Without coherent philosophy, GOP boosts appeal of liberal policies
Republicans have been fearmongering of late about socialism.
“Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country,” President Donald Trump said in his
Feb. 6 State of the
Union address. “America was founded on liberty and independence — not government coercion, domination and control,” he continued.
The latter point is fair. In fact, that’s one of the reasons why, at the time, my concerns about new calls to adopt socialism in the United States were comparatively muted. The president had, at that point, already made it clear that he would go to elaborate lengths in his bid to build a personal security wall among America’s southern border.
And on Friday, Trump declared a national emergency to access the funds necessary for this vanity project, as if the Department of Defense’s budget is his personal petty cash drawer.
That kind of thing worries me more than the fact that Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, is once again running for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination — or that many of his rivals also support “Medicare-for-all.”
It’s true that Sanders is a self-identified democratic socialist who spent his honeymoon in what was then the Soviet Union. He didn’t win the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2016, and I’d be surprised if he has better luck this time around.
And if the 2020 general election for some reason hinges on which of America’s major parties is more loyal to Vladimir Putin, or loves Russia more, it’s safe to assume that Trump could hold his own.
More to the point, however, is that Republicans themselves are in part to blame for the fact that young Americans are in-
trigued by the policy proposals put forward by democratic socialists like Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who recently set the right on edge by calling for a “Green New Deal.”
Conservatives find many elements of the Green New Deal objectionable, although the plan itself is perhaps best understood as metaphorical, like Trump’s “border wall.”
But the GOP, collectively, seems to have decided that having any kind of coherent political philosophy is a fool’s errand. The “new calls to adopt socialism” that Trump warned about in his State of the Union are as loud as they are because they’re being made in a vacuum.
And simply denouncing a progressive policy proposal as “socialist” doesn’t necessarily have the impact that Republicans might hope.
“I think the word has mostly lost its meaning, and it’s certainly lost its ability to be used as a kill switch on debate,” said Pete Buttegieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., in a recent interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper.
Buttegieg is among the Democrats vying for the party’s presidential nomination in 2020. One of his rivals, former San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro, made a similar observation when asked about the fact that he, like many of the Democratic contenders, expressed support for progressive proposals such as universal college tuition and “Medicare-for-all.”
“What people are proposing is not socialism,” Castro said, when the issue came up recently in an interview with CNN’s Van Jones.
“Socialism is where the state controls the means of production,” Castro continued.
“Medicare-for-all,” in other words, wouldn’t represent a radical lurch down the road to serfdom, because it wouldn’t give the state unilateral control of the production of health care, or its provision.
Millions of Americans are enrolled in Medicare already. Active-duty service members, similarly, have access to a singlepayer system via the government-managed health insurance program TRICARE.
The doctors who provide health care to those Americans work in the private sector, and would continue to do so.
Castro is correct, and his definition of “socialism” is not a euphemistic or controversial one. Republicans used to define socialism correctly, too.
In a 2012 interview with Texas Monthly, for example, Republican Ted Cruz accused then-President Barack Obama of being a relentless advocate for “Europeanstyle socialism.”
Cruz, who was on the cusp of being elected to the U.S. Senate, elaborated that he was using the S-word in its literal sense: “Socialism is government ownership or control of the means of production or distribution.”
Cruz was elected to the Senate a few months later and has continued to decry socialism at home and abroad.
“I am not remotely afraid to debate left-wing liberal socialists,” he said last year. In Cruz’s case, at least, there’s no question that’s true.
Republicans should remember, however, that most Democrats in the United States are not socialists, in the strict sense of the term. And it would behoove them to grapple with the left’s ideas, at some point — especially if they’re unwilling to offer Americans a few of their own.