In response to what it deems the "comeback of socialism," the White House Council on Economic Advisers has published a report warning of the dire harm that results when nations try to implement socialism (PDF).
Some of it is silly, and some of it is not (but that would be a much longer post to parse out).
What I primarily want to observe is the following.
During the 2016 election, Donald Trump promoted the narrative that Hillary Clinton rigged the election against both himself and Bernie Sanders, the man many credit for socialism's current popularity.
What a great evening we had. So interesting that Sanders beat Crooked Hillary. The dysfunctional system is totally rigged against him!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 4, 2016
Bernie himself, and his campaign leadership, had problems conceding that he lost fair and square to Clinton. Partly as a result of this lingering belief that Bernie was "robbed" of a win, Bernie (and many people's support of him) never really went away the way it's demanded that certain other, ahem, election losers go away forever. In fact, Bernie is largely treated as a 2016 winner, for purportedly pushing the Democrats leftward.
It is true that in the aftermath of the 2016 election, some high-profile Democratic politicians have publicly expressed more left-wing positions, such as supporting Medicare For All. Moving left is not necessarily a bad thing, but some of it seems to have been done in a reflexive, follow-the-white-man way in which a lot of people are taking cues from either Trump or Bernie. The mainstream media, too, has dutifully conceded that Bernie is the leader of the left and that everyone he hasn't properly anointed as a true leftist is therefore a "centrist" or "moderate."
Aside from the particularities of broad socialist policies (For instance, what happens to reproductive and trans healthcare rights when Republicans control the government that controls "healthcare for all"? And when the fuck are we going to talk about childcare?), I think many of the what I call "online socialists" simply have no clue how socialism, and particularly rightwing caricatures of it, plays in much of rural white America. I grew up in rural America in the 1980s, in a town that was about 99% working-class white people.
The teachers at my public schools told us horror stories about what happened to people in communist regimes. "Communist" was used often as a synonym for fascist, liberal, n-word, and/or Democrat. Yet, many of the men were in labor unions. And, the women had low-paying service sector jobs where unionization either couldn't happen or unions in the area didn't give a shit about them. Yeah, there was potential for .... political education, I guess. But I remember zero socialists (or Democrats or Republicans) going there and trying to organize or educate (or learn from) people.
The truth is, in the US, a lot of white guys across the political spectrum seem to fetishize violent political revolution. I don't mean that in a "both side-ism" way. I think it's far, far more prominent and worse on the right in the US, mostly because the US has been rigged for the racist, anti-woman far right since its founding. Indeed, even as they adopt hammer/sickle avatars and so forth, the Internet left-wing "revolutionaries" seem not to realize that an actual violent leftwing revolution would probably be squelched in the United States very, very quickly, as both the military and police force are more conservative than the general population.
My larger point today is that if the "online left," and even academia to an extent, spent a tenth of the time doing real-world outreach and education to the ordinary people(tm) they think are latent socialists as they did "dunking on libs," "ironically" being misogynistic rape culture racists, and having esoteric circle-the-wagons intra-left debates, I wouldn't feel so hopeless at the moment. (Because, unfortunately, toxic cishet white men often hog the best gigs, the leadership positions, and the large platforms via which they spew their versions of "socialism").
All that said, I'm not necessarily saying it's wrong for Democrats to move leftward. But that the debates we're about to see regarding socialism are going to be very, very stupid in the age of Twitter and Fox News, so Bernie and the Democrats who have kowtowed to him better have a fucking plan if they're leading this shitshow.
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