In the flurry of this year’s election, incumbent President Donald Trump has been throwing out insulting names like a violent game of dodgeball. Running against him on the Democratic ticket were the likes of “Basically Braindead Bernie” Sanders, “Little Mike” Bloomberg, and “Sleepy” Joe Biden. Back here in Michigan, we have “That Woman”, Gretchen “Half”-Whitmer. There’s something else that Trump has been calling Joe Biden, something a little more serious than word-play and alliteration. It’s something that has frightened patriotic Americans for over a hundred years: Socialist.
Where does this accusation come from? And why is it being hurled at Biden, a life-long moderate Democrat?
Biden’s campaign website features plans for economic recovery, protecting the Affordable Care Act, raising the living wage to $15, and encouraging unions. In the eyes of American conservatives, Biden’s potential administration is a stone’s throw away from Venezuela. Biden doesn’t identify as a Democratic Socialist like Sanders or Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but he has still been labeled one by Trump and his supporters in the Republican party.
Accusing a Democratic politician of socialism is an American pastime akin to a game of baseball. In the past century, FDR has been called one for his New Deal policies, LBJ for the Great Society, Clinton for his healthcare reforms, and Obama for the Affordable Care Act, just to name a few. It’s no surprise that Biden is now getting his share in 2020. While the Democratic party usually stands on a platform of a more fair economy and affordable healthcare, it still is not socialism.
However, in America, socialism doesn’t mean the type of economy where the people hold the means of production anymore, it means hating this country.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the people who benefited the most from capitalism (the rich and the politicians they supported) realized that Americans were unhappy with the state of the country and beginning to explore the benefits of socialism. So, they did all they could to keep themselves in power and spun a lengthy yarn of the disastrous impact socialism would have on the American way of life, a.k.a., destroying it. Decades passed, and here we are, with the Republican candidate using the tried-and-true tactic of calling his Democratic opponent a socialist with no evidence. After all, the supposed horrors of socialism ingrained in our heads is an American standard.
So while Joe Biden’s policies are moderately liberal, he’s just a Democrat, not a socialist. He’s not going to become capitalism’s biggest enemy, he’s not going to ruin American life as we know it. If Donald Trump and the GOP want to come up with new ways to tank their opposition, maybe they should come up with something a little more original.