By Marc Jampole
An unstated but obvious unofficial policy of the New York Times is to undercut the
Democratic Party in news stories, even as it pretends to support virtually all
of the positions that Democrats hold in its editorials.
The game this year consists of using the heavily-charged
word “socialist” as much as possible to describe the more left-leaning
Democrats while playing up a supposed generational divide between more
progressive millennials and their centrist-leaning elders. As we will see, it’s
a completely false narrative meant to suppress the Democratic vote and drive
independents to hold their nose and vote for Trump’s-boot-licking Republicans.
(Begging the question: Is that “boot” or “bootie” to which servile GOP
candidates have placed their puckered lips.)
This Sunday’s Times
followed this false narrative to a tee. Both the front page lead story and the
lead story of the national news page focused exclusively on the divide between mainstream
Democrats and the charismatic Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other progressives
who have won primaries. Both articles stress that Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders
and others call themselves democratic socialists; sometimes the articles
sometimes drop the “democratic.”
The problem is the Times
never defines what a democratic socialist is and what democratic socialism
stands for.
“Socialism,” of course has long been a dirty word in the
United States invoking totalitarianism and complete social control to the
right-wing and to the many centrists brainwashed by decades of fear of the
Soviet Union’s corrupt and autocratic version of socialism. Right-wingers have
long labeled such government programs as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid
and food stamps as “socialist” in hopes of convincing the public that because
socialism was bad, so were these programs. They’ve labelled regulatory efforts
as socialist. Their arguments would fail miserably unless the public accepted
the premise that socialism was evil.
As
we have seen, all Democrats pretty much share the same basic views, especially
when contrasted with the Trumpublicans. The only way to conceal this underlying
unity, however, is not to mention or talk about issues, something that the Times news staff has proven itself quite
capable of doing.
Which of course, it’s not. Historically, socialism referred
to the government collectively owning and administering the means of production and
distribution of goods. But in the real world, there’s a vast continuum of
government intervention and control. Europe provides a number of models of democratic
socialism: governments addressing social challenges such as health care,
retirement and education; unions having a greater say in the management of companies
or in the development of national industrial policy; greater regulation of
businesses to protect the environment or consumers or set standards of
employment and wages. The European democracies, Japan, Canada, and—let’s face
it—even the United States all have mixed economies that graft various socialist
solutions onto private enterprise and the free market.
By
not getting into any of what constitutes democratic socialism, the Times let’s stand the decades of
fear-mongering rightwing demonization of the word “socialism.”
Moreover, the Times
attempts to exaggerate the differences between more centrist and more leftist
Democrats by never talking about what those differences are. The headline of
one of the articles says
“Democrats Are Bracing for a Progressive Storm Brewing Far to the Left.” The
articles quote a number of Democrats suggesting that extreme differences exist
between mainstream Democrats and the candidates subscribing to “hard-left
ideology.”
Yet in
the two articles, which stretch across more than two pages of text and
photographs, only three times does the Times
mention what position any Democrat has on any issue. A
phrase of text and a photo caption point out that Ben Jealous, running for
governor in Maryland, is in favor of single payer health care. The other
reference is this weird sentence referring to voters in Republican districts: “Across most
of the approximately 60 Republican-held districts that Democrats are
contesting, primary voters have chosen candidates who seem to embody change —
many of them women and minorities — but who have not necessarily endorsed
positions like single-payer health care and abolishing the Immigration and
Customs Enforcement Agency.” The
only way to understand that sentence in the context of the article is to assume
that single-payer and a desire to dismantle ICE are extremist positions with
which mainstream Dems disagree.
The Times never
mentions what the differences between the “far left” and the rest of the party
are, never does an issue-by-issue comparison. And there’s a good reason for it.
There are few real differences, and those that exist are quibbles, at best. While I’m quite confident that large numbers
of Democrats do not want to see ICE abolished, virtually all want to see it
reformed. Surveys suggest that most Dems like the single-payer concept when
presented to them as “Medicare for all.”
Now let’s look at the large number of issues that the Times doesn’t mention. Surveys tell us
that that virtually all Democrats:
·
Want to raise the minimum wage. The quibble in
the past election cycle was that Bernie wanted to raise it to $15 right away,
whereas Hillary wanted to do so over a period of time.
·
Want more government support of public
education, especially higher education.
·
Think the tax package passed late last year was
a giveaway to the rich and want to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations.
·
Want to give the Dreamers a path to citizenship
and help refugees seeking asylum in the United States.
·
Are against the dismantling of regulations that
protect the environment and consumers.
·
Support a woman’s right to an abortion and fear
that Roe v. Wade may be overturned.
·
Support the Mueller investigation and want to
prosecute any American who collaborated with the Russians to fix the election
in favor of any candidate.
Most of all, virtually every Democrat wants to rein in Donald
Trump by electing a Congress that is not afraid to overrule his actions with
legislation and make certain that his appointees are competent and not
irrational ideologues or thieving cronies.
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