The GOP scrambles for a bogeyman
By Harold Meyerson
February 8, 2012
Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, one thing is increasingly clear: Boy, do the Republicans miss communism.
For Republicans, being anti-communist didn’t merely mean opposition to the Soviets and their ideology. That kind of anti-communism was all but universal in the United States, from the Republican right to the small, democratic socialist left (and encompassing European socialists as well). For the 45 years after World War II, however, anti-communism was also the Republicans’ ultimate wedge issue in U.S. politics.
It enabled them to label Democrats as soft on communism when those Democrats opposed wars, such as Vietnam, as counterproductive and unwise. It enabled them to label liberals as proto-communists when those liberals favored social welfare programs such as Medicare. It enabled them to link liberals to domestic, and thus Soviet, communists when liberals and communists favored the same goals, notably an end to segregation. And it enabled them to attack even hardened Democratic Cold Warriors such as Harry Truman and Dean Acheson as commie-coddlers over events about which the United States had little control — such as the Maoist takeover of China — and for Soviet espionage activities, real and imagined, here at home.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, then, the task of demonizing Democrats became vastly more difficult, as this year’s Republican presidential contest illustrates. Of late, a favorite Republican theme is that President Obama is a European socialist. “I am for the Constitution,” Newt Gingrich recently proclaimed, while Obama “is for European socialism.” Not to be outdone, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has suggested that the choice between Obama and himself is one between “a European-style welfare state” or “a free land.”...
For the full article, go to:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-gop-scrambles-for-a-bogeyman/2012/02/07/gIQAyrZwzQ_story.html
******************************************************
OCU
| 