By Warren Henry
Monday, August 27, 2018
How we “got Trump” is still a popular subject almost two
years after the 2016 election, not least because the left continues to behave
in ways that contributed to his upset win. There’s a lesson in their behavior
for conservatives interested in avoiding a future discussion about how we “got
Elizabeth Warren” (or someone similar).
Oddly, the lesson begins with a tweet from Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel,
who pointed out conservatives may have inadvertently watered down the term
socialism, by using it too broadly, and may now suffer the consequences as some
Democrats start pushing full-blown socialist policies.
On its face, the left’s perception is fanciful. In 1989,
when its domestic policy shop was headed by Stuart Butler, the Heritage
Foundation published a healthcare proposal with an individual mandate. But it
differed from the Obamacare mandate and was even then opposed by many
conservatives.
Moreover, Obamacare had many other features that caused
conservatives to call it socialist. For example, the law’s rules governing
medical loss ratios (governing the percentage of an insurer’s operating budget
that can be devoted to administrative costs and profit) were set just below the
level at which the Congressional Budget Office would have classified the health
insurance industry as a government program. But the left’s mythos is secondary
to the lesson hidden in the tweet.
Rather, the lesson starts with how ironic it is that Dave
Weigel is the author of the tweet. Weigel’s career was originally a caricature
of how the mainstream press like to paint the Republican Party, particularly
the Tea Party, as filled with birthers and conspiracy theorists. Journalists
generally failed to consider that years of such hyperbole desensitized many
Republicans to the charge while elevating these fringe elements. Yet Weigel
observes a similar psychology when it is Republicans broad brushing Democrats
as socialist.
The lesson to be found in Weigel’s tweet, therefore, is
to take the mirror attitude found there not literally, but seriously.
Literally, left may be dead wrong to think Obamacare was the Heritage
healthcare proposal. Yet the non-left has thrown the “socialist” card in cases
where it is not warranted. For example, Obama’s healthcare legislation had
socialistic elements, but his stimulus program was more in the tradition of
crony capitalism than socialism.
Seriously, the right should consider that overplaying the
“socialism” card may cause many on the left to stop seeing it as a restraint on
their politics, much like the left’s constant accusations of bigotry have
desensitized some on the right to the charge. This realization is useful in
understanding how our politics have become both more polarized and more
confused.
According to a recent Gallup poll, a majority of
Democrats and young adults have a positive view of socialism, while their view
of capitalism has declined over the past eight years. Those results grabbed the
public’s attention, but they merely confirmed trends shown in polling from the
American Culture and Faith Institute, Harvard University, and YouGov (for the
Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation). What those results mean, however,
depends on whether people have a good or common understanding of what those
terms mean — and it is far from clear they do.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the current darling of
“democratic socialism,” seems to think the concept includes things like public
parks and voluntarily-organized cooperative businesses. Neither of these things
are socialist. Not even employee-owned business are necessarily socialist when
they result from choices made in a free market.
Conversely, a Voxplainer like Matthew Yglesias cannot
figure out that Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s recently proposed “Accountable
Capitalism Act” would effectively expropriate a sizeable chunk of large
corporations’ control of the means of production in favor of representatives of
the workers. Yglesias suggests the fact that Warren does not propose
nationalizing these businesses completely means the bill is not socialist, even
though 40 percent of these corporations’ directors would be elected by the
company’s workforce, and political activity would require the authorization of
75 percent of board members.
It might be tempting to believe that Ocasio-Cortez and
Yglesias are fudging their definitions of socialism as a crafty political
strategy. However, anyone who has watched the former interviewed or read much
of the latter’s oeuvre knows that confusion is a more obvious explanation than
craftiness. And if the left’s politicians and pundits no longer have a grasp on
what socialism is, it is a fair bet the average twenty-something is at least as
ignorant about the subject.
Of course, the left’s confusion and further move away
from capitalism is caused primarily by the fact that the right too often
engages in a similar confusion. The global recession of 2008 caused many people
across the ideological spectrum to distrust and reject capitalism as manifested
by elite internationalism (rightly, wrongly, or somewhere in between). In
America, the populist backlash finds expression on the right in some form of
“nationalism” and on the left in some form of “socialism.” Also, younger Americans
have no memory of and poor education regarding socialism’s real track record.
Yet the right’s carelessness in playing the “socialism”
card matters because it encourages radicalization and helps the left stumble
into selling socialism as no different from more routine government action. The
right needs to be accurate — and even educational — when it attacks socialism
or the social welfare state. Otherwise, the attacks will continue to lose their
sting, eventually among the center as well as the left. And that would speed us
on the path to “how we got Warren.”
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