I've spilled a lot of digital ink defending Trump from the fascist label. One, because he's not. Two, because it cheapens the word fascist. Three, (most important to me), because it ramps up the political climate and creates space for people to justify unethical or harmful methods to defeat him. I think it's undeniable that we've seen that harm over the last 8 years.
But I've personally been pretty much immune to the communist label my whole life. That's probably because I thought the people making the accusation stupid or I had a soft spot in my heart for communism--because I thought its failures a result of the particular circumstances (stop trying it in peasant societies so close to feudalism! Read your Marx!), because I thought it was championed by people with good hearts, and because the ultimate utopian goals appealed to me and I thought them possible. I've become more educated and now mostly disavow those apologetics.
So now, I think it's important to remind everyone that referring to Harris and Walz and their vision as communist is wrong--as wrong as labeling Trump a fascist. Neither Harris nor Walz is, or has, called for nationalizing large swaths of industry, let alone abolishing private property. Neither is calling for a one-party state. Neither wants the kind of wide-ranging central planning communist states have imposed (yes, I know they want some) and we aren't close to a police state where we are spied upon and turned in for the wrong speech only to turn up dead or exiled. One could more accurately refer to them as socialists or proponents of socialistic policies and I think that's fair--they might prefer, like Sanders for example, to move the US towards more of a Scandinavian or European model. And we can debate if that is desirable or achievable. But communism is a different fish altogether.
By continuing to label Harris and Walz communist, though, I fear the following: (1) cheapening the term to the point where it is no longer useful; (2) failing to understand the theoretical difference between socialism and communism in history and confusing the public; (3) failing to appreciate the particular hell that developed under the Soviet, Chinese, and Cambodian versions of communism and so minimize their horrors; (4) creating space and excuses for political violence and harmful means to achieve the end of defeating the communists; and maybe most importantly (5) driving current Democratic supporters of Harris and Walz into the arms of communist thought and thinkers (and they do exist on college campuses--I studied under some at IU and know a handful now at different universities), making those (especially the young) people susceptible to accepting more or less communist policies in the future because the right has currently labeled the left as communists.
None of this is to say we shouldn't analyze particular policies by each party and think about their potential analogs in either fascist Germany or Italy or communist nations. We should--it's useful to look at how those regimes might have used particular policies and then put up road blocks here to the same usage or culture. But we should be careful because those analogies should always be limited by the phrase "to a degree" since no historical analogies are perfect and those between fascist and communist regimes of the 20th century, on one hand, and America in the 2020s, on the other, are always suspect.
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