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NY Times, June 28, 2019
The S Word, the F Word and the Election
By Paul Krugman
What did you think of the bunch of socialists you just saw debating on
stage?
Wait, you may protest, you didn’t see any socialists up there. And you’d
be right. The Democratic Party has clearly moved left in recent years,
but none of the presidential candidates are anything close to being
actual socialists — no, not even Bernie Sanders, whose embrace of the
label is really more about branding (“I’m anti-establishment!”) than
substance.
Nobody in these debates wants government ownership of the means of
production, which is what socialism used to mean. Most of the candidates
are, instead, what Europeans would call “social democrats”: advocates of
a private-sector-driven economy, but with a stronger social safety net,
enhanced bargaining power for workers and tighter regulation of
corporate malfeasance. They want America to be more like Denmark, not
more like Venezuela.
Leading Republicans, however, routinely describe Democrats, even those
on the right of their party, as socialists. Indeed, all indications are
that denunciations of Democrats’ “socialist” agenda will be front and
center in the general election campaign. And everyone in the news media
accepts this as the normal state of affairs.
Which goes to show the extent to which Republican extremism has been
accepted simply as a fact of life, barely worth mentioning.
To see what I mean, imagine the media firestorm, the screams about lost
civility, we’d experience if any prominent Democrat described
Republicans as a party of fascists, let alone if Democrats made that
claim the centerpiece of their national campaign. And such an accusation
would indeed be somewhat over the top — but it would be a lot closer to
the truth than calling Democrats socialists.
The other day The Times published an Op-Ed that used analysis of party
platforms to place U.S. political parties on a left-right spectrum along
with their counterparts abroad. The study found that the G.O.P. is far
to the right of mainstream European conservative parties. It’s even to
the right of anti-immigrant parties like Britain’s UKIP and France’s
National Rally. Basically, if we saw something like America’s
Republicans in another country, we’d classify them as white nationalist
extremists.
True, this is just one study. But it matches up with lots of other
evidence. Political scientists who use congressional votes to track
ideology find that Republicans have moved drastically to the right over
the past four decades, to the point where they are now more conservative
than they were at the height of the Gilded Age.
Or just compare the G.O.P., point by point, with parties almost everyone
would classify as right-wing authoritarians — parties like Hungary’s
Fidesz, which has preserved some of the forms of democracy but has
effectively created a permanent one-party state.
Fidesz has cemented its power by politicizing the judiciary, creating
rigged election rules, suppressing opposition media and using the power
of the state to reward the party’s cronies while punishing businesses
that don’t toe the line. Does any of this sound like something that
can’t happen here? In fact, does any of it sound like something that
isn’t already happening here, and which Republicans will do much more of
if they get the chance?
One might even argue that the G.O.P. stands out among the West’s white
nationalist parties for its exceptional willingness to crash right
through the guardrails of democracy. Extreme gerrymandering, naked voter
suppression and stripping power from offices the other party manages to
win all the same — these practices seem if anything more prevalent here
than in the failing democracies of Eastern Europe.
Oh, and isn’t it remarkable how blasé we’ve become about threats of
legal persecution and/or physical violence against anyone who criticizes
a Republican president?
So it’s really something to see Republicans trying to tar Democrats as
un-American socialists. If they want to see a party that really has
broken with fundamental American values, they should look in the mirror.
But that won’t happen, of course. Whoever the Democrats nominate — even
if it’s Joe Biden — Republicans will paint him or her as the second
coming of Hugo Chávez. The only question is whether it will work.
It might not, or at least not as well as in the past. By spending
decades calling everything that might improve Americans’ lives
“socialist,” Republicans have squandered much of the accusation’s force.
And Donald Trump, who was installed in office with Russian help and
clearly prefers foreign dictators to democratic allies, is probably less
able to play the “Democrats are unpatriotic” card than previous
Republican presidents.
Still, a lot will depend on how the news media handle dishonest attacks.
Will we keep seeing headlines that repeat false claims (“Trump Says
Democrats Will Ban Hamburgers”), with the information that the claim is
false buried deep inside the article? Will we get coverage of actual
policy proposals, as opposed to horse-race analysis that only asks how
those proposals seem to be playing?
I guess we’ll soon find out.
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