxes on those with incomes of over $10 million.

Trump will still probably get some traction with his attacks on socialism. And progressives should remember that social democratic ideas associated with fairness and expanding individual freedoms — to get health care or go to college, for example — are more popular than those restricting choice.

Nonetheless, Jerome Frank was right: those slurred as socialists really do have a good track record of making capitalism work better and more justly. The S-word is not now, and, in its democratic forms, never should have been an obscenity.

(c) 2019, Washington Post Writers Group

Socialism is a term for so long regarded as anathema in the United States that it used to be avoided altogether: Instead of socialism, one said either progressive or the s-word. These days, however, the s-word is no longer taboo. In their eagerness to recruit a new generation of young voters, the Democrats have – not for the first time in their history – admitted a faction of radical ideologues into their midst.

Exhibit A is the “Green New Deal” unveiled on Thursday by the Bronx’s very own La Pasionaria, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), and the rather less glamorous 72-year-old Massachusetts senator Ed Markey.

Now don’t get me wrong: I’m not in denial about climate change. But the measures proposed in the Green New Deal to “achieve net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions” are breathtaking. Comrades, we’re talking about a “10-year national mobilization” on the scale of the Great Patriotic War … sorry, I meant the Second World War. By the end of the Green Leap Forward, 100 per cent of U.S. power demand will be met from “clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources,” which means geothermal, hydro, solar and wind – nukes are out, according to the FAQ sheet on the “10-Year Plan” released by AOC’s office.

“All existing buildings in the United States” are going to be upgraded “to achieve maximum energy efficiency.” And, there is going to be investment in high-speed rail “at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.” The people’s commissars are also going to “guarantee a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement to all people of the United States.” The highlight of AOC’s FAQ sheet was the pledge of “economic security” for people “unable or unwilling to work.”

This is what you get when you recruit your legislators more or less directly from college. For this is the language of countless student union resolutions, freighted with the pious verbiage of today’s “intersectionality,” oblivious to the echoes of the totalitarian regimes of the past. And yet, this document has been endorsed by (thus far) five of the leading candidates for the Democratic nomination in 2020.

Meanwhile, in the real Democratic Party, all hell is breaking loose. Just more than a year ago, they were celebrating the swearing-in of a new governor in Virginia, the former army-medic Ralph Northam, who during the election campaign had accused his Republican rival of “fear-mongering, hatred, bigotry, racial divisiveness.” Symbolizing the new, progressive South was the election of the African-American lawyer Justin Fairfax as Lieutenant Governor – not forgetting the bravery of the Attorney-General Mark Herring in refusing to defend the ban on same-sex marriage in the Virginia state constitution.

Last week, all three men were battling for political survival after a) the publication of a photograph from Mr. Northam’s medical-school yearbook showing two students, one in blackface and the other in a Ku Klux Klan hood (it’s not clear which is the young Northam); b) the allegation, strongly denied by Mr. Fairfax, that he had sexually assaulted a woman in 2004; and c) the admission by Mr. Herring that he, too, wore blackface in college.

The point is that it is political suicide for the Democrats to embrace the campus socialism of AOC.

Mr. Trump’s State of the Union address was not only delivered with a panache that took his opponents by surprise. It was also subtly crafted to expose the fatal contradictions between the Democrats and their socialist succubi. Sure, there was red meat for the Republican base on the economy, immigration, and abortion. But the blue potatoes of bipartisanship were more plentiful – infrastructure investment, criminal justice reform, China-bashing – as appealing to the aging Democratic leadership as they were repugnant to the youthful lefties. I lost count of how many times he forced Nancy Pelosi to applaud. AOC’s face was a rictus throughout.

“We are born free and will stay free,” Mr. Trump declared early on. “America will never be a socialist country.” But he saved the best for last: a devastating broadside against the crumbling Chavista regime in Venezuela, “whose socialist policies have turned [it] from the richest country in South America to the poorest on earth.”

There are a great many reasons why Mr. Trump ought to be a one-term president. Yet the further the Democratic Party lurches to the left under the influence of AOC and her fellow social-justice warriors, the higher the probability of his re-election. In U.S. politics, unlike in Europe, those who live by the s-word, die by the s-word.