Can we PLEASE lose this "Socialism is Communism" nonsense?
Right now, though, another thought comes to mind. It's inspired by the recently concluded CPAC meeting, an annual gathering of conservatives that this year set something of a tone for the 2020 election.
President Trump said at this year's CPAC, "Socialism is not about the environment, it’s not about justice, it’s not about virtue. Socialism is about only one thing: it’s called power for the ruling class."
Huh? I'm not a fan of socialism, but... huh?
And then, there's Sebastian Gorka, a former White House advisor, who said something way over the top that I'm amazed to hear repeatedly these days from a great many people who should know better: “Democratic socialism is just a (politically correct) term for communism." About Alexandria Ocasia-Cortez's rather... um... extreme "New Green Deal," Gorka went beyond saying that it was extreme or ill-considered or not a good idea. “It's green on the outside," he said, "(but) deep, deep red communist on the inside,"
Dude, many of us hoped that we had gotten past that kind of nonsense with Joe McCarthy. Well, OK. That was rhetorical overreach on my part. Anybody who really pays attention has known right along that some circles really haven't progressed much beyond McCarthyism. People on the goofier fringes of the conservative movement have never stopped throwing the ugly and evil and grotesquely inhuman word "communism" around loosely at anybody they happen to dislike or disapprove of. Slander and libel are things extremists tend not to shy away from on either the right or the left. This shouldn't have to even be said, but regrettably, it does, over and over, without the need for it lessening with the passing of the decades: something can be extreme, or unwise, or even statist and ill-conceived and philosophically beyond the pale. But communist?!
That's a pretty heavy word, as we used to say back in the 'Sixties.
As conservatives know all too well, words like "racist" and "bigot" and "hate" and "misogynist" and so forth are tossed around by equal abandon on the zany left. It's not just that the name-calling is unpleasant, and takes our discourse out of the realm of reason and into the heated and irrational realm of the ad hominem. It has something of the "Boy who Cried Wolf" about it. A word which ought to evoke loathing and even terror loses its capacity to do that when it's overused and continually applied to people and ideas and movements that don't deserve it. We ought to react to the word "racism" with a great deal more horror and revulsion than we do. But the word has been cheapened by overuse to the point where it has lost the impact it ought to have.
The same thing has happened to the word "communism."
And the Left (yes, and even us Never Trumpers) are sometimes guilty of the same thing. Perhaps those pictures posted by his supporters during the 2016 campaign of Mr. Trump in a World War II German uniform gassing Bernie Sanders or other Jewish political figures, and of brilliant conservative commentator Ben Shapiro (!), who opposed Mr. Trump's nomination, dressed in a concentration camp uniform with a notation that it was taken at "Camp Trump" pointed out all too well just how malignant certain elements in the president's base truly are, and why the Trump movement frightens many of us.
I personally think that Mr. Trump's frank and open disrespect for his critics' right of free speech and for a free and independent press and his and his admiration for Russia's Putin and North Korea's Kim and various dictators generally, and his praise for Philippine President Duterte's policy of hunting down and killing suspected drug dealers rather than arresting them and putting them on trial are not only reasons for legitimate concern, but I'm disconcerted that more conservatives, of all people, don't seem to share my concern.
But I don't think it's fair to call Mr. Trump a Nazi. Some have, and his supporters (at least those who aren't ACTUALLY Nazis themselves) are understandably upset about it. As I said, I'm not a fan of socialism. But can't they see that equating an economic philosophy embraced by Tony Blair and Harold Wilson and Willy Brandt (remember him?) with the political philosophy which produced Lenin and Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot is just a little bonkers?
Although I'm continually dismayed by the number of conservatives who suggest otherwise, socialism is not a political but an economic ideology- a foolish one, in my view, with a pretty lousy track record, and doubtless, one whose presuppositions and implications are in many respect anti-freedom. But again, it's an economic philosophy, not a political one. And to equate the Democrats- even those as extreme as Rep. Ocasio-Cortez- with a vicious totalitarian political philosophy responsible for the murders of many, many times as many people as Hitler and the Nazis killed is deplorable.
We all need to dial it down a little, people.
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