Will the real socialists please stand up?

Pitching horseshoe theory

For about as long as I can remember, a major Republican talking point has been that the American left is made up of socialists, both closeted and open. Democratic policies from national healthcare (“socialized medicine”) to college loan forgiveness (“student loan socialism”) have been attacked by Republicans as socialist.

As with many other terms in modern life, the term “socialism” gets bandied about so much that it tends to lose its original meaning. Britannica defines the word as a “social and economic doctrine that calls for public rather than private ownership or control of property and natural resources.”

Image created by Grok

That brings up a few other questions, like whether public parks are socialist. What about fire departments and municipal utilities? If your city has a public sanitation department or public water department, is that socialist? Explain your answer.

And then there’s the $64,000 question: Are Social Security and Medicare socialist? After all, they mandate a redistribution of income, from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Social Security even has the word “social” in its name.

It seems that socialism is a very gray area. The question of whether something is socialist is reminiscent of Justice Potter Stewart’s observation that obscenity was difficult to define but “I know it when I see it.”

The recent furor over Democratic Socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani in New York City made me ponder some of these questions. Specifically, I wondered whether the Republican Party was still as anti-socialist as it used to be.

For instance, Republican voters will rant against socialism, but if you start talking about cuts to Social Security, they quickly transition to a position that asserts they do indeed have an ownership stake in the fruits of someone else’s labor. In case you didn’t know, current Social Security recipients are mostly being paid by current Social Security taxes.

And then there’s the tariff war. Trump talked prosperity in the campaign but quickly flipped to shared sacrifice when he took office. The prosperity had to wait because some pain would be required to make America great again.

“This will be the golden age of America!” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “Will there be some pain? Yes, maybe (and maybe not!). But we will make America great again, and it will all be worth the price that must be paid.”

In other words, some suffering is required for the greater good. Some will be required to make sacrifices in the form of economic upheaval and higher taxes, but as Spock said, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

That sounds like socialism.

But not everyone suffers equally. In Trade War I, Trump’s tariffs hit American farmers hard as the tax hikes closed their export markets and foreign buyers sought better prices from our international competitors. Trump’s solution was to subsidize farmers with bailouts. Back in 2020, the Council on Foreign Relations noted that 92 percent of tariff revenues went to pay off Trump’s rural base.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said in April that the Administration is ready with more wealth transfers to the Trump-supporting farmers as the new tariffs start to bite. From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Sounds like socialism to me.

What about the tenet of socialism that calls for public ownership of property? There’s an ugly new trend in the Trump Administration as the federal government takes an ownership stake in private corporations. This trend began with Trump demanding a “golden share, which I control,” in return for approving the merger of US Steel and Nippon Steel in June. The golden share gives the federal government, i.e., Donald Trump, veto authority over the company’s decisions. To a great extent, Trump has nationalized US Steel. (The government did take shares in bailed-out companies in 2008 under George W. Bush as part of TARP, but the government was a silent partner and liquidated its interests as the banks repaid their TARP loans.)

Beyond that initial deal, the Department of Defense became the largest shareholder in MP Materials, a rare earth mining company, reported CNBC. The Trump Administration claims its trade deal with Japan includes a $550 billion investment fund controlled by - you guessed it - Donald Trump. More government investment in private industry and the centralized economic planning that comes with both government money and the micromanagement of trade policy are likely.

That sounds very socialist, and I can only imagine the weeping and gnashing of teeth if Barack Obama or Joe Biden’s Administration had started taking over private companies.

Going further, Republicans often reference gulags and concentration camps in their fear-mongering, but Donald Trump has made them a reality. First, there was Trump’s deal to use a Salvadoran prison to “disappear” immigrants and hold them indefinitely outside the jurisdiction of US courts. More recently, Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” fulfilled the original definition of the phrase “concentration camp,” which was different from the more common notion of concentration camps as death camps.

The term originated during the Cuban revolt against Spanish rule as a Spanish tactic to control the population rather than to kill them. The definition from the Leo Breck Institute, a “place where a large number of inmates, often those deemed political enemies or members of ethnic and religious minorities, are confined against their will and under guard, usually without having been charged with a crime,” and often under punitive conditions, fits Alligator Alcatraz to a tee.

Indefinite detention without trial isn’t strictly socialist, but it does align closely with authoritarian regimes. In fact, nationalist and anti-immigrant sentiment does fit does fit with another ideological branch, national socialism, the German branch of the Italian fascist ideology better known as Nazism.

Fascism is another of those terms that has somewhat lost its original meaning. I like the definition offered by Professor Greg Jackson, host of the “History That Doesn’t Suck” podcast. Jackson notes that fascism is a flexible ideology, saying, “Fascism is less about what it is and more about what it hates.”

In Jackson’s four-part definition, fascism is:

1) Extreme nationalism that glories in blood and war, particularly waged to build an empire with expanded borders

(2) Governed by a one-party authoritarian state under the leadership of a dictator with a cult like following

(3) Values the tribe over the individual and the state over civil rights

(4) Whatever benefits the state economically

If fascism sounds a lot like socialism, it’s because horseshoe theory is real. If you go far enough to the right and the left, you eventually meet where there’s an authoritarian police state enslaving the people. It’s almost like repression, not freedom, is the natural state of man.

I’m not going to say that Trump’s America exemplifies all four of Professor Jackson’s points, but it does seem that Trump Republicans are well on their way. No authoritarian socialist or fascist regime was fully formed at the beginning. Seizing power is a process.

A lot of MAGA fan art is even eerily similar to communist propaganda posters and the adoring pictures of the Kims that you would find in North Korea. It is sometimes difficult to tell what is real and what is not because the real articles are often more outlandish than attempts at satire.

Going back to Zohran Mamdani, Republicans are right that there’s a lot of support for socialism on the left, but the American Enterprise Institute notes that polling shows that half of respondents don’t know what socialism is. A lot of people, especially the young, like socialism without really knowing what it means.

As one social media user pointed out, Republicans can probably thank themselves for that because they’ve spent decades dumbing down socialism to the point where the ideology is identified with social safety nets, health care, and education.

https://www.facebook.com/100044671952881/posts/pfbid02uDnNusP7mAJRfd3EGqPV27ZU3DpfWmm7Qm6HafKQpSSZjhUwotQkh1JT8QaN3WgVl/?

To put it a different way, I think there’s an age divide. To older Americans, socialism means authoritarian countries like North Korea, China, and Soviet Russia. To younger folks, socialism means social democracies like Sweden and Denmark. To some extent, even the US is a social democracy.

And it seems that socialism is probably even more popular than Republicans care to admit, because the majority of Republicans approve of Donald Trump’s socialistic (or national socialistic or just plain authoritarian) policies. They just don’t like the same policies with socialist or Democratic branding.

I think that’s a good example of why it’s dangerous to build a political movement purely around opposition to another party and/or fealty to a charismatic leader rather than on the positive conservative principles that the GOP used to embrace. If you don’t have principles, it’s easy to become the thing that you hate.

As the old saying goes, if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.

The right-wing socialism that I discuss here is not a new thing. Back in 2019, I wrote an article for The Resurgent where I compared quotes from Tucker Carlson, Elizabeth Warren, and AOC. Can you tell who said what? The article now lives on my blog:

http://www.captainkudzu.com/2019/01/what-do-tucker-carlson-elizabeth-warren.html

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