The GOP’s Enemy #1 for the Midterms: Socialism

A very old joke imagines two elderly Jewish men sitting on a park bench. The first reads the local Yiddish-language newspaper. The second reads an antisemitic, pro-fascist paper. After a few minutes, the first turns to the second and asks, “How can you read that garbage?”

The second replies, “When I read your paper, it’s nothing but bad news. It depresses me! When I read this paper, I hear that we run banks, the media, Hollywood. . . .  It cheers me up!”

I kept thinking of that yesterday as I watched the first night of the Republicans’ midterm “convention” (where no one was nominated, and no official business of any kind was conducted). When I read Jacobin, I get a (sadly realistic) view of reality where the Democratic establishment remains powerful and opposed to even basic reforms like Medicare for All. When I listened to the “convention” speakers, on the other hand, I heard that socialists had completely taken over the Democratic ballot line. Congressman Steve Scalise said there had been a “Bolshevik Revolution in the Democrat party.”

In fact, the socialist takeover seemed to be one of the few subjects most of the speakers could get excited about. Two years ago, the (actual) Republican convention that nominated Donald Trump was magnetically disturbing, like something out of a darkly satirical movie about a country descending into dystopian authoritarianism. Hulk Hogan ripped off his shirt while screaming about “Trumpomania.” Speaker after speaker spun unhinged horror stories about hordes of undocumented immigrants poisoning the native-born populace. The energy was palpable.

Now, Trump has been back in office for a year and a half. In that time, we’ve seen continuing inflation, a wildly unpopular war in the Middle East, something like a Cold War against Canada of all countries, and an immigration crackdown that has been cruel and authoritarian enough to turn the public decisively against the administration on what was once their most popular issue. Even in the context of a glorified pep rally full of attendees prepared to cheer anything that comes out of any low-level Republican politician’s mouth, convention speakers palpably struggled to find a narrative and stoke excitement about it. Where once the idea of restoring Trump to the presidency and making their enemies pay was enough to whip Republicans into a frenzy, now, as often as not, congressmen addressing the crowd seemed happy to wander listlessly from issue to issue.

The palpable exception was the struggle against the scourge of socialism. On that, they sounded like their old selves.

Heavy on Red-Baiting, Light on Specifics

House Majority Whip Tom Emmer railed against “the Communist Party, uh, excuse me, the Democrats,” the “democratic communists” — presumably his way of referring to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — and the “Marxists, communists, and anarchists” who he said want to “destroy” America. Not to be outdone, Trump himself said in his keynote that:

In state after state, the Democrat establishment has been overthrown and replaced by crazed lunatics and radicals. They call themselves Democrat socialists, but actually they’re communists. . . .  It’s going to be a communist country if they win.

What, though, would being a “communist country” actually entail? How would the laws change? How would society change?

On that, the “convention” speakers were far less informative. There was a lot of talk of “taxes” going up, but they made little to no mention of which taxes would be raised on which taxpayers, never mind what would be paid for in exchange.

Scalise, Emmer, and Trump all trotted out the DSA platform’s dubious slogan (controversial within DSA itself) about a long-term goal of “abolishing” police and prisons. But none of them mentioned short-term goals on which DSA is completely united, like Medicare for All (a phrase none of them uttered even once) or universal daycare or abolishing the travesties of Americans going into debt to pay for medical bills or a college education. Emmer mentioned “health care for illegals” while managing to avoid the subject of whether the 96.7 percent of the people who live here who aren’t undocumented immigrants would also get free health care.

Perhaps the most fervent bigots are so incensed about the thought of that 3.3 percent of “illegals” getting to see a doctor when they’re sick without having to worry about medical bankruptcy that they think having to worry about medical bankruptcy themselves is a fair trade. But even among Republican-leaning voters, that’s likely a minority position — and politicians like Emmer know it, which is why they aren’t eager to broach the subject.

Similarly, he said something about “Mamdani the commie” wanting to build what he said would be substandard municipal housing, but he couldn’t bring himself to mention the mayor’s rent freeze or his hearings to expose and go after negligent landlords. Perhaps bringing up those subjects would have encouraged otherwise sympathetic working-class Republicans to think a little too hard about how much they themselves pay in rent, and what their complaints are about their own landlords. All in all, in this threatening scenario, electing politicians like “Mamdani the commie” might not sound like the worst idea.

Even the long-term agenda of full socialism is one Republican red-baiters don’t want to linger on for too long. It’s one thing to say in an applause line that America will never become a “communist country.” It’s another to look into democratic socialists’ ideas about what a fully socialist society might actually look like.

Imagine if, instead of just saying that socialists want to “defund the police and abolish prisons and get rid of the Senate,” they had to try to whip up their base about the core socialist economic agenda. Perhaps Trump could have said something like this:

These crazed radical-left lunatics don’t just want to give everyone health care, so that you’d no more have to take out your credit card at the hospital than you do when the fire department comes to put out a fire at your house, but they even want to make public daycare available to anyone who wants it. And you know what they want to do long term? You’re not going to believe this! They’re going to take away our beloved corporations from rich people like me and turn them over to the workers to run themselves. The people who worked there would hold elections about who ran the company. They would get to vote on the wage scales, to decide how much everyone would be paid! Can you imagine? The workers? That would be ridiculous!

Trump knows better than to give that speech. It’s so much safer, from his perspective, to stick to cherry-picked, internally controversial bits and pieces of the DSA platform. Unfortunately for him, though, the public is already aware of at least some elements of democratic socialists’ core economic agenda. And in the long term, banking on ordinary people to hate immigrants more than they want health care or lower rent may be a losing proposition.