Trump’s left-wing nemesis
BEST AMERICAN COLUMNISTS
Americans should be very afraid. Not only are hordes of immigrants coming to kill them, but their nation is also being stalked by another terrifying menace: socialism. That was the key message of President Trump’s State of the Union address last week, said Paul Waldman in The Washington Post, and an early indication of the political battleground on which the next presidential election will be fought. “Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country,” the president declared. “America was founded on liberty and independence – not government coercion, domination and control. We are born free and we will stay free.” Amid applause from Republican lawmakers and chants of “USA! USA! USA!”, Trump said: “Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.”
Democrats and their friends in the media protest that the socialist label doesn’t apply to them, said The Wall Street Journal, but you need only look at their plans to see it does. The party is talking of banning all private health insurance in the US and replacing it with a federally administered singlepayer healthcare programme. Democrat Alexandria OcasioCortez – the 29-year-old darling of the Left, who has had a mutually admiring phone call with Jeremy Corbyn – wants a new government committee to take charge of making the US carbon neutral in ten years. There’s talk of a 70% tax on high incomes and a new 2% wealth tax on assets. Such tax rises on “the rich” would supposedly finance all the Democrats’ social engineering – but, of course, in practice they wouldn’t, said Corey Lewandowski on The Hill. Some experts state that over ten years the Democrats’ “Medicare for all” scheme would cost $32trn; their Green New Deal up to $5.7trn; their free college tuition and college loan forgiveness idea, about $2trn. Together, these schemes “would bankrupt our nation”.
To listen to Trump and his friends, said Krystal Ball on the same site, you’d think there were only two options available to us: the current “smash-and-grab capitalism” or a descent into Venezuela-style chaos. That is nonsense, and Americans know it. In a Gallup poll last year, 51% of those aged 18-29 said they had a positive view of socialism; only 45% had a positive view of capitalism. Trump’s scaremongering won’t work, agreed Paul Krugman in The New York Times. US voters today overwhelmingly support the idea of taxing the rich more and making Medicare available to all. They associate socialism not with Venezuela but with Nordic countries such as Norway, which they admire. With good reason. Compared to the US, those countries have “higher life expectancy, much less poverty and higher overall life satisfaction”. Trump will try to portray his opponents as the “second coming of Leon Trotsky”. The “clean little secret of American socialism” is that “it isn’t radical at all”.