The New Red Scare

Republicans want to make everyone scared of socialism. Democrats don't have to help them.

A specter is haunting America — the specter of socialism. Or as President Trump would like people to believe: Commies! Rotten stinkin’ Reds, I tell ya!

Here’s what Trump said at the latest Faith & Freedom Coalition conference:

Communism is very easy to sell. It destroys everything, but it’s very easy. I’ll be honest, I think I’d be the greatest communist in history. I’d give free rent. Ladies and gentlemen, from now on, you don’t have to pay any rent. From now on, anybody wants a house, don’t worry about it. Just pick the house you want. Everybody gets free food. Everything is free from this point forward. Everyone is going to vote for me.

The problem is, after two or three years, the country is a disaster area. The country fails. They always do. It always does. So easy to sell. That first year, boy, you’re the most popular. It’s happening right now in New York and California. But you’ll start living in squalor. You’ll live in squalor. There will be no food. There will be no housing. There will be no military. There will be no law and order. There will be no nothing. You’ll be a third-world inhabitant in every way, and everyone will suffer or die. You’ll suffer or die. That’s what happens. For thousands of years, it’s been happening, by different names. Thousands of years.

Thousands of years of communism! Marx would be so proud.

The president is not a subtle man, nor is he a particularly skilled propagandist, so he often substitutes his own impulses and prejudices where a smarter politician would have a better grasp on what might be persuasive. In this case, Trump is trapped in his favorite decade, the 1980s. Back then he was already famous but still young, and Ronald Reagan’s Cold War — which was more fun and entertaining than the darker version of earlier years — was the dominant political conflict of the era.

Trump is of course conflating communism, which no one in mainstream American politics advocates, with socialism. But how successful can Republicans be at making Americans terrified of the socialist tide sweeping the country?

The socialist moment

As I’ve often argued, politics is all about timing, and the socialists are definitely having their moment. A number of candidates who either call themselves democratic socialists, are members of the Democratic Socialists of America, or are mostly in agreement with the DSA on both issues and tactics have won Democratic primaries recently. That starts with two current mayors (Zohran Mamdani in New York and Katie Wilson in Seattle) and one mayor-to-be (Janeese Lewis-George in Washington), then goes through the successful congressional candidates Mamdani endorsed, and will keep on going as the primary season proceeds. (As Michael Tomasky points out, these people are really more social democrats than democratic socialists, but that distinction will be lost on most everyone.)

The next notable upset could be in Tuesday’s primary in Colorado, where Rep. Diana DeGette, who has been in Congress for three decades, is facing a surprisingly strong challenge from 29-year-old Melat Kiros, a lawyer and grad student. As you’d expect, this trend has produced both consternation from centrist Democrats and some over-the-top rhetoric from Republicans.

The Democrats waving their hands in panic at all these democratic socialists with the temerity to threaten politicians with previously secure sinecures, and the Republicans who are just spitting the word “socialist” at every opportunity, share some assumptions about how the American electorate will greet this new development.

First, they assume that if there are some democratic socialists about, voters will extrapolate their impressions of those socialists to all Democrats. Second, they assume that the average voter knows what socialism is. And third, they assume those voters despise socialism and will recoil from it in horror.

Those three assumptions might be valid. But there isn’t actually much evidence for them. And most importantly, how Americans react to the new socialism is not predetermined.

Communism? What was that again?

As I said, Trump is stuck in the 1980s in a whole lot of ways. But what’s most important about that era is that it predates the consciousness of most Americans. The Soviet bloc began its collapse in 1989, bringing an end to the Cold War. In order to have vivid, emotionally weighted memories of what it was like to live in fear of communism, you’d have to be older than 50 at the very least. That’s a little over a third of the population; many people that old couldn’t care less, and for the rest it’s a weird idea out of ancient history. Just saying “That guy’s a communist” not only doesn’t immediately create fear and hatred toward the target, it barely makes any sense.

But what about socialism, which means many different things but is more alive in the present? The current renaissance of the DSA is being drive mostly by young people, mostly in cities. As Harold Meyerson pointed out when discussing Nithya Raman’s challenge to incumbent Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, ideologically the two are barely distinguishable; “the only real reason why Raman is a DSA member and Bass is not is generational. Raman is 44; Bass is 72. When Bass was young, there was no viable socialist movement in the United States and most of the New Deal’s guardrails against capitalism running amok were still in place.”

But Republicans seem to think it’s enough to say “Yuck, socialism,” just as they have been saying forever. In fact, they’ve always called literally everything Democrats want to do “socialism,” no matter how far from socialism it actually was.

The short-term strategy was to discredit whatever Republicans were arguing against, but over the long term it may have had the opposite effect. It made them look silly, like Ronald Reagan warning in 1961 that if the bill creating Medicare passed, “We are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” Not only do they come to sound like the boy who cried wolf, but if everything from improving schools to providing health care to investing in infrastructure is “socialism,” at least some voters may conclude that socialism doesn’t sound so bad.

The two best-known democratic socialists in America today are the charming old curmudgeon Bernie Sanders, and the happy and charismatic Zohran Mamdani, neither of whom are as threatening as Fox News personalities would like them to be. Mamdani in particular has been aggressively pursuing what we used to call “sewer socialism,” improving constituents’ quality of life by providing basic services. Here’s how he described it last Sunday to ABC’s “This Week”:

JONATHAN KARL: Republicans are going to make you the poster child for the Democratic Party.

MAMDANI: Let them. We don’t have to ask ourselves what life looks like if a socialist wins. I won last November, and over the course of these last six months, what we’ve delivered for working people are the very things we were told were impossible.

We’ve delivered free childcare for two-year-olds for the first time in New York City history. We’ve delivered tens of millions of dollars back to tenants who were taken advantage of by bad landlords. We’ve delivered 165,000 potholes being paved. And we’ve done all of these things while also delivering the lowest recorded crime in our city’s history. That’s what it looks like to have Democratic socialism. And what you’re seeing is that New Yorkers experienced this for six months and made the decision that they wanted to see more of it on the national stage as well.

But how do people really feel about socialism? Given how hard Republicans work to make people afraid of it, the answer is, not so bad. Here’s a Gallup poll from last September:

And here’s how feel about capitalism:

Capitalism is more popular than socialism overall, though not among Democrats, and barely among independents. This is the important context. Even if most Americans aren’t willing to throw out capitalism entirely, millions feel that it isn’t really working for them. And unlike in the 1950s or 1980s, there are actually prominent people in public debate now making an affirmative case for some version of socialism. And who is making the case for capitalism? Tech oligarchs, Wall Street vultures, and slimy Republican congresscritters. Meanwhile, the most visible face of capitalism is an utterly corrupt one (Trump’s), the scam economy has ballooned, and people feel not only that they’re struggling to get by but that capitalism as it is organized today is making their future prospects gloomy.

The image of socialism is not fixed

Because most of them are very bad at politics, centrist Democrats have been freaking out about the new socialist momentum, and rushing to reporters to say how awful it is that their party has been infected by this virus. Some of them even put out a little manifesto (“We are capitalist, not socialist”). They’re obviously terrified that someone will say “You’re just like those New York socialists!” and they’ll have to answer for what some candidate in another state tweeted ten years ago. Republicans want to make everyone afraid of socialism; centrist Democrats are more afraid than anyone.

Yes, Republicans will say that socialism is horrible and if there are three or four elected Democrats who call themselves socialists, that means every Democrat is a socialist. But I would caution against a temptation Democrats often succumb to, which is to conclude that if Republicans say something a lot, voters must be persuaded by it. They believe this even when there’s no evidence to support the idea.

How voters think about socialism, furthermore, is not static. If the socialists aren’t going away, what should a centrist Democrat hope the average voter concludes about socialism? That it is a dangerous, radical ideology and anyone with even the remotest connection to it (like being in the same party as someone who says they’re a socialist) should be shunned and defeated?

Of course not. What centrist Democrats ought to hope is that the average voter concludes that socialism is a somewhat leftier version of what most Democrats believe in, and therefore not something to be all that afraid of.

Here’s the good news: Centrist Democrats can help convince voters to make that conclusion! When they’re asked about some DSA member, they shouldn’t say “I renounce and denounce that despicable radical! Begone, foul demon!” Instead, they can say “I don’t agree with her on everything, but that’s okay — this party is a big tent. When she comes to Congress I’ll work with her where we agree, and try to persuade her where we don’t. But here’s what we do agree on: Donald Trump is a catastrophe, democracy needs to be restored, and government should work to help people lead a better life rather than just being a trough that corrupt politicians and their oligarch friends feed at. That’s what’s important.”

It’s not a hard argument to make. You just have to show a little spine.

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