“Donald Trump is a socialist,” wrote conservative columnist Kevin Williamson in The Dispatch last spring. “I do not use the word the way most right-leaning commentators use it, meaning: bad. If you want to get a feel for exactly how insipid and repetitious the contemporary online right is, do a search for ‘cackling socialist’…. You’ll be hip-deep in stupid in two clicks.”
That’s an apt description of the local right’s excitement last week over Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s endorsement of self-described “Democrat socialist” Zohran Mamdani’s candidacy for mayor of New York City. The breathless question in one headline: “Is Elizabeth Warren a closet socialist?” (As if the relentlessly outspoken senator could ever be a “closet” anything.) Warren “has now admitted that this is the future of the Democratic party and it is socialism,” State GOP Chair Amy Carnevale told the choir on Fox.
This will excite the Fox News demo, sending them wheeling over to the window to yell at the socialists to get off their lawn. But for Democrats desperate to re-energize their base and recapture their edge with younger voters, it’s not as slanderous as the right-wingers hope. A recent Cato Institute poll found more than six in ten 18-to-29-year-olds and nearly seven in ten Democrats had a favorable opinion of socialism.
It all depends on how you define the term. For the hip-deep among us, conflating socialism with communism is like breathing. To Sen. Bernie Sanders, the nation’s most famous self-described socialist, it’s social justice ensured by New Deal-style government intervention. (“This country has socialism for the rich, and rugged individualism for the poor,” he says of the corporate welfare state.) To Williamson, citing the president’s incoherent tariff wars, “Trump’s view of a man at a desk moving pieces of the economy around like rooks and pawns on a chessboard is what socialism is all about.”
And then there’s Warren, who calls herself “a capitalist to my bones” and says “there is an enormous amount to be gained from markets…. Markets create opportunities. [But] markets have to have rules. They have to have a cop on the beat. Markets without rules are theft.”
That was the principle behind the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau championed by Warren but now neutered by Trump. After all, hasn’t the financial services sector proven over the years it will always act in the best interests of consumers?
When we questioned Warren about her backing of Mamdami, she erroneously claimed that his controversial proposal to open city-run grocery stores with lower prices in area with little access to supermarkets was an idea that had “worked” elsewhere. (Not so much; “municipal-owned stores have recently closed in several town,” reports CNN; an outlet in Kansas City, Missouri has lost millions and is on the verge of closing; a ten-year-old Boston-area experiment in non-profit grocery stores, Daily Table, closed this spring.)
But Warren was also bullish about Mamdami’s plan to offer free childcare, a crushing expense for low- and middle-income working parents. “We get more people in the work force, that actually builds the tax base,” she said, a vision even conservatives might love.
And Warren was also bragging about the housing bill she co-sponsored with Sen. Tim Scott (R-South Carolina), passed out of committee with unanimous bipartisan support, that aims to jump-start housing construction with a combination of grants and regulatory reforms, such as cutting environmental red tape.
Isn’t onerous government regulation a staple of socialist horror? Oh bleep it, let’s just call it outright communism! Why be just hip-deep in stupid when you could go neck-deep?