At last week’s Republican National Convention, presidential son Eric Trump evoked Ronald Reagan when he warned about the imminent threats to freedom that a Biden administration would pose. Accusing the “radical Democrats” of wanting to burn the flag, defund the police and “erase history,” among other depredations, he depicted “the fight that we are in right now” as urgent and necessary for the preservation of liberty.
His remarks were similar to those of Sarah Palin, who referenced Reagan’s comments in her 2008 vice-presidential debate with Joe Biden and later included them in her 2010 book, “America By Heart,” as a sentiment that “perfectly expresses our need to protect and preserve American values.”
Although it’s not surprising to find Republicans quoting Reagan, there is a catch: This line from the Gipper came from a badly flawed 1961 prediction about Medicare. Reagan claimed — modifying a line that he had been regularly using in the previous months to dramatically conclude his speeches — that in the “sunset years” of his generation “our children and our children’s children” would not know “what it was like to be free” if Medicare, which Reagan denounced as “socialized medicine,” became the law of the land. Yet, today, more than 55 years after its enactment, Medicare ranks after Social Security as the second-most popular government program, and Americans remain free.
The continued use of an embarrassingly misguided warning shows how conservatives have gravitated toward recycled apocalyptic rhetoric, notwithstanding the fact that their dire predictions have never come to pass. Crying wolf like this long predates Reagan’s 1961 comment. It dates to the early days of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, when Roosevelt’s opponents framed their criticisms not as a dispute about policy, but as an existential fight to preserve liberty.
When critics equated New Deal liberalism with socialism, they did so to mark the latter as the inevitable fate of the former. In the words of presidential son and future senator Robert Taft in 1936, the New Deal would “lead inexorably to complete socialism.” Predictions of imminent doom if the Social Security Act became law proved inaccurate, but that didn’t stop anti-New Deal Rep. Samuel Pettengill from predicting in 1936 (which Reagan echoed a generation later) that “this may well be the last generation of Americans to receive and cherish the legacy of liberty.”
These conservatives saw a slippery slope: liberalism plus time equals socialism. The New Deal was “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” — or what former president Herbert Hoover, whom Roosevelt replaced, called in 1949 “a disguise for the totalitarian state” — because, they believed, it was lulling the American people into accepting dangerous and metastasizing forms of government power. This gradualist “road to serfdom” (to borrow the title of F.A. Hayek’s 1944 best-selling critique of the welfare state, as federally supported social provisions began to be called in the late 1940s) was, “if anything, worse than all-out Communism,” according to one critic in 1955, because of the deception that lay at the heart of American liberalism. This is why, for these critics, it was always “five minutes to midnight,” to borrow one of their favorite images, employed by both Wendell Willkie, the Republican presidential candidate, in 1940 and Reagan in 1978 as he was getting ready to launch his successful 1980 presidential bid.
In this worldview, extensions of government, no matter how limited, could not be easily contained because they opened the floodgates to dangerous expansions of state power. In 1945, the conservative columnist and economic popularizer, Henry Hazlitt, like many other critics of New Deal liberalism, asserted the “inevitable tendency of Government” to expand in “ever widening circles.” What this meant was that even relatively modest extensions of the welfare state presented a radical threat to freedom. As a result, conservatives rejected the possibility of the “mixed economy” celebrated by postwar liberals in which government spending and regulation worked alongside private business firms to create prosperity. “The American system of freedom” and “a planned society,” said Hoover in 1936, “cannot be mixed.”
Even as the New Deal proved wildly popular, conservatives, who over time became increasingly concentrated in the Republican Party, stuck to this script in election after election, and as a way of framing politics more broadly. The use of “socialism” as a smear, usually to oppose New Deal liberalism or mild expansions of the welfare state, has never gone away. When President Trump called Biden “a Trojan horse for socialism” in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, he was employing a familiar image.
Reagan, who once had been a New Deal Democrat, embodied this tendency, first as a political pitchman for General Electric and then in his political career. In another part of his speech about the dangers of Medicare, he worried that, if it became the law of the land, one day soon “we will awake to find that we have socialism.” Almost three decades later, when campaigning for his vice president, George H.W. Bush, in 1988, Reagan implausibly called the centrist Democratic ticket of Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen “far-out left” and “liberal, liberal, liberal,” as if the two were synonymous.
Perhaps surprisingly, these claims have accelerated since the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. Bill Clinton, who positioned himself as a centrist, and Barack Obama, a pragmatic liberal, faced similar charges of covert socialism. After the tea party revolt of 2009, Republicans have increasingly doubled down on this rhetoric. Although a 2012 newspaper called the “socialism” charge against Obama “a new boogeyman,” critics were merely redeploying a tried-and-true tactic.
In 2019, Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg summarized this dynamic perfectly, saying: “If we adopt a platform that’s way out to the left, [Republicans are] going to say we’re socialists. If we adopt a more moderate or conservative platform, they’re going to say we’re socialists.” In 2015, National Review’s Jonah Goldberg admitted as much when he wrote, “What we call ‘liberalism’ has been the respectable face of socialist ideology.” The political rhetoric of Republicans in the current moment replicates both the alarmist predictions about the dangerous tendencies of Democratic policies and the conflation of liberalism with socialism that date back to enemies of the New Deal.
Trump’s rhetoric is an extreme example, but he is drawing on an old playbook. Although Trump is often depicted as representing a rupture with the Republican and conservative past, in this respect, his campaign is continuous with almost a century of conservative efforts. Highlighting the stakes of the upcoming presidential election a year before he crossed the aisle to join the GOP, conservative Sen. Strom Thurmond said in 1963: “Americans must make their choice between socialism and freedom. … The choice is yours; the hour is late.”
Republicans hysterically labeling Democrats as existentially dangerous socialists is nothing new, nor does it bear any more truth now than it did in the 1930s. One prediction that we can pretty safely make is that our children and our children’s children will be warned in some future election that “the hour is late” and that freedom is at stake if they opt for a candidate who seeks to preserve or expand the welfare state.