of Representatives, where the Democratic party performed worse than expected.) And the inconvenient truth is that many Americans actually endorse policies that are easily branded as “socialist.” A Gallup poll last year found that just over two-thirds of Americans think money and wealth should be distributed more evenly... and three-quarters think the very wealthy should be taxed more heavily. policies that are easily branded as “socialist.” As political risk consultancy GZERO Media explained... Americans don’t like “socialists,” but they do like social security, federal safety standards for food and medicine, The inconvenient truth is that many Americans actually endorse
means of production. Taking over the means of production, and then engineering value destruction on the scale of my Kyrgyz brick- plant buddy, is not on anyone’s agenda. (“[Biden] has handed control to the socialists and Marxists and left-wing extremists,” Trump said in mid-October.) The American brand of socialism relates more to specific policy areas, with health care at the top of the list. For example, a YouGov survey conducted in December last year found that 58% of Americans defined “a health care system that generally uses public-sector doctors and hospitals, where payment for treatment comes from general taxation” as socialist. Other policies that set off socialist alarm bells, like those 1950s duck-and-cover nuclear drill sirens, include utility companies being run by the government, free childcare for all parents, government-run schools, and firearm restrictions. During the recent presidential campaign, Trump tagged the Green New Deal policy and a federal tax on the net worth of wealthy Americans as socialist. (Those policies were not part of the Biden presidential platform, and neither was broader health insurance coverage.) But the scarlet “S” didn’t work, at least in the race for the White House... “The socialist label does not necessarily carry as much negative weight as Mr. Trump assumed. When pollsters ask Mr. Biden’s critics to name their concerns about him, ‘socialism’ ranks low on the list,” the New York Times explained on October 14. (Centrist Democrats blamed the views of their more liberal colleagues for losses in the House
unemployment insurance, federal disaster relief, and child labor laws. Younger voters, in particular, associate
socialism with Scandinavia, not the Soviet Union... this is less a story about political philosophy than about political branding. TRUMP’S BEEN DRINKING THE KOOL-AID, TOO And the biggest and most inconvenient truth of all is that the guy who tried to get reelected on the back of calling others “socialist”... might in fact be the biggest socialist of all.
American Consequences
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