How Democrats Should Respond to the GOP's Red-Baiting

Remind them that many of the most popular US programs were once called “socialist.”

The “S word” is going to get a workout from now until November 2020.

“We are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country,” President Donald Trump said in his State of the Union speech in January. “Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.”

Trump’s red-baiting rant was the opening salvo in what will clearly be the Republicans’ top talking point for the upcoming election season. The man with the orange face is stoking up fears of a Red Menace. Some version of that refrain is now a standard part of his stump speeches, and is frequently invoked by his top enablers. “Over 120 congressional Democrats are supporting a socialist takeover of our health-care system,” he told a Las Vegas rally in April.

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Or they could take a page from FDR.

In a speech defending his New Deal goals, Roosevelt said: “A few timid people, who fear progress, will try to give you new and strange names for what we are doing. Sometimes they will call it ‘Fascism’, sometimes ‘Communism’, sometimes ‘Regimentation’, sometimes ‘Socialism’. But, in so doing, they are trying to make very complex and theoretical something that is really very simple and very practical.”

When big-business leaders and conservatives attacked him as a radical, FDR boasted: “They are unanimous in their hate for me. And I welcome their hatred.”


https://www.thenation.com/article/gop-red-baiting-2020/