The following story is co-published with Luke Savage’s Substack .
The recent swathe of electoral victories by the Democratic Socialists of America has provoked a predictably delicious meltdown throughout the political establishment. James Carville is apoplectic . Centrist Democrats are suddenly scrambling to release manifestos . Jonathan Chait continues to write his one and only column over and over again. On the reactionary right, needless to say, the Red Scare-esque pronouncements continue to fly fast and loose.
Here, however, there’s a somewhat curious phenomenon that deserves special attention. Said phenomenon generally involves a conservative pundit, Republican politician, or Fox News host rattling off various tenets of socialism or perhaps the various policy commitments of an organization like DSA as if they are some kind of revelation.
If you’re a progressive liberal or leftist you’ve probably encountered this stuff on social media because dunking on it has become something of a meme (I’ve definitely partaken in it myself ). What I find interesting about this kind of reactionary moral panic is how matter of fact it tends to be in its use of language. Here, for example, is Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson talking about the DSA last month:
“This is their platform, this is actually quotes from their platform that they published about a day or two ago…They put this on paper! They’re saying the quiet things out loud: Abolish the Electoral College, replace the two-party system with a multi-party ‘democracy,’ expand the House of Representatives, implement proportional representation and ranked-choice voting in all elections. Establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries to ensure democratic control and accountability to the people, abolish ICE and grant amnesty for all. End sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran. Free Palestine…End all military and economic aid to Israel, prosecute U.S. and Israeli leaders responsible for the genocide in Gaza.”
You can watch the rest for yourself here:
With a few possible exceptions, many of the items Johnson lists represent fairly mainstream positions as far as popular opinion is concerned (and even those that aren’t majority positions aren’t exactly fringe ones either). Fox News regularly does a version of this too and, in many cases, its hosts seem even less concerned with recasting socialist priorities in a more negative frame. Rather, it just assumed to be totally self evident that the likes of “a democratic economy” and “healthcare for all” are inherently sinister.
The humour here is obvious, because this stuff can only sound scary if you belong to a closed ideological circuit and/or have consumed a thousand or so hours of Fox News. To paraphrase the New Republic’s Rachel Kahn , the reactionary right is effectively trying to fear monger by threatening Americans with a good time. They could be saying “these socialists will literally kill you” but are reduced to making scary faces while they say “free college” and “abolish medical debt” instead.
Many of the items Johnson lists represent fairly mainstream positions.
It’s pretty strange when you think about it. Even the hackiest operative knows it’s generally bad practice to repeat your opponents’ attacks verbatim or work within a rival’s chosen narrative frame
In obvious ways, the existence of a tick like this comes down to the particularities of the conservative media ecosystem itself. Whatever its purported ideological allegiance happens to be, much of modern cable news now functions mainly as liturgy for the already converted. Since the 2010s, this development has only been intensified by the cloistering effects of social media, which have inevitably reinforced many existing ideological silos to the point of near total impenetrability for those not versed in their arcane systems of affect, language, and symbol. Though versions of this process have happened everywhere, it’s been especially pronounced on the right.
This, however, is not the whole story.
In a more profound way, I think what we’re really seeing here is what Cold War era anti-communism looks like after decades without any actual socialist menace to fight. Whatever else, the ideological allure of 20th century socialism often compelled its adversaries to devise a sophisticated political response. At one time, the intellectual appeal of Marxism proved so strong that conservatism’s best minds believed it would take an epochal battle lasting decades in order to turn the tide. The new right drew considerable élan from these struggles and knew it couldn’t rely on repression alone. Instead, it needed to innovate, experiment, and figure out how to articulate its ideas to give them at least a patina of populist appeal. Many of its leading figures were themselves ex-communists driven by the fervour of apostasy and, as such, held an intuitive respect for the thing they were fighting.
By comparison, socialism’s adversaries in the 21st century are mostly products of a world where their own project has triumphed: one lacking either a geopolitical adversary like the Soviet Union or even the domestic equivalent of New Deal liberalism. Their own philosophy, neoliberalism, has so successfully conquered the modern Democratic Party that every Democratic President since Bill Clinton has effectively governed to the right of Richard Nixon.
If you stop using a muscle, it will eventually slacken and become weak. And in much the same way, the reactionary mind has been sapped of its earlier vitality. The old reflexes might persist as muscle memory, but they have so thoroughly degenerated into dead dogma that their adherents lack the energy or drive to deploy them with real conviction. As such, they no longer feel any need to grapple with or understand the appeal of what they are resisting. Instead, it’s simply assumed that the mere mention of raising taxes on the superrich, eliminating college tuition, or the spectre of socialism itself will find the average American recoiling in disgust. 1
Socialists are fighting competitive races and winning.
For the first time in my life, it has become possible to contemplate the possibility of a wholesale social democratic realignment in the world’s largest and wealthiest country. Self-described socialists are fighting competitive races and winning office across America. A socialist is now governing the de facto capital of global finance and ranks alongside Bernie Sanders as one of the nation’s most popular politicians. The Democratic Socialists of America (albeit in the context of a much bigger country) now has a membership exceeding that of the Socialist Party at its peak in the heydays of Victor Berger and Eugene Debs. Decades of noxious propaganda, it seems, have finally waned in their effect.
The political obstacles facing this project are very real and the prospect it will eventually be met with outright state repression cannot by any means be dismissed. But it’s become increasingly clear that the ideological opponents of American socialism are not adequately braced for the fight that lies ahead. When the next Red Scare almost inevitably comes, it may prove as sinister as its ancestors but will also be stupider than anyone can possibly imagine.
With any luck, this will be its greatest weakness.
- A good case in point here is something like Know Your Enemy , a left-leaning podcast that treats right wing ideas and intellectual history with genuine critical rigour. There is no inherent reason American conservatives couldn’t produce their own version of the same thing, and the fact that they haven’t is itself quite revealing. ︎
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