Again, GOP using s-word
President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Act started off at $3.5 trillion. Now it’s at $1.75 trillion and no longer includes provisions for guaranteed family leave or lower prescription drug prices. That’s still a lot of money. But since the total cost is calculated over 10 years, the annual bill will be only $175 billion — or less than 3% of the federal budget — and it will be largely or entirely paid for by tax increases. (A bipartisan infrastructure bill will add another $120 billion a year.) That seems pretty fiscally responsible compared with President Donald Trump’s record of adding $7.8 trillion to the national debt.
Republicans know that the individual provisions of the Build Back Better bill, such as pre-K programs, a child tax credit and clean energy, are popular. They also know that most voters don’t seem to much care about deficits. But Republicans still feel compelled to oppose major Democratic legislation, regardless of the merits. So to pillory this bill they fall back on the dreaded s-word.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., calls it a “socialist spending bill.” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., tweets: “A $1.75 trillion #BuildBackSocialist plan is just as socialist as a $3.5 trillion one.” (Note how he squeezed two s-words into one short sentence!) Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., harrumphs: “The American people didn’t vote for a massive socialist transformation.” Sometimes they even use the m-word: Marxism.
The s-word has become an all-purpose epithet that Republicans use to describe everything from an influx of migrants to the supposed teaching of critical race theory to vaccine mandates. But somehow Republican spending bills or tax hikes are never socialist.
This is not exactly a new refrain. Republicans have been accusing Democrats of instituting socialism in the United States for nearly a century. As noted by historian Kevin Kruse, as far back as 1952 President Harry S. Truman was complaining that socialism was “a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years” — including Social Security, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., agricultural price supports and other New Deal programs.
When in 1955 Democrats proposed a federal program to vaccinate all schoolchildren with the new polio vaccine, Kruse writes, Oveta Culp Hobby, a Texas millionaire serving in President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Cabinet, objected: “That’s socialized medicine by the back door, not the front door.” Naturally, Medicare and Medicaid were also denounced as “socialized medicine,” even though Republicans now pledge to protect both programs. What became known as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was described by segregationists as “the Socialists’ Omnibus Bill of 1963.” And so on.
All of this raises some obvious questions that Republicans never seem to ask themselves: If the United States has been traveling down the road to socialism for 90 years, how come we’ve never arrived at our destination and still have a flourishing capitalist economy?
Republican accusations depend on a rhetorical sleight of hand. The s-word has been applied to Scandinavian-style social-welfare states that are both democratic and capitalist as well as to Marxist dictatorships (e.g., the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) that were neither democratic nor capitalist. Republicans count on their followers missing the distinction between Sweden and North Korea by trying to convince them that social welfare bills such as the Build Back Better Act will draw us closer to the latter rather than the former.
In truth, I’m not aware of any examples of countries that gradually morphed from democratic social-welfare states into Marxist dictatorships. The countries that actually experienced communist revolutions were quasi-feudal societies, such as Nationalist China, czarist Russia and Batista Cuba, that did not offer any equivalent of Medicare or Social Security, much less family leave or universal pre-K. Scandinavian countries, by contrast, have larger social safety nets than the United States while also ranking high on the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom.
If conservatives had bothered to read one of their canonical texts — “The Road to Serfdom” (1944) — they would see the crucial distinction that Austrian free-market economist Friedrich Hayek drew between the two kinds of socialism. He was not arguing that socialism defined as “social justice, greater equality and security” would lead to tyranny. In fact, he wrote that “there is no incompatibility in principle between the state’s providing greater security” against sickness or accident “and the preservation of individual freedom.” Only “the abolition of private enterprise … and the creation of a system of ‘planned economy’ ” would usher in totalitarianism.
Is Biden proposing to abolish private property and make industry conform to Five-Year Plans drawn up in Washington? Nope. Therefore, he isn’t leading us to Marxism. Republicans are free to oppose the Build Back Better Act. But please stop describing every Democratic bill as the onset of socialism. After crying wolf for 90 years, Republicans have no credibility left on this subject.