Democrats Need New Answers to GOP Red-Baiting
Democrats can’t afford to ignore what does and doesn’t separate them from the crop of socialist politicians shaping the party’s policy agenda.
According to a reporter for the Toronto Star, last week’s meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) contained one theme: the growing threat of socialism in America from the Democratic Party. The conservative gathering’s laser focus on socialism echoed President Trump’s declaration a month earlier in his State of the Union address that “America will never be a socialist country”.
Despite four days of red-baiting Democrats, many of the responses to CPAC from the left were dismissive of what was clearly the GOP’s defensive strategy ahead of 2020. “Republicans calling Democrats ‘socialists’ is not a new playbook — it’s their ONLY playbook”, a former member of the Obama administration tweeted, before adding “DO NOT BE SCARED, DEMOCRATS!”
A Washington Post reporter also quipped at the idea of a new red scare. “Having been in the room at CPAC ten years ago, I’m really disoriented by the idea that *now* Democrats are embracing socialism,” he tweeted. “It was just taken for granted in 2009 that Obama was a socialist”.
On one hand, it is true that Republican red-baiting of Democrats isn’t all that new. Since the McCarthy era, Republicans have tried to draw links between the Democratic policy agenda — namely, the role of government in providing a social safety net to insulate citizens from the worst effects of market capitalism — and the socialist takeover of private property. A racial dynamic to these attacks emerged in the 1960s as the black American struggle for equality peaked with civil rights legislation, and again in the 2000s when Barack Obama became the first black U.S. president.
But on the other hand, dismissing the current right-wing red-baiting as business as usual obscures the reality that Democrats have actual socialists serving in their caucus with considerable influence over the party’s policy agenda, from healthcare to climate change to college affordability. Thus, as unremarkable as the red-baiting might be on its own, in the context of a growing movement of socialist engagement in mainstream party politics it reflects a real power struggle between mainstream liberals and leftists in the Democratic Party.
To be sure, it makes sense that ahead of 2020, Democrats would want to play down any notion of infighting over the party’s ideological direction. And it is not always clear that there are serious policy disagreements between socialists like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and establishment-backed liberals like California Sen. Kamala Harris, both of whom are seeking to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president in 2020. As Neera Tanden, president of the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, suggested on Twitter recently, socialists don’t have a corner on the idea of “greater income distribution”. And others have pointed out that the path to Medicare For All, first put forward by Bernie Sanders and backed by most Democrats running for president in 2020, requires some transitional phase like the public option or an expansion of Medicaid eligibility Democrats have long endorsed.
But the few policy disagreements that exist between mainstream liberals and avowed socialists kind of makes the point Republicans are trying to make by red-baiting Democrats. Thus it seems worthwhile of Democrats to consider, and be willing to defend, their own rejection of the socialist label.
As Alex Shephard explains in The New Republic, what is currently considered socialism in the U.S. falls more along the lines of European social democracy, with universal healthcare, free or low-cost higher education, and generous worker benefits. In contrast, Shephard describes real socialism as a transitional phase between capitalism and communism, marked by state ownership of the means of production. Unlike liberalism or social democracy, socialism is fundamentally anti-capitalist.
But missing from this definition is the revolutionary aims of socialist politics. In other words, socialism is not just about what in society transforms or how it transforms, but who is leading the charge — the working class.
The emphasis on workers using their labor power to transform society in the socialist theory of social change differs from those theories that prioritize working within established political processes to make improvements to an exploitative economic system. As Americans continue to see extreme wealth inequality juxtaposed with skyrocketing costs in healthcare, higher education, and housing more than a decade after the Obama recovery, it is not beyond the pale to expect Democrats to have more to offer potential voters than some wonky scheme to get corporations to pay a little bit more in taxes next year.
Ultimately, the reclamation of the socialist label by some Democrats speaks to a real yearning for a politics of social change that is grounded in the belief that another world is not only possible, but necessary for human survival. Freshman New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a self-described democratic socialist, has consistently driven this point home in her push for the Green New Deal, even as its policy goals are fairly conventional for liberal Democrats. Sen. Bernie Sanders has scoffed at the idea of actual government ownership of the U.S. healthcare system, but anchors his fight for a publicly funded single-payer healthcare system in basic human rights.
Neither proposal is socialist in the strict definition of the term, but as a policy vision they ultimately reject capitalism’s reliance on profit to determine what the nation’s values should be, and how to motivate workers and businesses to fulfill social needs. Even if their policies don’t look that much different from those of mainstream Democrats, or from what is standard in European social democracies, the terms by which socialists communicate and defend their policy agenda are different, and do reflect a different set of politics from the rest of the party.
Pretending that core differences between liberals and socialists can be minimized by mainstream Democrats adopting more left-leaning policy positions ignores the core of electorally engaged socialist politics — a fight to change power relations between the base and the two party establishment that many Democrats aren’t interested in, and can’t defend.
