Opinion by Paul Krugman on Aug. 12, 2024.

Paul Krugman

Opinion

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.”

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Now, Harris obviously isn’t a communist. So why does Trump say that she is? Well, red-baiting, 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.

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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 7 million are covered by CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program. The Affordable Care Act subsidizes health care for millions more. And so on.

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 ACA was unpopular when enacted but now has 60% 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.”

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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 Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race, then by the surge of Democratic enthusiasm and Harris’ unexpected effectiveness as a campaigner.

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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 6 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 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?

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Paul Krugman/Doug Mills
c.2024 The New York Times Company