The White House actually presaged this strategy last October, just before the midterm elections, in a report from its Council of Economic Advisers. They cite calls for single-payer health care and higher tax rates as evidence that “socialism is making a comeback in American political discourse,” with, they argue, dire consequences for the American economy. Next came the president’s address to Congress. And this week at a rally in El Paso, Texas, Trump went after the “radical left,” blasting a caricature of progressive climate policies. “I really don’t like their policy of taking away your car, of taking away your airplane flights, of ‘Let’s hop a train to California,'” he said, bizarrely adding that under the Green New Deal resolution introduced by liberal Democrats, “You’re not allowed to own cows anymore.”
The clear expectation is that many or most Americans will recoil at any hint of “socialism,” either on principle or because of its association with Venezuela, which the administration has tried to elevate as a major adversary. That might have been true in Trump’s cultural and political touchstone, the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan’s hard-line anti-Communism defined U.S. foreign and domestic policy. But in 2019, the Cold War is long over. The Soviet Union is a memory. And there is no comparable global ideological struggle over economic systems that might give weight to Trump’s rhetoric. There’s not much fear to monger. Instead, the president’s decision to make “socialism” his opponent might have the opposite effect, potentially bolstering the movement and its ideals.
Because the Cold War is well in the rearview mirror of history, the United States also has a growing cohort of voters with no experience of its political environment. Thirty-five percent of voters in the 2018 elections were born in November 1973 or later, according to exit polls from CNN. The oldest in that group would have been teenagers during the fall of the Berlin Wall; the youngest were born nearly 10 years afterward. Making the ground even less fertile for the “socialist” charge is the fact of the 2008 recession, which produced worsening views of capitalism, especially among young Americans, who showed growing receptivity to views such as “basic health insurance is a right for all people” and “basic necessities, such as food and shelter, are a right that the government should provide to those unable to afford them.” In truth, these ideas fit well into the modern history of capitalist governance. But the politics of the past 10 years have given them a left-wing tinge.
Specifically, in their vehement opposition to the Obama administration, conservatives narrowed “socialism” down to virtually any attempt to intervene in the economy on behalf of the broad public. The effort to save the U.S. car industry? Socialist. Regulated markets to purchase health insurance? Socialist. Market-based measures for reducing carbon emissions? Also socialist.
This aggressive labeling coincided with a rise in favorable attitudes toward socialism among Democrats. In 2010, according to Gallup, 53 percent said they had a positive view of socialism. In 2016, it was 58 percent. Some of this is the effect of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, which brought “socialism” back into mainstream political conversation. But conservative demonization of liberal Democratic policies as socialist played a major part as well.
It’s worth comparing what conservatives call “socialism” to actual models for it, like this one proffered by Czech thinker Radoslav Selucky and quoted by the American social critic Irving Howe in his 1985 book “Socialism and America”:
The means of production are owned socially and managed by those who make use of them. Social ownership of the means of production is separated from the state. Producing and trading enterprises are autonomous from the state and independent of each other. They operate within the framework of the market which is regulated by a central indicative plan.
The institutions which provide health, education and welfare services are wholly exempt from the market. The right to participate in direct management of the work units operating in the market is derived from labor. The right to participate in direct management of the work units exempt wholly or partly from the market is derived proportionally from labor, ownership, and consumption of the provided services and utilities.
No one in or around the Democratic Party has proposed the radical changes that might lead to such a state. No one has called for nationalization of major industries or creation of what the American democratic socialist Michael Harrington called “social property” — worker-owned firms and cooperatives governed by “the direct participation of the actual producers.”
What we actually have are ideas like the “co-determination” plan proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, which would give workers a significant say in corporate governance — a major change from the status quo of shareholder-driven capitalism but a far cry from abolishing capitalist ownership itself. Similarly, the Medicare for All Act introduced by Sanders would move every American onto a new government plan but would also permit supplemental private insurance and retain the present system of privately owned hospitals and other medical providers.
Even the Green New Deal falls within the tradition established by its namesake, which itself was attacked as a harbinger of socialism. It provides new economic guarantees to Americans while substantially altering, but not fundamentally rearranging, power relationships within the economy. Reform, not revolution.
Having said that, profound changes in U.S. society since the 1930s may give the Green New Deal less transformative potential than its predecessor. The social base of the original New Deal was a large and powerful labor movement with the capacity to, as historian Ira Katznelson wrote in a 1989 essay, “disrupt capitalism at the point of production” and potentially “lead a social democratic breakthrough in American politics.” The egalitarian vistas of the Green New Deal may ultimately be compromised by the absence of such a movement, although its ambition could galvanize the constituencies that might make such a movement possible.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. At this moment, the proposed policies of the Democratic Party — from modest initiatives to incentivize savings to expansive programs for guaranteed employment — aren’t socialism. Even if they were, Americans are less afraid of the label than one might think: 37 percent say they have a positive image of socialism, a two-point increase from 2016. Given the continued popularity of Sanders and the rise of politicians like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, these numbers have room to grow. And those who hope to see them grow almost certainly got an assist from Trump when he elevated the term in his State of the Union address.
The mechanism is simple: Trump is unpopular and drives Americans away from his positions. According to a Gallup survey last summer, after almost a year and a half of anti-immigration rhetoric from the president, 75 percent of Americans said immigration was a “good thing” and 29 percent said immigration levels should “decrease.” Most wanted either stasis or an increase in the number of immigrants. Just this January, in a poll taken during the partial government shutdown, 58 percent of Americans said they opposed “substantial expansion” of a border wall between the United States and Mexico, a direct rebuke to the president.
If anything can put socialism in a more positive light, it is Trump raging against it. Which means conservatives and Republicans may want to think a little harder before they embrace a campaign strategy that relies on him for messaging. If “socialism” is like every other idea Trump has attacked and disdained, then the Republican Party should prepare for even more Americans embracing the term — and the ideas that come with it.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.