In the wake of increasingly vitriolic Republican attacks on Obama's budget and auto bailout, Mother Jones' Kevin Drum had an interesting question:
Let's take a look at what some notable Republicans have said:
There is something different about [Republicans'] tone these days, and I can't quite put my finger on exactly what it is. My tentative take is that there's an inchoate quality to their fears that's new. In the past they were fighting against specific things: communism, hippies, Bill Clinton, Islamists, abortion, etc....Who, exactly, is their enemy these days?
Michelle Malkin: "Obama: I'm not a socialist, I just play one on TV."
Glenn Beck, Fox News: "People once again are feeling oppressed by an out of control state. We're afraid to the government growing larger ... They're marching us toward 1984. Big brother."
Rep. Paul Ryan, WSJ: "If this agenda comes to pass, it will mark this period in history as the moment America turned European."
Charles Krauthammer, WaPo: "His goal is to rewrite the American social compact... He's here to warranty your life."
AmSpecBlog, American Spectator: " There is a whiff of Fascism emanating from the Obama White House."
Really, the enemy seems pretty clear. Conservatives think Obama is a
socialist - or National Socialist - and just about every high-level
critique of his presidency
references some aspect of his socialism-style budgets, his
socialism-style takeover of General Motors, or his socialist-style
faith in more government funding for education and health care.
Where
Drum is right, however, is that the specter of socialism differs from
past conservative boogiemen - "communism, hippies, Bill Clinton,
Islamists, abortion, etc" - in at least four important ways. First of
all, this time the enemy isn't external, which means that it's more
difficult to construct the kind of American-as-a-fortress national
unity arguments that worked so well against the Soviets during the Cold
War and the Islamo-fascists in the few years after 9/11. Second, the
enemy isn't a person. Conservatives don't (yet) hate Barack Obama as a
guy with the bile that reflexively came to their lips every time Bill
Clinton appeared on TV. Third, the enemy isn't moral. Casting
pro-choicers as immoral is an simpler trick because abortion is a moral
debate that breaks down fairly logically into two sides. Deficits are
just plain different because there's no religious conviction about an
appropriate ratio of government spending-to-revenue. Obama's deficits
are daunting, yes, but Reagan ran big deficits, too. Bush seemed to be
OK with them. Cheney said they didn't even matter.
Finally,
and ultimately, it's about the visuals. The problem Republicans might
have going forward isn't finding something for conservatives to fear -
socialism seems fine - but figuring out what exactly scary socialism
looks like. All they've managed so far are foggy images of the future, like the idea of increased taxes somewhere down the road, or the idea of a larger public sector. But these enemies don't have faces. Kruschev had a face - a big one. So do hippies, the Clintons and terrorists. What does a bloated public sector look like? That's just the problem.
These wing nuts tossing "fascist" and "socialist" around look at the right track/wrong track numbers lately? Keep talking boneheads.
I would be more inclined to accept Republican criticism if they didnt reflexively oppose any Obama policy even when that opposition contradicts past positions.
There are a couple more problems with the "socialism" boogeyman. One is that it's generally tone-deaf to the problems ordinary Americans are facing right now. People are worried about their jobs, their homes, their families, and the overall state of the economy; "big government" is pretty far down on the list. Also, most people recognize that our current economic situation is going to require a substantial degree of government involvement; in fact, there's significant criticism from the left that the government isn't doing enough to solve this crisis.
The other problem is that it's hypocritical. Under George W. Bush, the size and scope of government expanded significantly. On the domestic front: No Child Left Behind, the Medicare prescription drug bill, and a $1 trillion increase in federal spending between 2001 and 2008. On the civil liberties front: warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention, and torture. All this was done with a Republican president and a Republican Congress - and with no cries of "SOSHLIZM" from Malkin, Beck, Krauthammer, or any of the other right-wing talking heads. (Andrew Sullivan is the notable exception to this rule.)
What does the face of the GOP's new enemy look like? How about Dawn Johnsen, Harold Koh, etc.? This is why Republicans are so fierce about opposing various Obama appointments - it's the only way they can put a face on the opposition. They need to focus their rage on something, and a person in an obscure office in the DoJ will suit them just fine. Has anyone outside the Beltway ever really cared about the OLC?
Of course, one reason that those appointments are gaining in prominence is because of the importance they gained during the Bush Administration. We all know the name John Yoo, who would otherwise have remained a faceless bureaucrat, because of his role justifying torture. So one side effect of Republicans fighting over these DoJ nominations is that they end up making fighting over these nominations look normal.
Regarding Koh, in addition to the reasons to oppose him that you might already be aware of, there are other reasons such as his support for illegal activity that might be combined with his inability to figure out what he supports:
http://24ahead.com/blog/archives/006885.html
There are plenty of things that could be about this post, but no one's ever accused BHO of being a nationalist (except when they were trying to fool people).
Why don't you just directly link to Alex Jones and save us the bother of reading your own recycled paranoid scribblings, 24BlogWhore?
They are definitely loosing it. From Beck's backdrop of parading stormtroopers to Bachmann's re-ed camps they are going batshit crazy. And it's picked up on the blog echo chambers. I'd say all this was music to the ears of the admin. Watching your opponents march of to the insane ward is a deeply satisfying experience.
i've never seen a group of people flip so quickly. not a peep was heard from these guys when W was kidnapping american citizens, holding them without charge, without trial, without legal counsel, and oh yeah, TORTURING THEM.
But it's only when Obama wants to raise the top marginal tax rate from 36% to 39% do they fear fascism, socialism, or some form of totalitarian government (complete with giant screens of marching storm troopers).
the cognitive dissonance in their heads must have caused some form of brain damage or selective memory loss.
and i think that may be a FIFTH problem with the whole "socialism/fascism as enemy". its that we've been closer than we've ever been under bush (what else can you call a president who shreds the constitution at will and unilaterally takes away the rights of his citizens, but a tyrant?) and these guys (and gals) carried his water (that he then used to waterboard teenagers and old men).
At the same time, Obama's justification for the urgency of health reform is clear: cost reductions and universal (or near-universal) coverage are the only way to maintain a health care safety net in perpetuity. The Republican alternative is simply not providing health care. It's a pretty easy argument for Democrats to win logically -- a wide majority of Americans would prefer that we don't let old people die a few decades from now, but it's too forward looking to have much of a visceral appeal.
Similarly, the benefits of carbon emissions reductions lie at least 50 years in the future and persist for a millennium. The costs are immediate and pervasive and much easier to demonstrate.
The challenge in making these two issues less "foggy," to use your term, is I think greater than the challenge facing the GOP. The GOP's found the best possible frame already: government's getting bigger and you, the taxpayer, aren't getting an equal share, let alone a share proportionate to the taxes you contribute. It's worked forever and it's true enough now. Seems a lot more difficult for Obama to convince the public of his side of the argument; a constant argument for urgent action will start to fall on deaf ears eventually. To an extent that's already happening with each successive industrial bailout becoming harder to sell -- Obama's exclusively relying on extralegislative measures now.
Wouldn't appear to be borne out by the latest CBS/NYT polls showing 75% approval for increasing taxes on the $250,000 and above and 57% willing to pay more taxes for universal healthcare. As the Republicans retreat into clownishness the public outside the talk radio crowd is not listening to them and conversely this elevates Obama's use of the bully pulpit to explain stuff to ordinary Americans. When it gets down to the short strokes on both healthcare and carbon emissions he'll be hitting the air waves, holding townhalls etc etc. The Republicans simply have no way of dealing with this.
While I agree with quite a few of the above problems with the GOP's stance, I think there's another, more obvious problem with "socialism": it's a scare tactic from the 30's. (Another Depression era, oddly enough.)
What does it say about a party, and the party's main cheerleaders, when they recycle 70-80-year-old ideas with a straight face? Ideas, for the most part, *that have already been adopted by the US and Europe* in some way, shape or form? What is Social Security? What is Medicare? etc. and so forth.
It sounds like someone with Alzheimers, or a nut.