Why GOP calls everything it opposes radical socialism
There are two things one can be sure of when politicians denigrate government programs as “socialist.” One is that they don’t know anything about “socialism.” The other is that they don’t know anything about the programs they’re trying to smear.
So here comes Rep. Elise Stefanik, the thirdranking member of the House Republican leadership, with an especially absurd example of the genre.
Marking the birthdays of Medicare and Medicaid, which were enacted on July 30, 1965, she took to Twitter to celebrate “the critical role these programs have played to protect the healthcare of millions of families.” Then she pivoted to add, “To safeguard our future, we must reject socialist health care schemes.”
Stefanik’s remark was particularly incoherent in part because of the history of Republican opinion on Medicare and Medicaid: Almost universally, they derided the programs as “socialism.”
The Medicare and Medicaid bill placed before Congress by President Lyndon Johnson was “not only socialism — it is brazen socialism,” declared Sen. Carl Curtis, R-Neb.
Ronald Reagan, functioning in 1961 as a mouthpiece for the American Medical Association, reviled a precursor bill to the Medicaid/Medicare legislation as “simply an excuse to bring about what wanted all the time, socialized medicine.”
More recently, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky announced that the GOP strategy in the 2020 election would be to present itself as “the firewall that saves the country from socialism.”
Did it work? This was the election that turned McConnell from Senate majority leader to Senate minority leader.
Stefanik was using the term as a shibboleth — a code word directed at her political base, much as her GOP colleagues have used “critical race theory” to manipulate education standards.
Stefanik was merely sending a signal to her peeps that she was one of them.
As I’ve reported before, the branding of progressive programs, especially those proposed by Democrats, as “socialist” is not a new stratagem. The “socialism” smear has long since become so common that it’s easy — almost too easy — to ridicule.
The best example dates back to January 1936 and a gala dinner sponsored by the American Liberty League, a splinter group of wealthy business leaders and old-guard Democrats opposing Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Its star was former New York Gov. Al Smith, who had run for president on the Democratic ticket in 1928 as a progressive leader and then thrown in his lot with the party’s Wall Street wing.
Smith told his audience: “Make a test for yourself. Just get the platform of the Democratic Party and get the platform of the Socialist Party and lay them down on your dining-room table, side by side. … After you have done that, make your mind up to pick up the platform that more nearly squares with the record, and you will have your hand on the Socialist platform.”
But Roosevelt had an ace up his sleeve — a speech Smith had delivered during the 1928 campaign.
“The cry of socialism,” Smith declared, “has been patented by the powerful interests that desire to put a damper on progressive legislation. Is that cry of socialism anything new? Not to a man of my experience. I have heard it raised by reactionary elements and the Republican Party … for over a quarter-century.”
Nearly a century later, the GOP is still at it. The cry of “socialism” is still used to put a damper on progressive legislation, whether it’s requiring the wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes instead of enjoying the lowest tax rates in 50 years, or looking for further means to ensure universal health care. It’s been a triedand-true method for decades, but as Stefanik’s inept version shows, it’s getting a little threadbare.