Politico this morning published what Josh Marshall describes as “your quotient of comically dumb puff pieces for the day.” Said puff piece portrays a group of freshman Republican women in the House as a counterpoint to the liberal Squad. They call themselves — wait for it — the Force.
Politico begins dreadfully:
On the first day of Congress’ freshman orientation, four incoming GOP members realized they shared a special connection: All had first- or second-hand experience living in communist or socialist countries.
Straw men everywhere shudder in their overalls.
Oliver Willis tweeted, “the consistent failure of ‘this is a conservative version of x’ is one of my favorite tropes. see conservative wikipedia, conservative actblue, conservative dailykos, conservative twitter, it just never ends, never works.” Perhaps the most pitiful of the lot, the mercifully short-lived “The 1/2 Hour News Hour.”
Conservative copycatting is as endlessly tiresome as Republicans’ all-purpose, socialism-on-everything left of Ted Cruz smear. Equate Guantanamo with gulags and they’ll rage for days and demand a public apology. Equate reinforcing the social safety net or a $15 per hour base wage with North Korea and they nod knowingly and warn of the coming of a liberal antichrist.
Socialism, you know? Cue Inigo Montoya.
Shi-Ling Hsu writes at Slate that one man’s socialism is another’s crony capitalism:
Republicans have been remarkably successful in labeling Democrats as socialists. But Democratic proposals that get tagged as “socialism” amount to little more than expanding the safety net, bringing the United States closer to Sweden, Canada, or Germany, all prosperous, democratic, capitalist countries. By contrast, Republicans are the ones that are gumming up the gears of American capitalism, promoting policies to prop up aging, anachronistic industries and, worst of all, enabling the imposition of environmental harms far in excess of what it would cost to avoid them. Republicans say they are in favor of capitalism, but they are actually in favor of crony capitalism, which tips the scales in favor of their favorite industries. Capitalism can be a tough master: The point of capitalism is that competition causes some industries to fail. But protecting industries from failure in exchange for political benefit is far worse: It is a dangerously short step to socialism. And traditional socialism necessarily implies authoritarianism—how else is a country to undertake central economic planning except by an authoritarian government? That is actually where the Republican Party is taking us.
In case you haven’t been paying close attention for decades.
Exhibit A: Three dozen Republican senators insisting he “prevent financial institutions from discriminating against America’s energy sector.” That is, stop them from disinvesting in dying fossil fuel firms. Shi-Ling Hsu notes, “That is the essence of socialism: authoritarian government dictating private investments.”
Exhibit B: Trump has spent over $1 billion to keep coal-fired plants running by trying to capture their carbon emissions.
There is more to his analysis, of course. But with socialism, like so many other right-wing straw men, Republican authoritarians more closely resemble what they want others to fear:
It is not really capitalism if companies produce goods and services while fobbing off costs on the public. Socializing the costs of pollution is socialism, and it is how some of worst environmental catastrophes have occurred. It’s how the old Soviet Union could build Chernobyl, how it could decide to shrink the Aral Sea to become self-sufficient in cotton production, of all things, and why it would build inefficient, polluting pulp and paper mills on the shores of Lake Baikal, the deepest lake in the world and the most beautiful in the country. It’s also how 6,000 dead pigs can wash up on the riverbanks upriver from Shanghai, how residents of Beijing must suffer daily with choking smog, and how China, a country with more than 300 billionaires, still does not have potable tap water. With the lax regulation and weak enforcement championed by Republicans in the U.S., polluting companies face no incentive to find cleaner ways to produce, passing up inexpensive alternatives that could save many lives and avoid many illnesses. This is the tragedy of the crony capitalism installed by the Republican Party: that so much public health and so many lives could be saved by modest changes but are not. That is also the tragedy of socialism that is not buffered by democratic principles: Industries and production decisions are made by political intervention that protects polluting industries at the expense of citizens.
But the Party of Trump has proved it has no use for democracy, the rule of law, competition that threatens top donors’ businesses, or efforts to address economic inequality. Oligarchy, not capitalism or democracy, is their preferred organizing principle, Dollah be praised.
Ooooh, but what’s the over there?! Savvy, strong, outspoken liberal women of color on the Democrats’ side of the aisle ready to snip parts of their hegemony. Run for the hills!
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