During a rally on September 30, 2020, Republican Donald Trump claimed that Joe Biden is a socialist.
This is one random accusation that I pulled out of a hat. We can all think of hundreds of times Republicans have accused various people and institutions of being socialist. They make this accusation so frequently that as with Arabs using the term "zionist," it no longer means anything as far as I can tell.
But just for fun, let's consider the implications of accepting this claim.
With the exception of Bernie Sanders and a handful of others, most modern Democratic politicians including Joe Biden are well to the right of Republican Ike Eisenhower. Arguably, some modern Democrats are to the right of even Ronald Reagan.
The Cold War
So if Joe Biden is indeed a socialist, that means that America was a socialist nation prior to the presidency of Ronald Reagan (if not Bush I). Therefore, we would have to completely reframe our understanding of the Cold War, as the majority of the conflict can now be described as a global conflict between two different factions of socialist nations: the American socialists and the Soviet socialists.
I was a child during that part of the Cold War. During that time, the Soviet Union framed the Cold War as communism vs capitalism. America framed the war as communism vs democracy. As a child, I was all but assaulted with propaganda promoting this view: the Cold War was all about communism vs democracy, and we were going to win because democracy is better than communism.
But now we know that everyone involved in the Cold War was wrong. Modern Republicans have finally revealed that the early Cold War was a conflict between competing factions of socialists. I would ask conservatives what they think the ideological conflict was about, but I'm afraid of the answer.
The Soviets claimed that we in the West were being enslaved by wealthy people, and they were offering us freedom from enslavement by wealthy people. Americans claimed that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was just like any other dictatorship and would ultimately abuse the people to remain in power without any real regard for socialist principles and that America offered freedom as opposed to the crushing tyranny of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
But what in the flying [bad word] is the ideological conflict if we are to believe that both sides of the Cold War were socialist?
World War II
Oh, but it gets even weirder. Bernie Sanders wants to bring back the economic policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which makes him and FDR even bigger socialists than Joe Biden. Recall that conservatives also believe that fascism is a form of socialism because the official name of the Nazi party had the word "socialist" in the name (one wonders if Republicans believe that North Korea is a democratic republic like America originally was before we became a "socialist" nation).
If we accept the definition of "socialist" used by modern Republicans, this means that World War II was a global war fought between two different factions of socialists: the socialist Nazis and the Imperial Japanese on one side, with the Soviet Union, socialist America, the socialist UK, and various other socialist nations forming an alliance against the "socialist" Nazis.
If the Nazis were socialist, and America was socialist, and France and the UK were socialist, then why were the allies fighting so hard to stop their fellow socialists from conquering Europe? While some Americans (using the slogan "America first") wanted to avoid conflict with Nazis, most Americans were eager to fight the Nazis and fought tooth and nail once we entered the conflict following the attack on Pearl Harbor. If all sides of the conflict were socialist, why was everyone fighting so hard and with such high body counts?
It's Not Just Republicans
Remember, there are a lot of people in the mainstream media, such as the NY Times and MSNBC, who literally cannot tell the difference between the democratic socialism of Bernie Sanders and FDR, and the socialism of the Soviet Union and mainland China. They do not equate Nazis with socialists, but by their definition of socialist, we still have to regard the Cold War as a global conflict between different factions of socialists, at least until Ronald Reagan was elected and saved America from "socialism."
I would really love it if someone from the NY Times could explain to me what they think the ideological conflict between American socialists and the Soviet Union was about. If they were all just socialists, why were they so concerned about the other side taking over the world and implementing socialism?
Also, do people at the NY Times and MSNBC celebrate a special holiday commemorating the day Ronald Reagan saved America from socialism?
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