This is very good analysis but my guess is that the GOP will continue to employ the “socialism” charge, as Jeb Bush’s son did the other day when he said that Trump is “the only thing standing between America and socialism.”/1
Although Trump had been using the socialist charge increasingly since his 2019 SOTU, when he said, “America will never be socialist,” the charge was less central to his 2016 campaign than it had been to most previous GOP presidential campaigns./2
I explain why in the epilogue to my book, “Free Enterprise: An American History.” Trump has never embraced a key part of free enterprise discourse, namely the association of free markets with freedom, upon which the freedom/socialism binary was built./3
yalebooks.yale.edu/book/978030023…
yalebooks.yale.edu/book/978030023…
This put Trump somewhat at odds with many GOP elected officials, like Tom Emmer, the chair of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, who regularly employs the socialism/freedom binary. /4
foxnews.com/opinion/nrcc-c…
foxnews.com/opinion/nrcc-c…
The “socialism” charge has been used against even moderate Democrats and I expect it will be employed against Biden, as it was against Bill Clinton. It is a rhetorical pattern that has been central to the GOP since the New Deal as @imillhiser showed./5
archive.thinkprogress.org/a-history-of-r…
archive.thinkprogress.org/a-history-of-r…
The reason for this, as I show in my book, is that very often the real target of the socialism charge has been Rooseveltian liberalism and the New Deal order that it underwrote. Subsequent efforts to expand the welfare state, however mild or limited, got the same treatment. /6
Take, for example, “Ronnie” Reagan’s 1960 letter to Richard Nixon in which he wrote of John F. Kennedy, “under the tousled boyish haircut is still old Karl Marx....There is nothing new in the idea of Government being Big Brother to us all.” /7 
