thousands of miles away, but it’s a slippery slope.) Similarly socialist is calling on other countries to buy more American products. And Trump’s efforts to bail out the U.S. coal industry – which, by any objective economic measure, should not exist – are infused with the sweet stench of (politically convenient) socialism. Maybe the new Biden administration will, like Trump, have selective hues of socialism. Most likely, though, some policies that have nothing to do with socialism will be called “socialist,” as shorthand for “I don’t like this policy, but I can’t explain why, so I’ll take the easy way out.” Case in point: Nearly two-thirds of Republicans polled in December last year characterized “The government completely or almost completely restricts the ownership of firearms” as a socialist policy. This is silly... and needless to say, when he wrote Das Kapital , Marx didn’t have in mind the “gunshow loophole,” or the God-given right of red-blooded Americans to their own private arsenal of semiautomatic assault weapons. Socialism doesn’t care about your guns. But whatever “socialism” – actual or imagined – arrives in the coming years in the U.S., it isn’t going to be anything worse (or “more socialist”) than we’ve seen over the past four years. And anyway, the American vision of socialism is – thankfully – a far cry from the real thing.
As National Public Radio explains... President Trump and Republicans in Congress have themselves blurred the lines between capitalism and socialism, passing the CARES [Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security] Act to aid businesses and providing $600 payments to unemployed workers in the coronavirus pandemic. Trump has also opened federal coffers to rescue farmers who have been hurt by his trade disputes with China and other nations. Decidedly capitalist Forbes magazine compared CARES with the platform of former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, and found that the Trump coronavirus bailout “dwarf[ed]” Sanders’ ideas. “[CARES] is both a corporate and individual socialist-type plan of unprecedented magnitude,” Forbes said. Trump was humming from the socialist playbook well before his government was inspired by the coronavirus to take a hard socialist turn that would make even President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (the father of Social Security) blush in his grave. For example, the Trump government’s massive bailouts of American farmers – which followed a collapse in foreign demand for American agricultural products because of Trump’s ill-conceived trade wars – are undeniably socialist. So are demands that American companies reconfigure their supply chains to reduce exposure to China. (It’s not quite as bad as forcing brick makers to buy clay from
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December 2020
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