I’m sure you have noticed that the right wing is now commonly and casually referring to its political opponents as communists and socialists. I guess their previous use of the word “liberal” as an epithet just doesn’t have the same punch it used to have.
Note the big smiles and laughter from Hegseth and Vance. Oh that Miller! What a guy.
Anyway… check out this very unusual turn of events:
Two weeks later:
What the hell?
Charlie Sykes gathered up some reactions from old timey conservatives who are wondering what in the world is going on:
- Tom Nichols: “I remember when conservatives used to rail against this kind of thing.”
- Conservative economist Jessica Riedl: “If Obama or Biden had done this, the right would have lost its mind. There’d be another ‘tea party’ movement complete with slogans about socialism. But I get it, the ‘intellectual consistency’ ship sailed a long time ago.”
- Conservative talk show host Erick Erickson: “So many of you were opposed to Mamdani wanting to seize the means of production in New York City, but are totally fine with Trump’s Commerce Secretary wanting the US government to become the largest shareholder of Intel. This is socialism with an R next to its name.”
- National Review’s Charles CW Cooke: “Preposterous move. If Obama had done this, so many of the people defending it would have correctly condemned it as overreach and interference and ‘picking winners and losers.’”
- Former congressman, Justin Amash, a libertarian: “This administration brags about corporate welfare, cronyism, and corruption. They are the enemies of liberty and prosperity.”
- Republican Senator Thom Tillis: “I don’t care if it’s a dollar or a billion dollar stake in an American company, that starts feeling like a semi-state owned enterprise, à la CCCP… You’re going to have to explain to me how this reconciles with free market capitalism.”
- Republican Senator Rand Paul: “If socialism is government owning the means of production, wouldn’t the government owning part of Intel be a step toward socialism? Terrible idea.”
- CATO VP Scott Lincicome posted a thread explaining what a terrible decision it was for everyone:
- 1. Bad for Intel’s long-term viability, as politics, not commercial considerations, increasingly drive its decisions. (SOEs are notoriously slow, bloated, & unproductive.) Foreign govts might also target it.
- 2. Bad for Intel’s competitors who are suddenly competing against it AND Uncle Sam for customers, capital, etc. (and not just chip production bc they do a lot of
- 3. Bad for Intel’s customers who now must fear (and may face pressure to) they’ll be pressured/forced to buy Intel’s products, regardless of their merit. (Intel is STILL struggling to make a top-end chip.) This is in turn bad for the US tech sector overall.
- 4. Bad for US companies that took govt subsidies (CHIPs/IRA/etc): Are they next? Should they return the money? Will they preempt via political moves/lobbying? (Buyer beware, sure, but they didn’t sign up for this, and their investments may be distorted further)(You can read the whole thing here.)
As a liberal Democrat, I’m not sure it’s quite the catastrophe the right thinks it is but there is good reason to be opposed, as Dave Dayen points out here:
I don’t pretend to really understand what’s happening here. If I had to guess it’s just Trump swinging his tiny …. hands around to show he’s boss without any real underlying rationale. He’s operating almost entire lyon whim at this point and his acolytes like Lutnick are seeing his every move as some kind of magical genius that is beyond everyone else’s ken to truly understand. It’s very creepy.
But you have to appreciate the extreme hypocrisy in the right screaming “communist!” at the opposition when they’re literally taking over the means of production. As the saying goes: you cannot make this shit up.
Sykes adds an interesting little bit of history here which I had not heard before:
You know who else would recognize what’s happening here? Grover Cleveland, the only other president to serve non-contiguous terms — and who coined the term “Communism of pelf [grift]”. I wrote about Cleveland the day before Trump resumed power.It’s worth remembering that Cleveland despised high tariffs. In Cleveland’s view, tariffs were not merely protectionist taxes on consumers, they were also instruments of fear and favor for the economic oligarchs of his time.
“Communism,” Cleveland declared, “is a hateful thing and a menace to peace and organized government.”
But he was not anticipating Bolshevism. Instead, he was talking about “the communism of combined wealth and capital, the outgrowth of overweening cupidity and selfishness, which insidiously undermines the justice and integrity of free institutions…”
That form of communism — what we might call the communism of grift — “is not less dangerous than the communism of oppressed poverty and toil, which, exasperated by injustice and discontent, attacks with wild disorder the citadel of rule.”
Fascinating. Very Gilded Age.