Republicans are starting to seed the body politic with a destructive fear. They want to associate Democrats with the “Socialism” moniker and by inference with the economies of Cuba and Venezuela. Here is how we avoid the bait.
I appear on Tamara for Georgia for a short commentary on national politics every Friday at some time between 10 and 11 AM Central. We cover several topics, but today I wanted to bring up a critical issue. The GOP attempt at using socialism as a Democratic noose was on my mind.
On Tamara for Georgia discussing Socialism moniker
While the GOP is intent on scaring Americans into the fallacy that electing Democrats would effectively be ceding our “great economy” to one that looks like Cuba and Venezuela. Ironically, the U.S. has been instrumental in ensuring those economies get a lot of help in faltering. One must ask why don’t they use Sweden, Norway, or Denmark as the template.
The reason is clear. If Americans dug too deeply into those countries and studied their economies, it would make their scare tactics ineffective. Americans would see an effective integration of their safety nets. That lends itself to the real development of free enterprise and upward mobility as opposed to complete unabated corporate control and indentured servitude that is starting to define America.
So how to inoculate the body politic from the evil emanating from the GOP narrative? We expressed what we need to along with Robby L Caban, Tamara Shealey, and David Slavin on Tamara for Georgia.
I pointed out we needed to step into the messaging and not cower.
I would love progressives out there, all the different shows that are out there right now, to make sure to not cave into the belief, or as a Robbie was saying last week, not to fear the word because of what they have us doing as Democrats right now is fearing the word, running from the word, running for what it really means. The fact that Webster dictionary says socialism means controlling all the means of productions is a fallacy. That’s communism. It’s a difference. The definition in the dictionary is incorrect. I think we have to get on top of the message as opposed to allowing them to dictate the message. And when we control the message, we can then express the people what we want in my humble opinion of course.
Earlier, David Slavin made a critical statement that we must keep in the narrative.
We really need to have a strategy. And the strategy is about counter, opposing money power with mass movements and mass organization. And to do that we really need to resolve the contradictions within the 90% that is the racial inequalities that exist within the vast majority of the people. There are public opinion polls, Egberto, that you’re talking about where if people are told you know we need to redistribute income to people to the lower-income folks in the in the country to make things more equal, everybody agrees you know 80% of people agree. But if you use the word welfare, which is a code word that has been used to racialize around income redistribution, then the proportion of the positive responses goes way way
down obviously because white’s are thinking white is really what it comes down to. So I think that we cannot simply, and I think that Bernie Sanders has a tendency to do this, we can’t simply say everybody, all the 90% get together without understanding that there are inequalities that we need to resolve among ourselves.
The bottom line is that Republicans are trying to take Progressive Democrats off their game as instead of fighting the Right and the Plutocracy, it becomes a war between factions in the Democratic Party. We cannot allow that to happen. I wrote the piece “Let’s reset and have civil & respectful debates as we choose the best Democratic candidate” that covers this in detail. We must not repeat 2016 or 2000. We must not campaign into fear but lean into our values and campaign on them unabashedly.