Mitch McConnell Is Gearing Up for an All-Out War on Socialism in 2020
As 2020 Democratic candidates debate the merits of Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, free college, and other ambitious progressive policies, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell is happily preparing to play the role of spoiler should one of them win the White House. "If I'm still the majority leader in the Senate, think of me as the Grim Reaper. None of that stuff is going to pass," he told constituents in Kentucky on Monday. "I guarantee you that if I'm the last man standing and I'm still the majority leader, it ain't happening. I can promise you."
McConnell also expressed his desire to make the election a "referendum on socialism"—especially in Maine, Colorado, Arizona, and other purplish states in which a vulnerable GOP incumbent senator is up for re-election. "Now, my friends, we're having a legitimate debate about the virtues of socialism. And I don't want you to think this is just a 28-year-old congresswoman from New York," he said, a not-so-veiled reference to the modern Republican Party's favorite supervillain. "This is much broader than that." If he can successfully frame Democrats as sinister peddlers of ominous-sounding socialism, he argued, and Republicans as heroic defenders of American capitalism, his majority leadership—and perhaps his ally in the White House—will both remain secure.
Blanket obstructionism is not a new posture for McConnell, who concerns himself less with enacting affirmative policies than he does with accumulating raw power on behalf of the conservative movement and the Republican Party. His most significant career accomplishments have all involved deploying that power at critical junctures to choke out his opponents' efforts to do things of great significance. When Barack Obama took office in 2008 alongside Democratic House and Senate majorities, McConnell vowed to thwart his every move, publicly dedicated himself to the task of Obama a one-term president. When Obama sought to appoint federal judges—a basic presidential duty, and a foundational element of a functioning democracy—McConnell helmed an unprecedented Senate blockade to keep those seats vacant. When Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia died in 2016, McConnell refused to hold confirmation hearings for any potential replacement until after the election, knowing that no one could stop from from dispensing with democratic norms as he saw fit. (He would later call this "the most important thing I've ever done.")
"He's not trying to cap off his career with a legislative masterstroke, because he doesn’t care about legislation," wrote Alex Pareene about McConnell in a The New Republic profile last month. "He already won. He’s the Senate majority leader, his parliamentary prowess is regularly feted, and he has already left his legacy indelibly inscribed on the highest court in the land."
Issuing dire warnings about the dangers of creeping Marxism, too, is a proud tradition in the Republican Party, whose members have long smeared any Democratic-supported policies as "socialist," regardless of whether the policy in question bears any resemblance to anything that might be termed as such. (Conservatives were decrying the Affordable Care Act's market-based reforms as "socialist," for example, well before actually-socialist single-payer proposals became part of the Democratic Party mainstream.) This strategy draws much of its strength from a decades-old, Soviet-era worldview in which socialism was synonymous with communism, which would lead inexorably to gulags, bread lines, and rat consumption the moment anyone dared to embrace it.
It is not clear how much longer these strategies will remain fruitful. So-called socialist policies are increasingly popular among voters—more than half of Americans now favor Medicare for All, and 61 percent support a wealth tax on households with a net worth over $50 million. A generation of progressive activists that grew familiar with right-wing fearmongering about socialism learned how to prevent it from derailing their cause altogether. People no longer see the looming death of the republic reflected in every proposal that would redistribute a society's wealth to reduce inequality and alleviate human suffering. Even Trump, on the campaign trail in 2016, pledged not to cut Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security "like every other Republican," because he understood that programs like these are popular among voters, if not the millionaires who have always financed GOP campaigns. He's enacted protectionist tariffs and directly intervened, as a government official, with factory closings—hardly an adherence to conservative free-market ideals.
Old-fashioned red-baiting might still make for dependable applause lines at CPAC. But in a 2020 political environment in which key Republican lawmakers could be fighting for their political lives, McConnell's arguments risk coming off as tone-deaf and obsolete—clear signs to voters that the party's message has run its course.
