Thread by @LarryGlickman

Rich Lowry’s introduction to National Review’s “Against Socialism” issue says that Bill Clinton “operated within the broad economic consensus,” which is true. What he doesn’t say is that Clinton was called a “socialist” anyway. /1

Socialism may be “back,” as Lowry claims. But the use of the label as a smear, usually to oppose New Deal liberalism or mild expansions of the welfare state, never went away. /2

I write about this extensively in my forthcoming @YaleBooks history of "free enterprise," which is available for pre-order. /3

https://twitter.com/LarryGlickman/status/1129134837099565060

I've done a number of threads on this topic before, but let me point to a few examples. This 1993 column condemned Bill Clinton's "welfare-state socialism," a phrase which nicely highlights the difficulty of separating the welfare state from socialism./4
newspapers.com/clip/31635619/

In 1994, National Review's own Jeffrey Hart called Clinton both a "socialist" and a "liberal thug." /5
newspapers.com/clip/31635837/

In 1996, with admirable forthrightness, a Wyoming letter writer said, in reference to Bill Clinton, "a liberal is nothing more than a socialist." /6
newspapers.com/clip/31635944/

To highlight the sisyphean nature of the task of pointing out how commonly the charge of socialism has been used, I'll link here to a thread, which links to _another_ thread on the topic. /7

https://twitter.com/LarryGlickman/status/1098194349878317061

In 2015, NR's Jonah Goldberg wrote, "The simple fact is that ever since progressives renamed — and misnamed — themselves `liberals,' what we call `liberalism' has been the respectable face of socialist ideology." /8
nationalreview.com/magazine/2015/…

It's not an accident that Goldberg repeated what the Wyoming letter writer, quoted above, said nearly 20 years earlier, which is not a surprise since a branch of conservative critics and many Republicans have conflated socialism and liberalism since the New Deal. /9

I'm not sure is there has been a time since NR was founded when the editors have not detected what Lowry calls here the "sweeping aggrandizements of government power on a scale not seen in this country since the New Deal." /10

The moment seems urgent now, but for anti-New Deal free enterprisers the moment has always been urgent. It's always been "5 minutes to midnight," to borrow a favored phrase from the 1950s. /11

This was precisely Lewis F. Powell, Jr.'s message in his 1971 "Confidential Memorandum" to the U.S. Chamber Commerce, when he worried that "business and the enterprise system are in deep trouble, and the hour is late.” /12

And the fear of what Lowry calls "aggrandizements of government power" was precisely how Barry Goldwater and other conservatives framed their opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. /13

Lowry may need his smelling salts now but his predecessors have felt the same sense of urgency and dread and have phrased their concerns in remarkably similar language. /14

A final point is that even though Lowry says that he thought we had "vanquished socialism" in 1989, conservatism and socialism have been discursively twinned and I don't think that conservatives can do without this enemy, even when they have had to conjure it. /15

Oh, and I found an uncannily accurate visual representation for these threads on socialism. /16