The Republican Party has spent the last 20 years transforming the word “liberal” into a slur and has been so successful that liberals themselves have struggled to find a replacement for that term. It seems that “progressive” has won out as the most commonly used substitute, although whenever I hear anybody use that term to describe their politics, I presume they are too spineless to own up to the real definition of liberal in the first place. John F. Kennedy’s timeless quote is the touchstone that I personally always look to when I want or need to define liberal to anyone:
“What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label “Liberal?” If by “Liberal” they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer’s dollar, then the record of this party and its members demonstrate that we are not that kind of “Liberal.” But if by a “Liberal” they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people — their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties — someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a “Liberal,” then I’m proud to say I’m a ‘Liberal.’”
It is possible to reclaim the word, of course. African-Americans have reclaimed a word that never had a positive connotation in the first place, “nigger”, and turned it into a subversive idea that throws the hatred of its original use back in the face of those who would use it and at the same time reframes it as an expression of solidarity. The transformation of the word “gay” is so complete that it has lost any of the negative connotations it was meant to convey and has simply become the standard term, but the gay community has similarly reclaimed the word “queer”.
Since the results of the 2008 election demonstrate a clear trend back toward liberalism, the Republicans have had to turn up the heat a little bit. The early actions of the Obama Administration to deal with the banking debacle found Republicans and other right-wingers trotting out the term “Socialist” to apply to the TARP bailout, and that worked so well in their echo chamber of madness, they’ve decided to run with it. The Republican Party has decided, against the objections of its own chairman Michael Steele, to refer to the Democratic Party as the “Democratic Socialist Party” in all of its official communication and in talking points for the media. According to that report, they are going so far as to convene a special meeting of the RNC next week to enact this resolution, making it official policy of the Republican Party, and also delivering a great big “Fuck you, nigger!” to Michael Steele in the process.
Calling Barack Obama, a thoroughly middle-of-the-road politician who shows no inclination toward anything resembling liberal politics, a “Socialist” was ridiculous in the first place. Applying that term to the entire Democratic Party, which, like the Republican Party, has so many corporate lobbyists up its ass that all they can see is the first guy’s shoes, transcends ridiculousness. But that’s the state of affairs in the GOP these days: “let’s take the most outrageously stupid thing we can do and do it harder.”
I’m sure you’ve probably read by now, though, that 20% of the American public now thinks socialism is probably a better idea than capitalism, and that among voters under 30 that shoots up to 33%. And, at the same time, the percentage of people willing to identify themselves as Republicans to a national pollster is down to around 20%. So maybe the Republicans could take a clue from those polls and jump on the Socialist bandwagon. If they did, they could double their numbers overnight!
Of course, they’d need to rebrand themselves a little bit. “Republican Socialist” just doesn’t have a ring to it, but Republicans like to paint themselves as the “defenders of the nation”, so maybe they could go with “National Socialists”. Hey! I think that works! Check it out:
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| Democratic Socialist |
National Socialist |
Real Democratic Socialism as embodied by the Socialist Party USA is quite a different beast entirely from the “free handouts to the rich and powerful” socialism that the Republicans are complaining about. You’d also have a very hard time pegging social democracy to the excesses of the Soviet state and its satellites. In practice, social democracy long ago became the norm in Western Europe and learned to play nice with the status quo, while establishing broad-based social welfare systems that have made people throughout the EU better educated, given then better medical care, and improved their standards of living to rival or exceed those of Americans. So maybe it’s a pretty good deal to be a Democratic Socialist. And if you can’t deal with being called a “Socialist”, I guess “liberal” is probably up for grabs again now that the Republicans have moved on from it.
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