The Revival of Red-Baiting
USA politics is rediscovering what has occurred on the Delaware conservative blogosphere for years: viz., if you want to nuke progressives instead of dealing with their arguments, then red-bait them:
Conservatives might be seeking a spiritual leader, organizing principle and fresh identity, but they at least seem to have settled on a favorite rhetorical ogre: socialism.
As in, Democrats are intent on forcing socialism on the “U.S.S.A” (as the bumper sticker says, under the words “Comrade Obama”).
It seems that “socialist” has supplanted “liberal” as the go-to slur among much of a conservative world confronting a one-two-three punch of bank bailouts, budget blowouts and stimulus bills. Right-leaning bloggers and talk radio hosts are wearing out the brickbat. Senate and House Republicans have been tripping over their podiums to invoke it. The S-bomb has become as surefire a red-meat line at conservative gatherings as “Clinton” was in the 1990s and “Pelosi” is today.
Apparently, the “L-word” has lost its frightening connotations and, in fact, has been replaced by the C-word thanks to the conservative George Bush and the erstwhile Republican Congress. Since the L-word seems like a balm to the deep trauma brought on by those aligned with the C-word, C-word devotees are going for the jugular. Here are some examples:
“Earlier this week, we heard the world’s best salesman of socialism address the nation,” Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, said on Friday, referring, naturally, to a certain socialist in chief.
Former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas decried the creation of “socialist republics” in the United States. “Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff,” Mr. Huckabee said, speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference here over the weekend, a kind of Woodstock for young conservatives.
“Socialism is something new for us to hit Obama over the head with,” said Joshua Bolin of Augusta, Ga., who founded a Web site, “Reagan.org,” which he calls a conservative analog to the liberal MoveOn.org.
Given that the USA requires New Deal like solutions to its quasi-Great Depression like problems, it's not particularly surprising to see the use of the S-word by contemporary Hooverites:
“The right would use ‘socialist’ against Franklin Roosevelt all the time in the 1930s,” said Charles Geisst, a financial historian at Manhattan College in the Bronx. “To hear him referred to as Comrade Roosevelt during that period was not unusual.”
In short, it's an old ploy used by a party and political ideology that has even run out of new material for attacking its opponents. It's a cliché used by hackneyed thinkers. The ad hominem is what is being conserved by conservatism. Let them have at it if that is the best they can do.
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