In this week's New Yorker online, Hendrik Hertzberg offers up a delightful morsel of food for thought on his blog in the Talk of the Town section: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2008/11/03/081103taco_talk_hertzberg
As has been the case throughout this election, when it comes to making a mockery (or at least attempting to do so) of Barack Obama, and to a great degree our intelligence as a nation, semantics has once again proven to be the tool of choice in the Republican arsenal.
This week's word of choice: SOCIALIST. As in Obama is a SOCIALIST (duhduhdone!) and thus a vote for Obama is a scary, unpatriotic vote for SOCIALISM. Egads!
Because let's face it, everyone knows socialism is the same thing as being a Communist and that's synonymous with being a Nazi, a dictator, a Red sympathizer, a - well you catch my drift. It's bad, really, really, really bad.
But wait...what does this really mean?
According to The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy socialism is a cooperative economic system not necessarily synonymous with communism. "There are many varieties of socialism. Some socialists tolerate caoitalism, as long as the government maintains the dominant influence over the economy; others insist on an abolition of private enterprise. All communists are socialists, but not all socialists are communists."
Wait a second! Run that last bit by me again! "All communists are socialists, but not all socialists are communists." An economic system and responsible approach to national spending that promotes regulation and possibly more equitable outcomes?! What kind of crazy talk is this?
Now I’m not promoting socialism, but I am suggesting, perhaps optimistically, that the Republicans have taken a misstep on this one. Surely in the 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union we as a culture have come to disassociate spending to benefit the greater social welfare from fear of the collapse of capitalism and the onset of a Bolshevik Revolution, American style.
Have we evolved so little since McCarthyism that words like "equal", "distribution", "wealth", and dare I say it, "share" (God NO!) are capable of sending chills up and down the spines of a nation when used together in a sentence, or even in a series of sentences where "socialism/t" has also been sprinkled about?
Do Americans today even have an emotional response to the idea of Socialism and even if they do, is it actually powerful enough to sway a voter?
More than 60 years later, does the whole "He's a Commie!" ploy still work?
- Um...yeah, and there are more than a few right-leaning politicos banking on this fact.
As Hertzberg points out in the debate over income tax and the fight to capture the Oval Office, it all comes down to the interpretation of words. Throw in a dash of fear mongering, a few stretched truths and minced words and you've got yourself a moderately successful recipe for Republican Campaign Strategy 2008.
Accusing Obama, with his "terrorist links" and foreign-sounding name of being a socialist, and by default a communist, is an assertion laden with ideological connotations. A fact made all the more intriguing when you consider we’re really only talking about a few percentage points difference between one side’s income tax plan and the other’s.
But how can this be? Why?
It's a game of semantics folks!
It's the intentional manipulation of a potential meaning of a word for ideological purposes.
The stakes are high, but at the end of the day it's all come down to a politicized version of tomAYto, tomAHto.
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