Is strengthening the social safety net or limiting inequality really ‘socialism’?

In 1961, America faced what conservatives considered a mortal threat: calls for a national health insurance program covering senior citizens. In an attempt to avert this awful fate, people were played a recording of Ronald Reagan explaining that socialized medicine would destroy American freedom. The people were then supposed to write letters to Congress denouncing the menace of Medicare.

Obviously the strategy didn’t work; Medicare came into existence and became wildly popular. But the strategy — claiming that any attempt to strengthen the social safety net or limit inequality puts us on a slippery slope to totalitarianism — endures.

Donald Trump, in his State of the Union address, warned about the threat from socialism.

What do Trump’s people, or conservatives in general, mean by “socialism”?

It can refer to economic liberalism. Thus after the State of the Union, Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, lauded the Trump economy and declared “We’re not going back to socialism” — i.e., America was a socialist hellhole as recently as 2016. Who knew?

Other times, it means Sovietstyle central planning, or Venezuela-style nationalization of industry, never mind that essentially nobody in American political life advocates such things.

The trick — and “trick” it is — involves interchanging these utterly different meanings, and hoping no one notices. You want free college tuition? Think of all the people who died in the Ukraine famine! And no, this isn’t a caricature: Read the strange report on socialism that Trump’s economists released last fall.

So what’s really on the table? Some progressive U.S. politicians are now self-described socialists, and a significant number of voters, including a majority of voters under 30, say they approve of socialism. But neither are clamoring for government seizure of the means of production. Instead, they’ve looked at conservative rhetoric labeling anything tempering market economy excesses as socialism, and in effect said, “Well, in that case, I’m a socialist.”

Americans who support “socialism” want what the rest of the world calls social democracy: A market economy, but with extreme hardship limited by a strong social safety net and extreme inequality limited by progressive taxation. They want us to look like Denmark or Norway, not Venezuela.

And the Nordic countries aren’t hellholes. They have somewhat lower gross domestic product per capita than we do but largely because they vacation more. And they have higher life expectancy, less poverty and much higher overall life satisfaction. They also have greater entrepreneurship — because more people start a business when they’re not risking losing health care or plunging into poverty.

Trump’s economists clearly struggled with fitting the reality of Nordic societies into their anti-socialist manifesto. In some places they say the Nordics aren’t really socialist; in others they try desperately to show that Danes and Swedes are suffering.

And there’s absolutely no evidence of a slippery slope from liberalism to totalitarianism. Medicare didn’t destroy freedom. Stalinist Russia and Maoist China didn’t evolve out of social democracies. Venezuela was a corrupt petrostate long before Hugo Chávez.

So scaremongering over socialism is silly and dishonest, but is it politically effective?

Unlikely. Voters overwhelmingly support most of the policies proposed by American “socialists,” including higher taxes on the wealthy and Medicare for all (although not plans that force forfeiting private insurance).

But dishonesty has power. Right-wing media will portray whomever the Democrats nominate for president as the next Leon Trotsky, and millions will believe them. Let’s just hope the rest of the media report the clean little secret of American socialism — that it isn’t radical at all.