Why does nearly every article about the GA Senate race start with the Republicans groundless charged about the “extreme socialism” of the Democratic candidates? And why is the not only real but self-proclaimed extremism of the GOP never mentioned? /1 nytimes.com/2020/12/30/us/…
I provided a brief history of the socialism charge from the New Deal to the present in this @DissentMag article and have more to say about it in my book, FREE ENTERPRISE: AMERICAN HISTORY./2

dissentmagazine.org/online_article…
Here is a passage from the introduction about the “slippery slope from reform to totalitarianism” that was central to the anti-New Deal playbook and to all subsequent reform efforts. /3
And here is my recent @washingtonpost piece about how poorly such predictions of doom have fared, with a special focus on Ronald Reagan’s laughably bad (bit still widely-quoted) prediction about how Medicare would destroy freedom./4

washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/0…
Meanwhile, Kelly Loeffler proudly says she is “more conservative than Attila the Hun.” Yet for some reason the lede seems always to be the GOP charge that Democrats are extremists, rather than her admission of extremism./5

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More from @LarryGlickman

21 Dec 20
In FREE ENTERPRISE, I discuss a group that condemned advocates of a robust welfare state as daydreamers who promised "something for nothing." Yet these people, who, like Paul, depicted themselves as hard-headed realists, posited the miraculous, faith-based nature of free markets.
Paul’s critique, founded upon a kind of inverted producerism, has a long genealogy.
In 1950, Robert Bremen’s noted the “semantic somersault” of the phrase “something for nothing”: it had become “a missile by the spokesman of big business and political conservativism to hurl at what they called the ‘gimme’ attitude of the common folk toward government.”
Read 5 tweets
11 Nov 20
I disagree that Trump ran as an "economic populist" in 2016. He called for tax cuts for the rich, opposed increasing the minimum wage (@PeterBeinart says otherwise), & called for eliminating health care for millions. The populism was purely performative.
nybooks.com/daily/2020/11/…
Here's a good @washingtonpost roundup on Trump's minimum wage claims during the 2016 campaign. /2
washingtonpost.com/news/fact-chec…
Trump said a bunch of bs stuff about how his taxes would go up, but his proposed plan made clear that it benefitted the wealthy, that it was a typical Republican plan./3
taxfoundation.org/details-analys…
Read 10 tweets
26 Oct 20
The irony of the 60 Minutes interviews is that Biden faced much tougher questions. They asked him, and not the guy who recently bragged about acing a dementia test, whether he was senile. They asked him, and not the guy who just got out of the hospital, about his health. /1
When Trump couldn’t name a policy priority, rather than zeroing in on his inability to do so, Stahl changed the subject to “Who is our biggest foreign adversary?” Other than COVID, she didn’t ask him to defend or explain any of his policies or about his personal tax avoidance./3
To be fair, Stahl had more questions that she didn’t get to ask because he walked out early, but there was nothing about his threats to free and fair elections, about about kids in cages, or about tax cuts for the rich, about corruption in his administration, or climate change./3
Read 9 tweets
24 Oct 20
This piece is incredibly credulous about Trump's approach to the economy and in accepting the myth that, prior to Trump, the GOP embraced "sacred verities about government debt." nytimes.com/2020/10/24/bus…
First, the record over the last forty years makes it patently obviously that the GOP only embraces these "sacred verities" when a Democrat holds the presidency. /2
It quotes an AIE economist saying that Trump has "completely moved the Republican Party away from reducing Social Security and Medicare spending" but not Trump's own claim that he would consider cuts to Social Security and Medicare in his second term./3
vox.com/2020/3/6/21168…
Read 16 tweets
18 Oct 20
One problem with this article is that it does not explore the long history of the term "white supremacy," which arose in the Jim Crow and was proudly and frequently used by white politicians and other thought leaders. /1
nytimes.com/2020/10/17/us/…
The people who first embraced it were not critics but self-defined white supremacists, as in this claim by Georgia Senator A. O. Bacon in 1904. /2
At the Alabama Constitutional Convention of 1901, the attendees, who bragged "there is not a representative of the negro race among its one hundred and fifty members," framed the Civil War/Reconstruction era as a time of "negro supremacy." /3
newspapers.com/clip/61348423/
Read 11 tweets
8 Oct 20
Lee's statement that "we are not a democracy" has a long genealogy on the American right, and is not that different from what others have said recently. /1
Remember that in 2016, Trump economic advisor, Stephen Moore, said, "I'm not even a big believer in democracy." /2
theintercept.com/2016/08/09/cap…
As Lisa McGirr shows in the "Preface to the New Edition" of her classic study of conservatism, Suburban Warriors, such statements are not uncommon. In 2014, Tea Party Rep. Fred Yoho confessed to "radical ideas of democracy" by limiting voting rights to property owners (p. xxi) /3
Read 9 tweets

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