Matt Yglesias

RNC Going Back to the USSR

Via Ed Kilgore it seems that in a non-joking way, the Republican National Committee is actually going to vote for a resolution urging Republicans to start referring to the Democratic Party as “the Democrat Socialist Party.” Washington state’s Jeff Kent explains:

There is nothing more important for our party than bringing the truth to bear on the Democrats’ march to socialism. Just like Ronald Reagan identifying the U.S.S.R. as the evil empire was the beginning of the end to Soviet domination, we believe the American people will reject socialism when they hear the truth about how the Democrats are bankrupting our country and destroying our freedom and liberties.

Ed Kilgore notes:

I don’t know what’s more offensive: the idea of identifying the Democratic Party, which the American people elected to run Congress and the executive branch just six months ago, with the Soviet Union, or the idea that Ronald Reagan brought about the collapse of the Soviet bloc through a magic spell. All in all, the highly adolescent nature of Kent’s thinking is illustrated not only by this comic-book historical revisionism, but by his insistence on retaining in his version of the “Evil Empire” the little-boy-taunt of dropping the last syllable from the adjective “Democratic.”

To take this perhaps more seriously than it deserves, it’s worth observing that the lack of democracy was a substantial problem in the USSR, more so than the socialism. You never see a “Democrat Socialist” party anywhere in the world, but outside the United States “social democrats” or even “socialists” are common enough in electoral politics and to imply that Gerhard Schroder or François Mitterand are basically on a par with Stalin or Mao is a ridiculous slur.

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

I’ve heard it speculated, and even done some speculating myself, that the reason “socialism” is growing in popularity is that you have so many hideously unpopular right-wingers saying the broadly popular Barack Obama is a socialist.

An alternative hypothesis is that this Amstel Light ad is leading some to conclude that socialist Europe is not quite the dystopia Mitch McConnell’s been warning about:

I’m not really an Amstel fan, but there’s no denying that Amsterdam is great. Beyond the obvious, they’ve got some very interesting early childhood policies there and delicious Indonesian food.

The Full McCarthy

Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL) decides to imitate one of modern conservatism’s greatest heroes:

Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.) puts the number of socialists in the House at 17.

“Some of the men and women I work with in Congress are socialists,” Bachus told local government leaders on Thursday, according to the Birmingham News.

Bachus gave the specific number of House socialists when pressed later by a reporter.

To take this more seriously than it deserves, the number of members of the House who would be inclined to support the sort of agenda advocated by what would, in Europe, be called a “labor” or “socialist” or “social democratic” political party is surely more than 17. That would be an agenda of offering a more expansive version of the sort of public sector we already have in the United States—one that provides for public infrastructure, protects people against illness, offers education services, and takes care of children, the elderly, the disabled, and those afflicted by temporary economic dislocation. If, by contrast, you’re looking for “socialists” who believe that we ought to have large scale public ownership of industry then I think you would find very few socialists in France (indeed, it was Lionel Jospin’s gauche plurielle that spearheaded major French privatizations in the 1990s) or Sweden to say nothing of the United States.

The Right’s New “Socialist” Rhetoric

One thing most people probably don’t realize is that there are these international organizations of political parties from around the world. The big right-of-center parties—including the GOP, the Christian Democrats in Germany, the Conservatives in the UK and Canada, etc.—are in the International Democratic Union. The major left-of-center parties are typically in the Socialist International. But there’s also a “Liberal International” which is for liberal parties in the European sense, usually small right-of-center outfits that emphasis deregulation, social tolerance, and a business perspective. But based on what’s essentially terminological confusion and a desire to not be attacked as “socialists,” the Democratic Party isn’t a member of the Socialist International even though basically all the equivalent parties abroad—the sundry “labor” and “social democrat” parties of the UK, Australia, and the continent—are.

I wonder if the medium-term impact of the new red scare that the right is currently engaged in will be to change this dynamic. Mark Liebovich reports for The New York Times:

It seems that “socialist” has supplanted “liberal” as the go-to slur among much of a conservative world confronting a one-two-three punch of bank bailouts, budget blowouts and stimulus bills. Right-leaning bloggers and talk radio hosts are wearing out the brickbat. Senate and House Republicans have been tripping over their podiums to invoke it. The S-bomb has become as surefire a red-meat line at conservative gatherings as “Clinton” was in the 1990s and “Pelosi” is today.

“Earlier this week, we heard the world’s best salesman of socialism address the nation,” Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, said on Friday, referring, naturally, to a certain socialist in chief.

Former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas decried the creation of “socialist republics” in the United States. “Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff,” Mr. Huckabee said, speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference here over the weekend, a kind of Woodstock for young conservatives.

By redirecting their rhetoric several clicks to the left, conservatives seem to me to be essentially collaborating in efforts to shift the center of public opinion to the left. Instead of a scenario in which progressive politicians had to squirm awkwardly away from the liberal label, the scary concept is now socialism. This actually makes it much easier to sell progressive policy as little more than a practical response to shifting events, but the ideological agenda it’s allegedly serving has been made so much more outlandish. At the same time, by associating socialism” with a popular president, they’re bestowing it with new legitimacy. If Obama’s policies can succeed in turning the economy around, maybe people will decide they like socialism just fine. Of course that’s a big “if” but it’s the “if” that hangs over all present-day political conversations.

Don’t Tell Andy McCarthy

I almost hesitate to bring this up, for fear of throwing more kindling on the right-wing fire, but yesterday’s post on my ties to radicalism including the Working Families Party, Todd Gitlin, and PvdA led someone to draw my attention to JS We Can! which is both a clever multilingual pun, and an insidious plot to bring America to its knees.

You see, PvdA has a youth arm. And it’s called Jongen Socialisten, or young socialists. And in Dutch “JS” is pronounced sort of like “yes” in English. Hence, “JS we can!” a website that is, quite literally, an effort by foreign young socialists to elect Barack Obama. It seems they’ve got Dutch exchange students canvassing for Obama in Pennsylvania and everything. Personally, I love Dutch socialists (and it should be noted that PvdA took a “third way” turn like UK Labour in the nineties and isn’t really a socialist party anymore) but I’m not sure how well this kind of thing would play in middle America.

Socialism

Not that anything about the current “socialism” rhetoric is meant to be taken seriously, but isn’t the closest thing to socialism on the American policy agenda the status quo situation in . . . Sarah Palin’s Alaska? You have collective ownership of valuable natural resources that generates lots of revenue for the state, and then the government makes “spreading the wealth around” through the Permanent Fund, etc. its main priority. It’s actually, for all the flaws of Alaska politics and public policy, a pretty good system. But I think the best way to think about it is that it’s an example of a somewhat special case in which socialism is a good idea.

Of course another time where you need a dose of socialism is if, for example, there’s a financial system emergency and the government needs to partially nationalize large banks in order to recapitalize them. But that’s been brought to us by George W. Bush with the support of John McCain.