The Stupidity of Conservative Rhetoric

Former President Donald Trump is joined by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Jan. 28 at a presidential campaign event in Columbia, South Carolina. The Republican Party is relying on fearmongering to gain political advantage.

We’re nearly a year and a half from the 2024 election, but you don’t have to look far to see how ugly things will be. We got a sneak preview from the Commonwealth of Virginia, which held a primary on June 20. Political wonks and election watchers followed the day closely since both parties had to contend with brand-new legislative maps based on the 2020 census. Two years ago, Republicans won control of the House of Delegates and the governorship; Democrats still hold a slight majority in the Senate. Both chambers of the General Assembly are up for grabs in November. 

The campaigning was vile, repulsive and shameless, especially by the Republicans. A friend in Fairfax, who requested anonymity since he works for a government agency, told me of the depraved rhetoric, the phone calls, the television and radio ads, and his mailbox being bombarded daily with political ads.

“Not one Republican ad spelled out a policy position,” he said. “It was mostly name-calling, even saying that the opposition stands with Hillary Clinton. They are going after their RINO opponents with no mention of why they would be a better choice, and they’re calling Democrats communists and Marxists. I thought that went out with the 1950s.”

Well, if you’re still bringing up Hillary Clinton, who hasn’t held elected office since 2009, why not bring up something dating back to the Red Scare days of the 1950s?

So add “communist” and “Marxist” to the lexicon of tiresome name-calling, fearmongering hyperbole of labels, tirades and talking points.

How To Speak GOP

This is what the Republican Party has morphed into over the last 30 years. Insults, ad hominems and diatribes that are just inflammatory enough to elicit an emotional response, like fear, hatred, anger or that good old “own the libs.” It’s funny how all these Republican lawmakers repeat these vituperations starting right around the same time as if there’s a little room at the Republican National Committee headquarters where some evil scientist rubs his hands with glee every time he conjures up a new menace, hits send and it lands in the email box of vacuous blowhards everywhere. And then you hear them everywhere, all at once, like a coded in-group language all its own, all of it too silly to be believed, but that’s the point: They don’t need to be believed to work.

It is excessive to the point of preposterous.

“They want to take your pickup truck. They want to rebuild your home. They want to take away your hamburgers,” screechedSebastian Gorka at the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which has always been an event more about venting and fomenting than conferencing.

Imagine that: Democrats want to take away your hamburgers. You thought of it, didn’t you? Hamburglars? No doubt the CPAC crowd ate it up, pun intended. Funny, Gorka didn’t say, “They want to take away your Prius.”

They don’t use the “take away your guns” blurb anymore since no one ever came to anyone’s house to take anyone’s guns despite guarantees that Barack Obama was going to. Well, of course he didn’t do it. How can you trust someone who wasn’t born here? Unless that army of IRS stormtroopers comes marching down Main Street, taking away your guns as well as your money, and maybe even your firstborn.

I can vouch for my friend’s account of the political ads flooding everyone’s mailboxes since I work for the U.S. Postal Service. The rhetoric here in California has been no different. Kevin Kiley, a Republican congressman from Sacramento, might be a good husband and father, but I couldn’t vote for him last year, not with mailers shrieking nonsense like this:

“I won’t let Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi destroy our economy, open our borders and dismantle our freedoms without a fight.”

Oh, please!

Every mailer was a relentless repeat of the last, with one bogus claim after another promising to protect you from those evil Democrats.

I’ve yet to meet a postal customer who appreciates the bombast, let alone the day-in, day-out assault on their mailboxes. I’ve yet to hear from other mail carriers about any of their customers who like getting the mailers.

“STT,” they tell you. Straight To Trash.

“I won’t even bring it into the house,” a customer once told me.

It was the same story in Arizona last year.

Arizona was ground zero for sleazy campaigning in the 2022 midterms, even down to school board candidates. I was in Phoenix just weeks ahead of the election and spoke with several mail carriers at a post office, a very large one. The language was the same, and the story of customer resentment was the same. Even worse, with so many types of elections, people there were receiving as many as a dozen pieces of political mail every day.

Somebody please steal my hamburger already and be done with it!

One carrier explained that his route included a large condo complex and a large apartment complex. “Every day,” he told me, “I’ve been peeking into the dumpsters at both stops just to see.”

And?

“Filled with all the campaign mailers I delivered the day before. Nobody wants them.”

What you hear is that it’s not as much about the number of mailers, it’s the language, the tone and the mean-spirited name-calling. It’s exhausting.

Just as a sidebar here, it’s funny how the Postal Service is always complaining about revenue shortfalls, but if the agency was smart, it would charge higher rates for all that paper. Each piece should cost at least the price of a first-class stamp, since all political mail arriving at any post office must be delivered the day it arrives, just like first-class mail. Instead, on average, each piece costs not even half that.

But unlike radio and television ad rates, which are governed by the Federal Election Commission, Congress approves postal rate hikes. Does anyone think lawmakers are going to increase the price they pay to pummel you with their propaganda?

I’d have far more respect for candidates who passed on the fearmongering and focused instead on practical solutions — not only what they’d like to do but ways to implement them; how they intended to do it. You never see it. It would mean they’d have to treat the electorate like grown-ups, which presents us with a chicken-and-egg scenario: Either the candidates think we’re too stupid to have an intelligent conversation about issues — why would you vote for such a candidate? — or the electorate really is that stupid.

The Red-Baiting Tradition

Calling people communists and Marxists just adds to the belching conservative’s panoply of stupidity. What is that, a political version of Throwback Thursday? An outgrowth of the “socialism” pablum they’ve never stopped using? What next, the anachronistic “anarchism” branding that was conveniently bandied about a century ago?

The return of “communist” and “Marxist” has surfaced occasionally in recent years, but it got new life courtesy of Dear Leader Donald Trump.

“Lashing out after his arraignment on federal charges,” The Associated Press reported, “Donald Trump took aim at President Joe Biden and Democrats with language that seemed to evoke another era: He was being persecuted, he said, by ‘Marxists’ and ‘communists.’”

I’d bet money neither Trump nor his followers could tell you what either a Marxist or a communist is or the difference between them. In fact, I would bet most of them would try to tell you they were the same thing. Or that they’re both the same thing as socialism.

This is an area worth exploring.

Karl Marx wasn’t a politician or a political figure of any sort. He was a German philosopher and economist. He saw communism as a global movement of working-class individuals — we’d call them middle class today — rebelling against horrendous working conditions and the rapacious capitalists who fostered them.

Such a revolution was underway in 1848 before Marx and his co-author, Friedrich Engels, published “A Communist Manifesto.” Though the worker protest in France that year failed, the ideas and goals of Marx’s manifesto appealed strongly to an urban working class in both Europe and the United States, which had tired of their life of squalor while upper-class citizens (the bourgeois, as Marx labeled them in the “Manifesto”) lived lives of luxury.

You can trace such rebellions throughout the latter half of the 19th century, particularly in this country. Those efforts led to the reforms of the Progressive era under President Theodore Roosevelt and formed the basis of what would become the modern labor movement, a movement enormously strengthened by the passage of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.

From the 1920s into the 1940s, the Communist Party of the United States entirely supported those reforms. It championed inclusiveness for women and minorities. It railed against racism and Jim Crow laws. It was the only party that fully supported unions, the common worker, women, minorities and the poor.

When Franklin Roosevelt adopted some of those same ideals, he was branded a socialist, and yet those ideals resonated so much with the public that he kept getting reelected. Look at how today’svotersfeelaboutany number of issues — abortion, gun control, marriage equality, climate change, the nation’s tax structure — and see how out of step one particular party is with those voters.

Under FDR, the nation saw the creation of Social Security, farm price supports (the Agricultural Adjustment Act), work relief programs like the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), federal aid programs like the National Recovery Administration, publicly owned power companies (the Tennessee Valley Authority), bank deposit insurance (the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.), oversight of stock trading (the Securities and Exchange Commission) and the growth of independent labor organizations.

All of these developments were supported by liberals, liberal Democrats and members of the American Communist Party. They would surely have been supported by Karl Marx. They would never have seen the light of day, nor did they, in regimes that conservatives and Republicans have called communist. To wit, conservatives attacked FDR’s programs as socialism, which was used interchangeably with communism and Marxism, no doubt because Russia had become this transcontinental country called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (see? Socialists!) and Marx wrote a book with the word “communist” in the title.

Republicans and conservatives have goneso far as to tie Democratsto Nazis because Democrats = socialism, and the official name of the Nazi party was the National Socialist German Workers Party. No greater an intellectual giant than Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has said, ”You know Nazis were the National Socialist Party. Just like the Democrats are now a national socialist party.”

And there you have it: The early conflating of an economic philosophy with tyranny, fascism, dictatorships, historical illiteracy and political smears still has a voice a century later.

Ms. Greene and her many Republican colleagues prove that there is a fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: Ignorance.

Meanwhile, an Indiana chapter of the group Moms for Liberty published its first newsletter, and it features this quote: “He alone who owns the youth gains the future.” Who said that?

Adolf Hitler.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Moms for Liberty is the nationwide nonprofit opposed to school curriculums that mention race, critical race theory, LGBTQ rights and discrimination against white Christian America. (OK, I added that last part, but c’mon: who’s kidding whom here?) Then again, Hitler was no fan of any race other than the master one, and Nazis persecuted gays and lesbians just as they had those of the Jewish faith. So, good job, moms!

They’ve since apologized. Would they have done so had they not gotten caught? Funny how they call themselves Moms for Liberty but support taking freedom out of Americans’ hands and letting bureaucrats make family decisions for them. Don’t the countries that conservatives call communist do that?

There may be no greater fearmongering word in the conservative lexicon than “socialism” and its interchangeable cousins, Marxism and communism. It’s the word used, improperly mind you, to strike fear into the hearts and minds of those who are too clueless to know better. They’re quick to point to failures — Russia, Venezuela or Cuba — while ignoring its successes in stable democracies like Denmark, Finland, Sweden and most of Europe.

There is a big difference between authoritarian socialism, which denies basic liberties, and democratic socialism, which does not. It’s easy to tell the difference. Unless you are a conservative.

Comprehension of these philosophies and their application is blurred, even obliterated by binary thinking, an either/or mentality.

“Republicans, in particular, viewed socialism and capitalism in zero-sum terms,” a Pew survey found. “A large majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (68%) had both a positive impression of capitalism and a negative view of socialism. However, Democrats and Democratic leaners were more likely to view both terms positively; a plurality (38%) had a positive impression of both socialism and capitalism.”

Interestingly, and not surprisingly, nearly a third of participants labeled socialism or capitalism as either “good” or “bad,” without explanation, or that one is better than the other, without explaining why.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the respondents provided no explanation because they can’t. They can’t offer any clear definition of either system, and they probably haven’t given much thought to the reality that the American system is a blended economy featuring countless examples of socialism. Or, I suppose, what some hard-liners would call communism.

Police and firefighters? They’re socialist programs. You may never have to call the fire department to extinguish a blaze threatening your home, but your tax dollars pay for them when someone else in your community needs their services. You’re paying for something that will benefit someone else? That’s socialism. Imagine being required to use your PayPal account before the police come to your door. That’s capitalism in its purest sense.

Your tax dollars support the local public library. When was the last time you borrowed a book? But someone did, and you helped pay for that. Socialism! Gasp! The same with public parks, public landfills, and state and federal highways.

The United States military protects every soul in the nation, from billionaires who don’t pay their fair share in taxes to the homeless who have no means to pay taxes. Everyone is protected whether they pay taxes or not. That is complete socialism.

I’ve lost track of how many times Republicans have tried to repeal Obamacare, calling it socialism. They’re right to call it a government-run health care system, but what the Republicans don’t tell you is that the health care for members of Congress is largely free, and what they pay for they pay very little. You and I pay for the rest through our tax dollars for care far better than what most of us can afford. And, yes, that includes Marjorie Taylor Greene, a socialist who doesn’t know she’s a socialist.

You get the idea. We all pay in and enjoy the benefits from countless public facilities, government agencies and organizations whether we use them or not. It’s either that or you’re hiring your own police force and fire department, and building your own roads.

I doubt many Americans support the kind of regimes that exist in North Korea, Russia or China, though Republicans might have you think differently when they scream “communist” or “socialist.” Except those aren’t communist countries; they’re authoritarian states to a greater or lesser degree. They were never the communist societies Marx envisioned. He would have turned over in his grave to see what Lenin, Stalin, Mao and so forth did in the name of his manifesto, and he never would have approved of the oppression that nations behind the so-called Iron Curtain had to endure under the Soviet Union.

All the good things the Communist Party USA supported during the first half of the 20th century — worker rights, a fair wage, equal treatment of women and minorities, and civil rights (it was one of the earliest political organizations in the U.S. to fight for civil rights) — conservatives opposed throughout their history and continue to oppose under the banner of a now-extremist Republican Party. Who’s the real demon?

If directing public policy toward the benefit of regular working folks instead of the billionaires and mega-corporations is Marxist, if expanding the rights of the disenfranchised and marginalized is Marxist, communist or socialist — whatever you wanna call it, I don’t care — sign me up.

This is not about advocacy. It doesn’t need advocacy. Rather, it’s the need for a better understanding of reality, or at least the acceptance of it, while dismissing the labels so often used by conservatives as jeremiads. When someone tosses out such labels to denigrate, our response should be: Shut your pie hole, go back to school and learn something about history.

That is, if the local government hasn’t removed that content from your history textbooks.