This isn't a new phenomenon: A brief, 90-year history of Republicans calling Democrats 'socialists'
https://thinkprogress.org/a-history-of-republicans-calling-democrats-socialists-777bcd2b7a6d/
A brief, 90-year history of Republicans calling Democrats 'socialists'
This isn't a new phenomenon.
This is not the first time, and it won't be the last, that the Republican Party tried to associate its opponents with socialism — the belief that the government should take control of the means of production. President Donald Trump used his recent State of the Union address to claim that "here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country." Vice President Mike Pence told the Conservative Political Action Conference last weekend that "America will never be a socialist country." Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, in an opinion piece that could win Pulitzer Prize for its outstanding contribution to the field of false choices, writes that America "needs strong borders — not socialism."
To be fair, the lines between "socialism" and other forms of government are often blurred. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), for example, sometimes describes himself as a "socialist," despite the fact that he does not advocate public ownership of the entire productive sector.
Nevertheless, the GOP has a long history of making facile comparisons between ordinary Democratic policy proposals and "socialism" — a history that predates Sanders by generations. Indeed, the socialism smear even predates our modern-day political coalitions, with the Republican Party commonly understood as the economically conservative party and the Democrats as economic moderates and liberals.
The socialism smear shaped the modern GOP. The idea built its coalition, defined many of its objections to the Democratic alternative, and helped form the partisan divide that is so familiar today. The socialism smear targeted the New Deal. It was Ronald Reagan's weapon against Medicare, Newt Gingrich's weapon against "Hillarycare," and the entire GOP's weapon against Obamacare.
And no matter what policies the next Democratic presidential nominee supports in 2020, that nominee will be labeled a "socialist."
The American Liberty League
America's political coalitions looked very different on the eve of the Great Depression than they do today. The Democratic Party would go on to produce President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but it also incubated men like Justice James Clark McReynolds, a notorious bigot who consistently ruled against the New Deal. The Republican Party gave us President Theodore Roosevelt, with his trust-busting, pure food regulation, and conservationism. But it also gave us President Calvin Coolidge, who once claimed that "collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery."
Indeed, for much of his presidency, FDR's most strident foes were not Republicans but conservative Democrats. While feeling abandoned by the party of the New Deal, they had not yet formed a new identity as Republicans. These men, who included two former Democratic presidential candidates and some of the wealthiest businessmen in the nation, formed an organization called the American Liberty League. At its peak, the group even rivaled the Republican Party itself as the locus of American conservatism.
Though the League failed in its primary goal of denying FDR a second term, it formed a bridge that led many of the nation's most fortunate sons away from the Democratic Party — all the while denouncing the Democratic president's agenda as socialism.
The League's origin story reads like a liberal fever dream about the early days of the Tea Party. "Five negroes on my place in South Carolina refused work this spring," a former DuPont executive named Ruly Carpenter wrote a former colleague in 1934, "and a cook on my houseboat in Fort Myers quit because the government was paying him a dollar an hour as a painter." The recipient of this letter, a current DuPont executive and former chairman of the Democratic Party named John Raskob, wrote back to suggest a course of action.
"You haven't much to do," Raskob wrote to his retired friend, "and I know of no one that could better take the lead in trying to induce the DuPont and General Motors groups, followed by other big industries, to definitely organize to protect society from the sufferings it is bound to endure if we allow communistic elements to lead the people to believe that all businessmen are crooks."
Raskob was correct about his friend's abilities, for Carpenter wasn't just a former DuPont executive. He was a member of the du Pont family by marriage and the brother-in-law of two of the wealthiest men in the nation, Pierre and Irénée du Pont. At Carpenter's urging, the two chemical barons convened a group of their fellow captains of industry to form a "property holder's association" to work to defeat the New Deal. The American Liberty League was born.