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Lawrence Glickman Profile picture
@LarryGlickman
Aug 12, 2020 • 8 tweets • 3 min read • Read on X
The GOP playbook since the New Deal has been to label pretty much every Democratic presidential candidate a "socialist," no matter how ridiculous the charge. /1
I'll remind everybody that President Ronald Reagan in 1988 called the centrist Dukakis/Bentsen ticket as "far-out left" and "liberal, liberal, liberal." /2
upi.com/Archives/1988/…
In 1994, Jeffrey Hart called Bill Clinton both a "liberal thug" and a "socialist." /3
newspapers.com/clip/31635837/…
In 1996, a letter writer to the Caspar Star-Tribune said, in reference to Bill Clinton, that "a liberal is nothing more than a socialist."/4
newspapers.com/clip/31635944/…
Another letter writer in 1992 said that Bill and Hillary Clinton were "lifelong and tireless socialist ideologues" who "must be stopped before they push us into total socialism."/5
newspapers.com/clip/54114951/…
In spite of this history, there tends to be surprise when the charge is (very predictably) revived. For example, this 2012 article expressed surprise about the GOP's "new boogeyman" of calling Obama a "socialist."/6 newspapers.com/clip/28639872/…
In my book FREE ENTERPRISE, I show how central the freedom/socialism binary was to the critics of the New Deal and and how often they conflating the latter with New Deal liberalism./7
yalebooks.yale.edu/book/978030023…
Nixon was already reproducing a tried-and-true formula in 1949 when he framed his forthcoming Senate campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas as a "choice between freedom and state socialism" and denounced the Fair Deal as "the same old socialist boloney."/8
newspapers.com/clip/44108769/…

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More from @LarryGlickman

Lawrence Glickman Profile picture
Oct 5, 2023
One important point missing from the discourse about Steve Scalise calling himself ‘David Duke without the baggage,’ is that, when he used the label, this was already a viable political lane, one used to describe other politicians, before Scalise. /1
theguardian.com/us-news/2023/o…
In 1990, the Alexandria Town Talk used the phrase "David Duke without the baggage" to describe a winning political formula in Louisiana politics. /2 Image
In 1991, U.S. Rep. Clyde Holloway, seeking to advance in the Governor's race, said he was "a great alternative to David Duke, without all the baggage."/3 Image
Read 6 tweets
Lawrence Glickman Profile picture
Sep 28, 2023
A central fact is that, in the midst of a UAW strike, Trump spoke last night at a nonunion factory. Yet the @nytimes mentions this only at the end of the 6th paragraph and the @washingtonpost brings it up in only the 19th paragraph. These are failures of framing./1
It seems disingenuous for the Times subhed to claim that both Trump and Biden spoke to people "affected by the United Automobile Workers strike," without mentioning at the outset that only one of them spoke directly to striking workers. /2
nytimes.com/2023/09/28/us/…
Similarly, for the Post headline to be that Trump "demands union votes" without mentioning at the outset that he did so at a nonunion factory strikes me as somewhat misleading./3
washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/…
Read 6 tweets
Lawrence Glickman Profile picture
Mar 27, 2023
A few comments on this piece, which makes some good points but also imo mischaracterizes key issues. /1 nytimes.com/2023/03/27/bri…
To say, "Today’s left is less...patriotic than the country as a whole and less concerned about crime and border security," is to take the conservative critique of "the left" as accurate rather than the perspective of those who self-define that way./2
In contrast, this summation of the pre-Trump Republican Party accepts their self-description: "Republicans were mostly comfortable pushing for lower taxes and smaller government (other than the military)."/3
Read 7 tweets
Lawrence Glickman Profile picture
Mar 17, 2023
No doubt, GOP rhetoric in 2024 is "dark," perhaps unprecedentedly so, but this piece understates the continuity in the apocalyptic style in conservative political speech./1
washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/…
There's not much "sanguine optimism," in Ronald Reagan's fearmongering 1961 anti-Medicare speech, which ends with his claim that "you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children... what it once was like in America when men were free."/2
americanrhetoric.com/speeches/ronal…
Here's a thread I did last year on a NY Times article that posited a similar discontinuity./3
Read 4 tweets
Lawrence Glickman Profile picture
Mar 10, 2023
Republican claims of being angry--visceral or otherwise--is often reported as being newsworthy in itself, in a way that it is not for other groups in society.
One of the modes of elite victimization is to take claims of anger among the powerful to be a self-justifying force, rather than to address the question of what justifies that anger. /2
A good question to ask is why are they angry about the enforcement of the law--in this case ensuring that the wealthy actually pay the taxes they owe?/3
Read 8 tweets
Lawrence Glickman Profile picture
Mar 8, 2023
I'm not sure I agree with George Packer that focusing on "terrible subjects" necessarily produces "fatalism" or "shame."/1
"Punctured myths make us better students of history, but they leave nothing to live up to. Shame is a shaky foundation for any project of renewal." I'm not sure why the first claim necessarily follows or why history should necessarily promote a "project of renewal." /2
Moreover, I don't think that the history of "terrible subjects" is necessarily based on a model of producing feelings of "shame." /3
Read 6 tweets

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