Red Scare Alert Fatigue
How Republicans, Democrats, and the media all worked together to create an electable socialist.
In the 2020 election cycle, one presidential candidate alone accepts proudly the moniker of “socialist”: Bernie Sanders.
The received wisdom is that America will not vote for a socialist; so if Bernie Sanders is a socialist, then we’d be “insane” to vote for Sanders, because he is not “electable”. Supposedly, the Democratic base of alleged mostly-centrists could never get behind such a candidate.
Except… that’s not what’s happening.
With Bernie Sanders now taking the undeniable lead, the internet watches with buckets of popcorn as media outlets like MSNBC and CNN fall over themselves with hand-wringing reports on “how to stop Sanders”. Far from any attempts to understand why people are voting this way, or how to unite the party in the wake of this development, the establishment seems hell-bent on tanking the Democratic Party’s chances in November by demonstrating to the electorate its allegiance to Vote Blue No Matter Who (Except Bernie).
Over the course of the past 40 years, the Democratic Party has been ratcheted inexorably to the right to become the world’s most right-wing liberals. That rightward shift has only recently been challenged by the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others brave enough to advocate for more left-wing policies — and to call their positions “democratic socialist”.
In general, Democrats seem to have accepted their lot in life: stray too far to the left, get rapped on the wrist by Republicans with an accusation of “socialism”. Go sit in the corner with a dunce cap, Democrat, and come back when you’re ready to talk about “tax relief”. It’s an American tradition at least as old as the New Deal, and establishment Democrats have been complicit in their own brow-beating.
But something has broken the resilience of the people to stay in this linguistically abusive relationship.
A generation of younger voters who came of age during the Great Recession, who witnessed the Obama administration respond with a formal “meh” to the concept of financial malfeasance during Occupy Wall Street, and who are just as likely to go bankrupt from medical expenses as their grandparents were to buy houses, are now paying very, very close attention to the 2020 presidential election.
This generation, unlike the previous, doesn’t remember the Cold War. This generation, by contrast, has access to information about how the rest of the world functions. This generation knows that the United States spends about 17.5% of its GDP on health care and still leaves about 100 million people uninsured or underinsured, while the other actually-first-world countries spend far less and receive the same or better quality of care.
So as the Trump campaign rallies around the idea that we must “stop socialism”, we all perform a very simple semantic logic:
- Bernie Sanders stands for universal healthcare.
- Republicans call universal healthcare “socialist”.
- Therefore, Bernie Sanders is “socialist”.
“We are living in many ways in a socialist society right now,” intoned Sanders at the Democratic primary debate in Nevada last Wednesday night, a classic from his rhetorical repertoire — a retort performed perfectly to associate Sanders with socialism whilst continuing to thwart the word’s very definition.
While the academic arguments about whether Bernie Sanders is or isn’t a “socialist” continue to swirl around the candidate, neither the last-century specter of violent nationalist socialism nor the attempts to “well, actually” the term into submission seem to detract at all from Sanders’ steady increases in support.
The notion, therefore, that the “socialist” moniker represents some kind of ticking time bomb in the Sanders campaign remains unsubstantiated by proof. Indeed, “the fact that affixing that label to Sanders doesn’t really shift polling at all tells you something,” writes Matthew Yglesias in Vox, referencing data from a 2020 presidential election survey study conducted recently.
The fact is, Republicans have beaten the Red Scare drum too many times for an accusation of “socialism” to scare anyone away. They jump to the “socialism” attack reflexively as if it is the only argument they have, using it in ways that demonstrate their complete disinterest in bridging divides in America.
Given that many voters view establishment Republicans as having completely lost all legitimacy in the wake of a trial in which no evidence or witnesses were allowed, the finger-wagging invocations of Red Scare in response to highly popular ideas about raising the minimum wage and taxing the extremely wealthy are starting to sound pretty hysterical.
Indeed, the evidence of Red Scare Alert Fatigue can be found everywhere. Millennials proudly tag themselves #socialist on Twitter as Trump ramps up his 2020 campaign “Just Say No to Socialism”, prompting us all to wonder just what is “socialism” supposed to mean?
Not to be outdone, podcasting powerhouse Joe Rogan has introduced an entirely new electorate into Bernie Sanders’ midst through his interview. His fan base, trained to pay close attention for long periods of time as Rogan elicits long-form responses, listened and considered what Sanders had to say.
A sample of high-voted comments on Joe Rogan’s interview with Bernie Sanders reveals just how obvious the weaponized-yet-denuded usage of the word “socialist” really is to those who are paying attention with an open mind.
If Republicans are truly afraid of a descent into Venezuela territory, they need to rethink how often they use their favorite scare-word. Universal healthcare has not turned Canada, Norway, France, or the UK into an anti-capitalist, anti-free-trade hellscape. Using Red Scare rhetoric to beat back progressives may have been expedient, but it came with the cost of having fully lost the true meaning of “socialism”.
As for Democrats, those sitting in the middle of the political spectrum should choose their words very, very carefully, now that Sanders has pulled ahead in the Democratic primary, if they don’t want to push voters even further to the left. All the fear-mongering over the possibility of a Sanders nomination merely proves to the electorate how out of touch the elite are with a vast plurality of voters who don’t find “socialism” to be a deal-breaker.
In sum, the only message that Republicans, the Democratic establishment, and the media have been able to consistently convey is that “socialism” has something to do with Bernie Sanders, and that Bernie Sanders stands for “socialism”.
As the media continues to spin pure incredulity masquerading as punditry, the electorate — wisely — turn to more grassroots sources for insight.
The more people find out for themselves that Bernie Sanders stands for policies they actually like, the more “electable” they will find a “socialist”.
