Conservatives often take great pleasure in diagnosing their more liberal rivals with that hideously corrosive malady, Trump Derangement Syndrome. Toward that end, Republican Congressman Warren Davidson, Ohio, introduced perhaps the goofiest bill on last year’s Congressional agenda (a distinction that had many contenders): the TDS Research Act that, according to Davidson’s website, “would require the NIH to study this toxic state of mind.”
(Never mind that, since then, Republicans have gone out of their way to defund all sorts of truly important health research.) Given President Trump’s extraordinary talent for mixing grift with corruption, mendacity, insult, and vindictiveness (not to mention cheating at golf), it is perhaps understandable that liberals tend to get a little kooky about the guy.
But with the midterm elections looming, liberals are in a position to issue a countervailing comeback – a diagnosis of Commie Derangement Syndrome now metastasizing among conservatives. Conservatives, from Trump on down, are warning that the entirety of the liberal constituency of the U.S. electorate is becoming infected by a virulent new strain of communist ideology. “Communism is the single greatest threat to our country and its history—including even World War I and World War II, Pearl Harbor, 9/11,” Trump said in a recent speech. Yikes!
It might be masquerading euphemistically as something called Democratic Socialism, but commies are devious spinmeisters in that way. If the American electorate doesn’t stay on its toes, the government will soon become overrun with new-age Stalinists, free enterprise will succumb to labor-camp statism, and our dear children will be goosestepping in unison while dressed in Mao suits.
A TIZZY
This vision of America’s nightmarish future is driven by the reality of a growing, but still tiny, presence of avowed socialists in the national political scene. The election of socialist Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York was a signal red flag: the country’s biggest city – the national heartbeat of commerce, culture, and capitalism – was crumbling before the symbolic hammer and sickle. Abdul El-Sayed’s razor-thin victory in a Michigan Senate Democratic primary (not even a general election) sent conservatives into a tizzy: not just a communist takeover but an Islamic communist takeover! Then there have been pronouncements from a small handful of extremists calling for the abolition of the Supreme Court and the Senate among other hopelessly dead-in-the-water idiocies. You can hear the alarm bells ringing; just a handful of wrongly cast votes, and welcome to the new Communist States of America. The horror! The horror!
Time for a reality check. To suggest that the country is at the brink of a communist takeover is the political equivalent of diagnosing a slight head cold as a sneeze away from terminal cancer. A realistic take on the infiltration of socialism into the political mainstream tells a much different story. Among mayors of the largest 100 U.S. cities, Larry Agran, a Democrat who won the mayorship of Irvine, California with just 38 percent of the vote, is the only member of the Democratic Socialists of America other than Mamdani. And so far, Mamdani’s most noteworthy “socialist” policy suggestions have been to make the public bus system a free service and to open city-run grocery stores offering discounted food items for those in need. Hardly Marxist extremism. At last count, the big, bad DSA claimed 120,000 members, a pittance compared with 45 million registered Democrats and 39 million Republicans. Two members of the 435-member U.S. House of Representatives are said to be registered with the DSA (although they are technically Democrats), and according to News Nation, there are just six Congressional candidates for the upcoming midterms who consider themselves socialists. Presumably not all will be election winners.
MEDICARE FOR ALL
A visit to the Democratic Socialists of America web site turns up nothing about abolishing the Supreme Court or the Senate and nothing trumpeting communist maxims. Stated campaign priorities, while certainly liberal, don’t seem especially outlandish: calls for affordable housing, broader wealth distribution, and Medicare for all and support of the Green New Deal. There is no call for a quashing of capitalism or for a governmental seizure of America’s major industries. Simply put, at least as it intertwines with American capitalism, Democratic Socialism is NOT Soviet-era communism.
To be sure, the influence of socialism is growing in America, especially among those under 30. More candidates with socialist leanings are winning elections at the local, state, and federal level. According to a Gallup poll, 39 percent of Americans have a positive view of socialism, up slightly in the past 15 years although a number that still falls well short of the 54 percent who view capitalism positively. Socialism gets the nod when it comes to popular government programs like Social Security, Medicare, and farm subsidies. Capitalism takes a hit when wealth distribution is so pronounced that roughly a third of the nation’s wealth is in the hands of the top one percent, and when, according to one study, the top .003 percent pays, on average, a lower federal tax rate than the bottom 50 percent. Uber-capitalist Gordon Gekko insisted that “greed is good.” Well, maybe not always.
Exactly where capitalism ends and socialism begins in America is murky. Regardless, a synthesis of the two has vitalized the U.S. economy and politics for centuries. Examples: The creation in the 1950s of the Interstate Highway System, a massive “socialist” public-works project, allowed 20th-century commerce and free enterprise to flourish in the U.S. Technically, the military, paid for with public funds, could be considered a socialist construct. And “corporate socialism,” where the government subsidizes private (capitalist) industry, has been around for a long time. This fusion of capitalism and socialism will not end any time soon, nor should it. Dire warnings of a complete socialist takeover, much less a communist takeover are, simply, deranged.
Oliver lives in Warren
