By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist

Donald Trump has been using an ugly word to describe Vice President Kamala
Harris. No, I don’t mean privately calling her the B-word, although he
reportedly does. I mean “communist,” an insult echoed by some of his allies. For
example, Elon Musk, in a post on X, declared “Kamala is quite literally a
communist,” demonstrating, among other things, that he quite literally doesn’t
know the meaning of “literally.”

Now, Harris obviously isn’t a communist. So why does Trump say that she is?
Well, redbaiting, like race-baiting — which Trump also does when it comes to
Harris — is very much part of the American political tradition. For example,
early in his political career, Ronald Reagan was a part of Operation Coffee Cup,
an effort to convince voters that government health insurance, in the form of
Medicare, would destroy American freedom.

It’s also true that American political discourse lacks a widely accepted term
for people who don’t believe that the government should control the means of
production but who do believe that we should have policies to limit economic
inequality and prevent avoidable hardship. To find such a term you need to go to
European countries in which it was important to distinguish between parties
supporting a strong social safety net and Communist parties, which weren’t at
all the same thing. In these countries, politicians like Harris, who supports a
free-market economy with a robust social safety net, are known as social democrats.

The thing is, social democracy isn’t a radical position. On the contrary, it has
been the norm for generations in all wealthy nations, our own included.

True, America’s social safety net is less comprehensive than those in Western
Europe. Even so, we have a universal retirement system, Social Security, and
universal health care for seniors, Medicare. Medicaid, which provides health
care to lower-income Americans, covers around 75 million people. About seven
million are covered by CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program. The
Affordable Care Act subsidizes health care for millions more. And so on.
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Furthermore, these programs have overwhelming public support. At least
three-quarters of registered voters have a favorable view of Social Security,
Medicare and Medicaid. The A.C.A. was unpopular when enacted but now has 60
percent approval.

If you believe that the government shouldn’t be supporting seniors and paying
for many Americans’ health care, that’s a philosophically defensible position.
And there are certainly activists on the political right who consider just about
the whole expansion of government’s role since the New Deal illegitimate. But
they have very little support outside their ideological bubble.

Even Friedrich Hayek, whom libertarians have adopted as their intellectual
patron saint, conceded that there is no reason “why the state should not help to
organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those
common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision.”

Which brings us back to Harris. She’s a social democrat who favors government
programs that mitigate the harshness of a market economy — but so are almost all
Democrats, most Americans and, whether they realize it or not, many Republicans.
She wants to expand the social safety net, especially for families with
children, but the suite of policies she supports wouldn’t represent a
fundamental change in the role of government. She has in the past called for
single-payer health care, but has since backed off that position; and if you
think a single-payer system is a radical, un-American idea, what do you think
Medicare is?

So where does this Kamala-the-communist stuff come from? It could be that
Republicans believe they can convince voters that a moderately center-left
Democrat who is a former prosecutor is a communist because she’s a Black woman —
a twist, perhaps, on the “welfare queen” trope of another era.

But it may be less calculating than that. To all appearances, the Trump campaign
has been caught flat-footed, first by President Biden’s withdrawal from the
race, then by the surge of Democratic enthusiasm and Harris’s unexpected
effectiveness as a campaigner.

Even negative public perceptions of the economy, which have been Trump’s ace in
the hole, seem to be evaporating as a political force. A New York Times/Siena
College battlegrounds poll released in May gave Trump a 20-point advantage over
Biden on the economy; that advantage was down to six points over Harris in the
latest Times/Siena poll of three battleground states. A new poll by The
Financial Times shows Harris slightly ahead on the issue nationally.

Trump and MAGA seem to be responding by throwing lots of stuff at the wall and
hoping some of it sticks.

However, the kind of character attacks that worked against Hillary Clinton and,
in a different way, against Biden don’t seem to be gaining traction. I almost
felt sorry for the Fox News host Jesse Watters, who tried to attack Harris by
saying: “She likes wine. She likes food. She likes to dance.” This is supposed
to make voters dislike her?

So since nothing else seems to be working, hey, why not call her a communist?

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/12/opinion/harris-trump-communist.html

Trump is such a fucking idiot. He doesn't know anything.

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Every Republiscum/QAnon accusation is in fact a confession