What Republicans Don’t Understand about the Democratic Party

And why this paralyzes discussion

Many of you who have read my other work know that I tend to direct most of the criticism toward my own side: the Democrats. For one of my more successful examples of that, see here. You can check my profile for the rest. On this day, however, I am going to talk about an area where Republicans continually fall short: their fundamental assessment of Democrats.

In a recent post in r/conservative about calls by Democrats to abolish U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), one user expressed no surprise, saying of the party:

…this is what happens when your political party become [sic] communist in every way but in name.

I think it is worth stating that I am not writing this in response to this single post. It is, nevertheless, a useful example of a recurring trend. For years, I have heard this claim by Republicans, that Democrats are Communists. I would dare to say that this is a mainstream idea within the GOP, and it is one that is totally off the mark.

It is not merely off the mark, though. It is comparable to the same gratuitous level of error that you find on the far-left, in which opponents to their new world order are labeled as Nazis. I am perfectly willing to admit that this happens on the left and within my party. I just wish that Republicans, who claim that there is too much political correctness and too much SJW dogma, could see the same in themselves on this. Not only do they play the “You’re a Nazi!” game, by simply substituting the word “Communist” (or “socialist”), but they have been doing it far longer than Democrats or leftists have ever done.

While the tendency of Republicans to dish out the Communist label has ebbed and flowed, we can see it in the early days of the Cold War. Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy ruined thousands of lives with his witch hunt against political enemies, who were often falsely accused of being Communist, as if being Communist itself were a crime. In the 60s, Ronald Reagan issued a similarly misleading and paranoid statement against the emergence of Medicare / Medicaid:

If you don’t, this program, I promise you, will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow; and behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country. Until, one day, as Norman Thomas said, we will awake to find that we have socialism. And if you don’t do this and if I don’t do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.

Fifty years have passed, and these programs did not lead to the dissolution of democracy, despite the Republican panic. They have enabled the poor and the elderly to receive medical care that would have otherwise be unavailable to them, however. It ultimately stands as no surprise that Reagan’s ideas expressed here became the central orthodoxy of the Republican Party, following his election to the Presidency in 1980, an orthodoxy that has remained largely in tact, the erratic nature of Trump notwithstanding. To varying degrees for the last sixty or so years, the bottom line is that Democrats have to parry these unfair accusations of Communist ideology. Republicans might then wonder if accusations of Nazism against them really come out of nowhere.

Some of the confusion by Republicans about Democrats seems to be a branch of greater confusion about government and the idea of Communism itself. The GOP has this habit of assuming that having a government program, whatever that program may be, is tantamount to Communism/socialism. This completely misses what Communists have always tried to do. They have tried to nationalize the means of production and create a centrally planned economy, in an effort to liberate the “proletariat” from the “bourgeoisie.” While Democrats have often supported government programs, this is not close to anything they have ever proposed or advocated. They have tried to influence the economy on the margins and to satisfy collective demand within a free market construct.

It is true that Democrats have more confidence in government than Republicans, and this makes them more similar to Communists in that way. Being more similar to Communists is not the same as being an actual Communist, however, just as the greater similarity of Republicans to Nazis does not make them actual Nazis. Just consider where America has shared traits with Communist states. Both America and its Communist rivals tend to be militaristic countries. If we apply the Republican train of thought to a comparison of America and, say, Costa Rica (which lacks any military at all), it could be said that America is the Communist country between the two.

Of course, we would recognize what a fatuous conclusion that would be. It would overlook so many crucial features of American society: its private ownership, its wealth inequality, its lack of protections for workers, and the political power of the donor class. None of these aspects are consistent with a Communist system, and they enable us to distinguish ourselves from Communist nations. The same distinction applies to the Democrats. They possess the same aforementioned aspects, and so much of their agenda is explicitly capitalist in its vision. Keynesianism, which provides the foundation for nearly all economic thinking of the Democratic Party, assumes application within a free market.

So this is my challenge to my brethren on the other side of the political aisle. Stop calling us Communists. Stop calling us socialists. We have never been that, and history has proved as much by now. Understand that even those of us who support candidates such as Bernie Sanders are actually capitalists. Otherwise, I think the kind of open discussion for which you long, against the excesses of the far-left, will not be attainable even among Democrats in the center, and a larger number of them are centrists than you realize. Most Democrats are not even the generic liberals that they are made out to be.

I agree wholeheartedly that political correctness has gone too far and had damaging effects on our political and even social health, but I also acknowledge that the problem cannot be solved merely by Democrats changing their ways. The GOP also needs to own its role in poisoning the well and reform accordingly, and it will not take much for them to do that.

So, Republicans, what say you?