After posting my last piece around noon, I went out and about and caught this article on my smartphone that I really should have included in the argument:
“Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a 2020 White House hopeful, on Sunday dismissed concerns that his status as a self-proclaimed democratic socialist would be a liability in a general election and said President Trump’s description of his ideology as “communist” was inaccurate.
“Obviously I am not a communist,” Sanders told host Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday” in response to a clip of Trump using the designation in a Fox News interview, adding that Trump “maybe doesn’t know the difference.”
Sanders also called Trump a “pathological liar” for claiming Sanders was “married in Moscow.”
Wallace continued to press Sanders on how he would address criticisms that agenda items such as the Green New Deal, Medicare for All and forgiveness of college debt are both overly radical and prohibitively expensive.
“In many respects, we are a socialist society today,” Sanders responded, noting the tax breaks and subsidies Trump received from the government as a businessman.
“The difference between my socialism and Trump’s socialism is I believe the government should help working families, not billionaires,” he added.”
See, Democrats, THIS is what I’m talking about. When the mean Republican bullies call you names, you FIGHT BACK. And you don’t have to do it by being as ugly and evil as they are. All you have to do is hit ’em with the facts.
And the fact is that Trump IS a socialist. He never would have gotten to where he is without gaming the system of government preferences and loans. It’s the sort of thing that leftists refer to as “socialism for the rich,” eliding the question of why socialism for the poor is not also corrupt. It’s just a question of emphasis and benefits. With Trump, he said at this year’s State of the Union speech that he would not allow socialism to destroy Americans’ healthcare, which for most old people means the socialist crutches of Medicare and Medicaid. Trump has defined himself as a “nationalist.” A lot of his supporters, like Iowa Congressman Steve King, have more explicitly embraced the label. In terms of orienting the government towards a certain goal, the Trump Republican Party is using socialist means towards nationalist ends. One could call their party philosophy nationalist socialism. Or even, national socialism.
Now, this is going to raise the usual screaming and crying from leftists who rejected similar arguments because they want to foist the idea that socialism is an unalloyed good. It is not, as anyone whose family escaped from Cuba or the Warsaw Pact can tell you. But as Jonah Goldberg points out, a lot of the right-wing nationalists in Russia are nevertheless fans of the old Soviet Union, because that was the height of Russian military and cultural power (including republics in the Warsaw Pact that are now independent of the Russian Federation). The new Right may bad-mouth socialism but they clearly do not see it as an unalloyed evil any more than the Left does. What matters to them is not the trappings of government, but the nature of it. What Leninists and fascists have in common is that the state is a means to an end, and power is the end in itself. Lenin specifically opposed the approach of Social Democrats in Germany and elsewhere, saying “the spontaneous development of the working-class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology; for the spontaneous working-class movement is trade-unionism, and trade unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie.” Anything that allowed for freedom or plurality undermined the chances of achieving long-term goals, so Lenin wanted a “vanguard party” that would run things from the top down and would only work with other parties for the purpose of subverting and destroying representative government so that it could be replaced with control by one party. This was the Bolshevik approach after the March Revolution, it was the approach of Mussolini and Hitler towards the Italian and German parliaments, and it is clearly the approach of Mitch McConnell, who is more deliberate in his subversion than Donald Trump.
If Sanders and others wish to disassociate their movement from that kind of Leninist socialism, then they ought to do so, and as we see in that piece above, I think Sanders IS doing so. His counter argument gets to the other point: How does the Trump Republican Party get to say it’s against socialism? You have Trump allies smearing Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman over his Soviet (Jewish) family background as though he had divided loyalties, but their loyalty is to a man whose campaign manager worked for Ukraine’s pro-Putin wannabe dictator, who consistently takes Vladimir Putin’s side over the intelligence of our own government, and who fired Alexander Vindman AND his brother from their government posts just because one of them was disloyal to the Party boss.
How can you claim to oppose Soviet-style socialism, when THAT is the path you want America to follow?
Look,you can still vote for the Libertarian Party, or some other party that actually believes in the Constitution as written, but You, The People, have clearly decided you don’t want that option. You have decided, on behalf of the majority, that the purpose of government is not to protect our natural rights, but to reward its patrons and punish their enemies.
So let’s quit kidding ourselves. If you’re voting for one of the two ruling parties this year, the fact is that they’re BOTH socialist. It’s just a question of which government you want: The one that covers your cancer treatment, or the one where your daughter has to fly to California to get an abortion and your favorite gardener is about to get deported?