Why is everything "communist" to right-wingers?

[Rocknrule]

I hear them all the time labelling just about anyone to the left of Larry the Cable Guy as communist, socialist, etc. Why? Are they all really still stuck mentally in the Cold War era? I just don't get it.

[YOY]

1. You see...well...that is...um...how should I put it without mincing words?

THEY'RE FUCKING IDIOTS WHO'VE NEVER TAKEN A POLITICAL SCIENCE CLASS IN THEIR LIVES.

The world around them is changing and they cling to anything...usually some pundit who makes money off of them and tells them that it's ok to be afraid...and to hate what they are afraid of. They eschew listening to someone who is smarter than them (say...a college professor or some similar subject matter expert) out of bitterness and jealousy and our media lets them keep on believing things for fear of being labeled "liberal".

That and they seem to find anything that "threatens" their thinking to be some homosexual threat to their sexuality. I've been called "gay"/"fag" so many times by idiots on subject matter that had nothing to do with heterosexuality let alone "teh gay" that I bet our GLBT friends here can take me as a honorary/non-participant member out of solidarity or would at least laugh their asses off at my deadpan comeback..."not gay...but thanks for caring."

Sound about right?

[jobycom]

2. To them it means "Scary boogeyman."

Kind of like "corporate" means to some left-wingers.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

13. I'd note that there's one major difference here...

...even though I think the "corporatist" label applied by many here at DU is equally ridiculous. The difference is that communism and communists were more or less the avowed enemies of the United States for the better part of half a century, so that label has a lot more historical "evilness quotient" to most people than corporatist.

[Fumesucker]

14. So you're claiming that corporations have no influence in the USA?

I think that's more than a touch delusional.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

17. No I'm not.

I'm saying that "corporatist" is frequently and indiscriminately used as an epithet by certain intellectually lazy people to describe their enemies.

[Fumesucker]

46. We all use shorthand terms to describe or denote certain attitudes and certain people..

"Corporatist" is a term used by some to describe those who appear to support the further subjugation of our political and social life by those amoral and immortal entities who many of us think already have far too much influence in our society than is remotely good for us as a whole.

Edited for speling.

[HughBeaumont]

28. Yes, because I enjoy my universal health care and world-renowned social safety net.

And a military that only DEFENDS when it NEEDS to. And inexpensive college. And a cable media that actually reports news minus a partisan slant.

Oh wait, no I DON'T.

Still want to serve this lame canard?

[jobycom]

29. What?

My duck walks fine. Not sure what the rest of your post means, at all.

[HughBeaumont]

35. Of course you don't.

[jobycom]

37. Well I'm glad that's settled.

I like a person who has something to say and actually thinks they said it.

[HughBeaumont]

38. Save the snark.

The reason we have none of what I mentioned is because of corporate influence on legislation and government. It's not just a "scary bogeyman". Corporations and the wealthy are gumming up societal progress, laying off people by the hundreds of thousands (all because their quarterly profits slip 1 or 2 basis points), polluting without care, colluding with colleges to keep education more expensive and out of reach, and even after getting everything they want STILL expect the world to be handed to them on a silver platter. They're turning this nation into an international laughing stock.

[jobycom]

42. That rather supports my initial statement.

Which is that some on the left hurl around "corporate" as an insult they don't understand in the same way the right hurls around "communist." Both communism and corporations have been responsible for great evils in this world, but both are being used as slurs to attack anything the other side doesn't agree with, and that's of no use to anyone. The real enemy is ignorance, and that includes the ignorance both sides have of each other's real motivations. If we better understood that the other side is motivated more by a fear of a loss of their freedoms and of greater taxation, we might get somewhere. They are just as poor as many of us and are terrified of a tax increase that will push them under for the last time, the same way many of us are afraid that a lack of health care will have that effect. Communication rather than blind name calling is the solution.

The root of any problem we face is deeper than a legal organizational construction or an abstract polito-economic ideal.

[treestar]

43. Only some of them

Some corporations, believe it or not, just allow small businesses to operate.

You looking for something more along the lines of "Big Business."

[Kaleva]

3. Extremists see everyone else as a member of the opposite extreme.

To them, those that don't agree is either a Nazi or a communist.

[DesertFlower]

4. i was told by a facebook friend

that we liberals were ruining the country and that we should move russia.

needless to say he is no longer my "friend".

[Bucky]

12. Because he can't speak Russian?

Maybe you could ask Sarah Palin to tell you friend "hi" since she can probably see both of yall's houses from wherever she's at

[greennina]

5. Because they recognize better when they see it!

[MisterP]

6. James Burnham, Orwell, Koestler, and Arthur Schlesinger

successfully equated "left" with "Commie" and that with "Stalinist"; McCarthy's "liberal anticommunist" enablers and co-purgers made "leftist = anti-American"; the "extremes" were against the glorious, centrist consensus: in the 80s we were asked to support the impotent "democratic" death-squad puppet Napoleon Duarte "against extremists of left and right": in the 10s we have gibbering morons like Will Marshall and John Avlon defending the "vital center." They're what's wrong with America as much as a crowds chanting "kick their ass and take their gas!"

also, http://conelrad.com/index.php

[MercutioATC]

7. Because they're unimaginative.

Alternatively, because most of them are still fighting the cold war.

[hack89]

30. To be fair, the left has its fair share of unimaginative people

judging by the way "corporatist" and fascist are bandied about.

There's many that are also still fighting the cold war but from the other side - the reflective support of leftist dictators comes to mind.

[aquart]

8. It's the Nazi-Communist talk that pisses me off.

And don't tell me they don't do that a lot.

[JVS]

9. Because communists didn't put up with their bullshit!

[Juche]

10. You'd have to understand conservative ideology

Read up on the work of Erich Fromm or the paper 'political conservatism as motivated social cognition'.

The question is how do we use their personalities against them? They are basically scared children (filled with fear, rage, ignorance and intolerance). So how do we get them to self destruct instead of bringing the country down instead?

[xfundy]

11. Because we were all taught in school to hate communists

and socialists. Think back and remember.

I guess nowadays there's not so much indoctrination against communists, since that system has universally failed. Now, I imagine, kids are being taught to fear "libruls."

Hitler hated liberals too. Individuality and having one's own thoughts, and certainly, questioning authority, are dangerous to the controlling structure.

[Ozymanithrax]

15. It is a code word for everyhing we are not. It goes back to the mid 1800's.

It works pretty damn well, if history is proof.

[krispos42]

16. Because they're so far to the right, Hitler looks like a moderate n/t

[EFerrari]

19. LOL

End of thread.

[Azathoth]

18. Same reason everything to the right of Kucinich is "fascist corporatism" to left-wingers n/t

[whistler162]

40. +1

[Joe the Liberal]

20. Because their minds are stuck in the past......

they still remember the blissful days when their demigod Reagan was doing his best to keep America safe from those god awful boogeymen communists who hated everything we stand for. The right wing mind is not hard to understand, they always need to have someone or something to fear and hate, the latest boogeymen being "the terrorist".

[Union Yes]

21. Drones til the end of time. knr nt

[Union Yes]

22. BTW I take it as a compliment! =) nt

[apocalypsehow]

23. Because history has steadily moved all of Western Civ to the Left since 1688.

That's the short answer.

There have been pauses, interruptions, temporary throwbacks, long periods of stagnation, etc., since The Glorious Revolution, to be sure. But by and large, the tact of human history, at least in the "The West," has been steadily to the Left ever since William of Orange sailed into Torbay. He had no way of knowing it, but "King Billy" set in motion the events that for all practical purposes slit the metaphorical throat of the notion of "The Divine Right of Kings."

1776 & 1789 followed in short (historically considered) order. Then came Marx.

[Bucky]

26. Ironically, the Tea Partiers are playing the perfect dupes for the merchant class that started...

the Glorious Revolution. The financial revolution of the 1690s created the real economic power of the tories with their East India Company monopolies and privately financed public debts--all built around maintaining a state of almost constant warfare in the 18th Century (and then turning big profits on those wars). The Tea Party folks are supposedly the common folks who end up paying the taxes that give power and influence to the new commercial class (the EIC then and Wall Street now), and yet all their efforts only go to serve the interests of the big banks and financial institutions that will be better served by the Republicans than by the modest oversights of the Democrats.

[struggle4progress]

24. There's more than one ingredient here:

(1) Many Americans have essentially no political vocabulary. "Communist" and "socialist" are used interchangeably by the less-articulate conservatives simply as synonyms for whatever other negative emotion they want to express at the moment: "tyrannical" or "anti-democratic" of "un-American" or whatnot

(2) Chomsky decades ago indicated "communist" has been reliably used as a code word by the elite to mean "anti-corporate"

[Bucky]

25. Because it's easier than arguing. Besides, they might lose a straight up argument

It's the win-at-all-costs mentality of the right. They start from a never-spoken-of fear that they're wrong; that their ideas might not carry the day. But for someone who can't face the prospect of losing, such a thought is too terrible to deal with. So you get the first transaction of conservatism: fear ==> denial.

They deny the reality that they might be wrong more than anything else. A healthy skepticism of one's own views is the hallmark of a mature mind. But if they can't be wrong and those who disagree with them can't see this or be won over with the simple platitudes they exert (family values, pro-life politics, anti-union biases) then those who differ from them must be villainous. The second transaction of conservatism: resistance to conservatism is rooted in evil.

What is evil? It is all powerful, demonic, elite, sneering at you with contempt and a master plan its waiting to unleash. You can get more insight on this from "the Paranoid Style in American Politics" by Richard Hofstadter ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paranoid_Style_in_Amer... ). In the face of such all powerful, insincere evil, any means are needed. The third transaction is paranoia ==> justification for win at all costs

Finally, you have an opponent who must be defeated, who can't be reasoned with, and who secretly surrounds you with vast and intimidating resources at his beck and call. You saw this come out when the Republicans lost the last election. Southern Republicans announced they were surrounded by pagans. Tea partiers entertain delusions that white America is losing not just its power, but losing its own country to invaders. While logic dictates that Republicans make a hard play for Hispanic votes (politically it's very doable, actually), you keep having panicky Republican pols going batshit crazy on immigration issues in a way that socially alienate the growing Hispanic demographic (and in the process turned formerly red California into the bluest of blue states).

In some ways, they can't help themselves. They've become the Party of the Id. Like an undisciplined child, they lash out, they name call, they make illogical assertions in arguments and then refuse to be reasoned with. Current Republican Senate strategy is almost a text book example of anal retention (see also Gerald Keegan's discussion of the anal stage): the child unable to express his anxieties and fearing an inability to control events, compulsively withholds his bowel movements to retain parent attention (or as an ersatz adult hoards power and access in order to prevent losing that moment of being the center of attention and obsess on that moment of limited control of events).

Now you know why it's called the Tea Party "movement." They also obsess on ridiculous and phantastic details (birth certificates, death panels, black helicoptors) and seek to obstruct all progress on the public's agenda while themselves offering zero constuctive suggestions on how to fix national problems. The name Tea Party suggests an opposition to tax increases, only Obama has only introduced a tax cut in his fiscal program. They object to any number of proposals for fixing the jobless rate or the growing health care crisis or the financial and housing crises both these problems create, yet have no solutions to offer. The point isn't to solve the problem, but rather to redirect attention onto themselves.

So why do conservatives cry out "socialist" and then "communist" and then "nazi" rather than debate their issues on the merits? Because they don't want to debate. Debate leads to solutions, to compromises, to progress--to moving on from the current moment and into the unknown and scary future. But if you can halt all progress, stay in the moment there on the potty chair, holding mommy and daddy's attention while they encourage you "that's good baby, just give it a push, I know you can sweeties, oh, mommy's so proud of you", if they can retain that moment, they can stay in that moment of pure anticipation and gratification. It's like having a party and never having to clean up the mess.

[Dappleganger]

39. LOL @ Tea Party "movement"

Lot's of good insight in your post, but this one is a gem!

[HughBeaumont]

27. TEH RED MENUHCE! MARXISOCIALICOM'NISTS!!

FEEEEER IT!!!

Only thing I can come up with is that the younger Birchers are about as well conditioned as the Senior Bircher fascists. Either way, they're believing an overblown menace from a bygone era, and it's getting just about as silly and pathetic as the reasons to be against "teh geigh merrige" and universal health care.

[GreenMetalFlake]

31. Large Print propaganda of old for the authoritarian minded dies hard

[DailyGrind51]

32. Isn't that somewhat "retro"? I thought the new accusation was "Islamo-fascist"?

[tango-tee]

33. Because....

they're goddamn stupid, that's why. If stupidity hurt, they'd be howling in pain.

[pnorman]

34. The "intellectual peak" of many of those Teabaggers took place in early childhood.

"The boogieman is going to get you" was a great motivator then. No surprise, but it still is!

[Lucy Goosey]

36. Because the president is Black...

And race mixing is communism! To these people, Obama must seem like an incredibly visible reminder of everything they think has gone wrong in the US in the last 50 years.

[CanonRay]

41. It the John Birch Society roots

[Javaman]

44. Because to them, every problem looks like a nail. nt

[Odin2005]

45. Because they grew up during the Cold War.

They are the Right-Wing version of "Boomers stuck in the 70s".

[mmonk]

47. Because rightwing governments throughout the previous century

used it for political effect.