What do Pol Pot, Chairman Mao and Martha Stewart have in common?
Well, they’re not on a new show hosted by Snoop Dogg, and they aren’t starting an indoor soccer league with Phil Spector and Andy Dick. No, but they are in the same boat because they’ve all been compared to the architects of the Green New Deal.
When U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) released the overarching plan for the Green New Deal last week, the response was swift, with a generous mix of cautious enthusiasm, skepticism and total vitriol.
All of it was a bit premature. The plan was filed as a nonbinding resolution, meaning it’s largely symbolic (and enormously nonbinding).
All the same, conservative writers jumped to denounce the Green New Deal as a harbinger of communism.
Fox News neatly labels its posts about the Green New Deal with the tag “socialism.” The posts get the tag even when the text doesn’t mention socialism by name or if the writer brings up dictators who were communists, not socialists.
Still, they aren’t the same thing. Here’s one way of picturing them, even if it’s a little oversimplified.
In capitalist systems, people, not the government, control the economy through things like owning businesses, property and the production and sale of goods and services. In communist systems, the government controls the economy.
Things get confusing when you bring in socialism, which exists somewhere between capitalism and communism. Marxist theory views socialism as one step away from capitalism and a step closer toward the inevitability of a communist system. It’s more complicated than that, though, because communism isn’t inevitable. Many governments that implement socialist programs don’t ever actually become communist countries.
In other words, socialist countries aren’t necessarily destined to become communist. The United States, for example, has a capitalist economy with socialist programs, like social security, a program with broad American support and New Deal origins.
Socialist theory views capitalism as an economic system that creates inequality, and reducing that inequality is its priority. How that’s actually done is another complicated thing, but it’s possible for a country to have a democratic government with a capitalist economy and some socialist programs, like the United States.
I bring up these distinctions that are best hashed out on an uncut episode of “The Good Place” because some conservative writers are equating the Green New Deal with the work of Communist dictators who had a penchant for murdering their own people.
In an opinion piece for conservative newspaper The Washington Times, Fox News contributor Tammy Bruce called the Green New Deal a hoax, with language “vague enough to be modeled on Pol Pot or Chairman Mao Zedong or maybe just Martha Stewart.”
Bruce somehow slipped in that Democrats are working “to legitimize infanticide” (they aren’t), and concluded, “Now the same leftists trust you won’t ask for specifics as they plan the next round of wrecking your life.”
Bruce made that hyperbole, that this is a life-wrecking agenda, but she also said the Green New Deal isn’t a serious plan. So, we’re expected to believe that these frivolous ideas can also turn our lives into a living hell.
Former Microsoft executive Mark Penn made the same logical flourish in an opinion piece for Fox News. He said the New Green Deal is a “nifty piece of marketing,” but not a serious plan. And finding the plan to be completely ineffective didn’t stop Penn from claiming the New Green Deal has more in common with China’s Cultural Revolution than the New Deal.
To compare a resolution that is literally nonbinding to the Cultural Revolution is some bold nonsense. As head of the Communist Party of China, Mao Zedong was responsible for the violent Cultural Revolution. Historians aren’t sure how many people died during that era, but they estimate the toll could be anywhere from 500,000 to 8 million people. Schools were closed, young people were forced to move to rural areas and many who opposed the regime were persecuted or killed.
As for Pol Pot, he led a Communist regime responsible for the deaths of more than 1 million Cambodians. Martha Stewart served a brief sentence for white-collar crimes, but she has a lot of catching up to do if she wants to be the next Pol Pot.
All this fervor against the Green New Deal isn’t quite the same reception that the Depression-era New Deal got when it was introduced. In his 1964 Pulitzer-winning book “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” Richard Hofstadter wrote that the New Deal had most Americans’ support, but a minority opposed it “with a feverish hostility rarely seen in American politics.” Among the New Deal’s opponents were American communists, who Hofstadter wrote were against the New Deal until 1935.
However, most longstanding New Deal critics weren’t communists, not by a long shot. Hofstadter suggested hatred for the New Deal and President Franklin D. Roosevelt united McCarthyism supporters, who were also repulsed by communism, socialism, liberals and the idea of a welfare state.
That period was plagued by a wide net of accusations, many against people who had never been communists. To Joseph McCarthy’s supporters, Hofstadter wrote, “his bullying was welcomed because it satisfied a craving for revenge and a desire to discredit the type of leadership the New Deal had made prominent.”
No one today is filling in for McCarthy, but blustery language that may seem laughably beyond the pale is dangerous nonetheless.
Contact Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@bigiftrue.org. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
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