In a recent interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Kamala Harris framed her opposition to the increasingly authoritarian direction of the Trump administration in an interesting and notable way. See for yourself.
Lest anyone think this is simply a case of a politician flying fast and loose with her rhetoric, Harris’s comment actually reflects a quite longstanding tick of centrists and liberals in the Trump era. I think, for example, of how Joy Reid — one of the most watched and influential liberal commentators on cable back in 2016 — repeatedly sought to draw a connection between Trump and the non-existent menace of Russian communism. I think of Cass Sunstein, a widely respected Harvard law professor and former Obama administration advisor, asserting that alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election hailed from a Marxist lineage, and further that Trump seeks to “heighten the contradictions” by “trying to provoke unrest and discontent.” (Facebook bots, in this telling, are a vintage Soviet tactic and Donald Trump is Lenin. Got it?)
These days, this particular centrist tick seems to be enjoying something of a renaissance. In an excellent piece on Harris’s comments for Jacobin, my friend Ben Burgis noted another high profile liberal politician who has recently taken up a similar line. Here, not to be outdone, the perpetually triangulating Gavin Newsom adds his own, very special spin:
In his appearance on the Pivot podcast, Newsom responded to host Kara Swisher’s question about Mamdani by bringing up Trump’s deal with Intel, whereby the government agreed to buy almost 10 percent of the company’s stock. Mamdani and Trump, the governor suggested, weren’t so different. Newsom said it “sounds like Trump’s been paying a lot of attention to” Mamdani, given Trump’s “desire to socialize great American companies.” Just like Mamdani wants to start a few municipally owned grocery stores in New York, Trump wants to do something similar, Newsom contended, through public ownership of a slice of Intel. According to Newsom, it’s “just perverse” that someone like Mamdani could be “shaping the Democratic Party in the context of the socialist brand” when Democrats should be pointing out every day that Trump “is the leading nationalist and socialist of our time.”
Ridiculous though they might be, I think Newsom’s comments are remarkably clarifying — in effect, completing the horseshoe logic that has always lay behind the liberal “Trump = communism” formula. The implication here, whether subtly implied or explicitly stated, is that the left and Trumpism are somehow synonymous. Thus, in one fell swoop, Trump is deemed a “communist” authoritarian and leftist critics of the Democratic mainstream are lumped in with him.1
It’s a useful move if happen to be a corporate-friendly liberal politician like Newsom or Harris, and there are obvious reasons it gets used so often. The left/liberal divide in the Democratic Party is often framed as a “disagreement” about the likes of policy and ideology. In a sense it is, but the real reason a figure like Gavin Newsom objects to an idea like publicly-owned grocery stores — and, by extension, any form of social democracy or democratic socialism — is that it works directly against the kinds of organized donor interests he represents (and heavily relies on for campaign funds).
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