In the March 8 New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg makes an interesting throwaway observation in the course of discussing the Republican disinformation campaign that has labeled Obama's health-care effort as "socialist":
The Democrats' bill more closely resembles Richard Nixon's health-care proposal—the one that Ted Kennedy went to his grave regretting he hadn't embraced—than it does Bill Clinton's, to say nothing of Harry Truman's. [full article]
It's clear that politicians who bloviate about the dangers of socialism in this country are either ignorant or lying. Do you think that when a smart guy like Newt Gingrich calls 1984 an argument against socialism, he doesn't know Orwell was himself a radical socialist? Do you think that when Jim DeMint calls "discredited socialist policies" the "enemy of freedom for centuries all over the world," he doesn't know that Europe and Canada are not exactly collapsing into anarchy and ruin as he speaks?
No, they're not ignorant. What they're doing is putting Orwell to use in a different way—deploying careful buzzwords—socialism, totalitarianism, 1984, Big Brother—that have become freighted with decades of fear-inducing associations, words that slice through rational processing and detonate like smart bombs in the reptile brain.
The worst indictment of socialist ideas I can think of is that our equitable, cooperative, socialist education system has so completely failed to instill in us the ability to see through all this doublespeak.
