After President Trump picked trade wars with nearly every major U.S. trading partner — friend and foe alike — U.S. exports of soybeans, pork and other agricultural products dried up. The president subsequently decided to cover up one foolish economic policy with another, and another. He launched not one but two rounds of massive farmer bailouts, together totaling tens of billions of dollars.
Yet Republican politicians have portrayed neither of these taxpayer-funded handouts as “socialist.”
Nor do Republicans cry “socialism” when the treasury secretary lectures U.S. retailers and manufacturers about how and where they should reallocate their supply chains; nor when the president himself lectures firms about what products to stock; nor when the administration tries to get other countries to engage in more centralized economic planning — by, for example, demanding that European political leaders commit private companies to buy more U.S. crops anPolling last fall from YouGov, for instance, found that Republicans overwhelmingly supported Trump’s trade-war-driven farmer bailout, despite an avowed antipathy for “socialism.” A separate YouGov poll conducted this week asked respondents whether they considered various policies to be examples of socialism, such as free college tuition (according to Republicans: yes!), or Social Security and government medical care for veterans (both no, somehow). Medicare for the elderly is decidedly not socialist, but something approximating Medicare for everyone definitely is .
So maybe the problem isn’t hypocrisy, exactly. It’s that the word “socialist,” to Republicans at least, has evolved to mean anything the other side is for.
You would be hard-pressed to find better recent examples of the U.S. government trying to exert influence, if not outright control, over the means of production, both domestically and abroad.
When not disrupting previously functional industries, Republicans have also been busy propping up failing ones. Consider the case of coal.
