Austin Sarat
Melat Kiros, Darializa Avila Chevalier, Brad Lander and Claire Valdez, are hardly household names. But if President Trump and his MAGA allies have their way they will soon be.
Kiros who won the Democratic nomination for Congress and the other three who prevailed in Democratic congressional primaries in New York are all Democratic Socialists and to hear what the president says, their victories signal the takeover of the party by “communists.” Others in the Republican Party are amplifying that message in the hope of making the Democratic brand even more toxic than it already is.
We have seen this playbook before. First, they targeted Nancy Pelosi, former Democratic House Speaker from San Francisco. Then it was the Squad, a group of four young Democratic women in the House of Representatives (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI)) who pushed progressive policies like the so-called Green New Deal.
In each case, they were used as convenient stand-ins in a demagogic campaign to frighten voters into believing that the election of Democrats threatens the American Way of Life. Now it is Kiros and the other Democratic Socialists turn to play that role.
And surprisingly, some voices in the Democratic Party are saying similar things.They are latter-day Paul Revere’s sounding the alarm: “The Communists Are Coming.”
Centrist Democrats may not like what happened in New York or Colorado but demonizing the victors gives the president more fuel and will further damage the Democratic brand for everyone in the party. Instead of sounding like letter-day Paul Revere’s sounding the alarm, “the communists are coming,” they should focus on policy differences.
Fight about support for Israel, or universal child care, or a higher minimum wage, but don’t use those differences to scapegoat others in their party. Democrats can ill afford mutual destruction.
Almost as soon as the Colorado results were released, Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert said that she was concerned that it would become “the epicenter of socialism and communism.” She also crowed that Kiros’ victory would be a “gift to Republicans.”
Her sentiments were echoed by the Republican National Committee which issued a statement: “Tonight’s Democrat primary results across Colorado confirm that the socialist takeover of the Democrat Party isn’t confined to New York City or deep-blue enclaves. It’s spreading into the very battlegrounds that will decide control of Congress.”
Recall that last Thursday, following the New president claimed last Thursday following the New York results, the Communists “are finally making their move. I’ve been waiting and preparing for this for a long time…It’s easy to be a Communist — All you have to do is say, ‘I’ll give you everything,’ but that means you’re taking it away from others that have earned.”
The American people should not be fooled. Democratic Socialists, are a long way from totalitarian Communists.
As Time explains, “(D)emocratic socialism generally favors New Deal-style programs, believing that government is a force for good in people’s lives and that a large European-style welfare state can exist in a capitalist society.”
Unlike Communists, who advocated a violent overthrow of capitalism and the governmental structures which supported it, people like Kiros want to work “’within the system through legal and peaceful means [such as] electoral and social movements’…(D)emocratic socialists believe in democracy, while communist forms of government are not democracies.”
Nonetheless, the same day the president issued his warning about Communists making their move, thirteen Democratic members of the House of Representatives joined in his fear mongering when they signed on to the “Promise to America.”
It says that Democratic centrists are for “acceptance, respect, free expression, and democratic pluralism. We embrace a politics of persuasion over purity, contempt, and cultural division.” They should know better. Democratic Socialists do not threaten “Acceptance, respect, free expression, and democratic pluralism.”
They do not as Trump insists, “ want to completely destroy the traditional American way of life….”
Such statements are not surprising, coming from President Trump, who has a long history of red-baiting. However, Centrist Democrats are only shooting themselves in the foot by doing likewise.
But that is what they seem determined to do. One of them, Rep. Josh Gottheimer (who signed onto the Promise to America), has accused Democratic Socialists of supporting , “Tax raising, job killing policies like defunding the police. Shuttering the prisons, massive, unfunded spending increases, and even government-run grocery stores…”
Their policies, he added in Trumpian hyperbole, “are radically at odds with both the Democratic Party and American values,” Gottheimer warned that socialism would “tear down…America.”
Do Kiros and other Democratic Socialists want the state to control the means of production, or end freedom of the press, or religion, free elections, or “tear down America”? No, they do not.
One can debate whether taking steps to make the distribution of wealth fairer or to make the conditions of life easier for working Americans is sound policy, but it is a long way from threatening the American way of life or from Communism. But Democrats of all stripes should remember the lessons of history; red-baiting, wherever it comes from, is fearmongering in the service of authoritarianism.
Austin D. Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. He is an internationally renowned scholar whose interdisciplinary work examines law in relation to culture, violence, and the liberal arts. His academic foundation includes a B.A. from Providence College (1969), an M.A. (1970) and Ph.D. (1973) from the University of Wisconsin, and a J.D. from Yale Law School (1988). He has also received honorary degrees, including an LL.D. from Providence College (2008) and an A.M. from Amherst College (1984). Sarat has also been awarded the Jeffrey B. Ferguson Memorial Teaching Prize at Amherst in 2022 and the Ronald Pipkin Service Award as well as many others
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