Socialism Personified (for those who remember)

Sunday’s NY Times had a Week in Review front-pager on how conservatives have decided on “socialism” as their primary rhetorical weapon against Barack Obama and the Democrats. The piece had plenty of examples and a nice bit asking an actual socialist in Congress (Vermont’s junior Senator Bernie Sanders) what he thinks of it all. But it was left to the editor laying out the pages to point out what this really represents.

In the next column over from the article’s Page 3 jump is another piece entitled “Ailing GOP Risks Losing a Generation.” The two stories are hardly unrelated.

As Get Real and plenty of others has pointed out for some time now, the GOP is stuck using a playbook that simply doesn’t work any more. Conservatives still think that by attracting enough white men to their side their ideas and candidates will triumph. But as the Times’ other article demonstrates, that dog don’t hunt no more.

Young people have been fleeing the Republican Party and it’s ideas at an accelerating pace since the end of the Reagan era in 1988. Voters under 30 hardly decide elections — in 1996 they made up 17% of the electorate and last November they consisted of 18%. But voters who were under 30 in 1992 when the rate of young GOP abandonment began to accelerate more rapidly are now in the more important 30-45 age group which accounted for more than 30% of the vote last year. It doesn’t take a math major to figure out that time is NOT on the side of conservatives if present trends continue.

Which brings us back to socialism. That’s a word that had hefty meaning for much of the last century as countries from Hitler’s Germany to Stalin’s Soviet Union shared the term with more benign nations like Sweden. But what does socialism mean to somebody who is 25 years old — or 45 for that matter?

If you are 25 you only remember living under two Presidents (Clinton and Bush) and probably have only the vaguest notion of when the Berlin Wall fell or what the Soviet Union was. Even those twenty years older never really felt the fear of creeping socialism that our parents knew. By the mid-80s socialism may still have been an effective word for many voters but for those of us voting in our first or second elections it was as dated a term as “davenport” (that’s what my grandma always called the couch).

In fact for many people now under 45 the closest brush with socialism any of us has had might have been a trip to Stockholm, Paris, or Berlin where European socialism seemed to provide good public transport, free health care, a pretty good standard of living, and fine quality of life.

By going into their wayback machine for inspiration conservatives and their Republican friends end up looking like doddering old folks — like our beloved relatives we see at holidays and find amusing for their outdated words and quirky relations with the modern world (“I turned on my AOL machine to write you.”)

Putting younger, darker faces on the product (Jindal, Steele) won’t convince a generation of jaded, sophisticated consumers to buy the Republican brand, especially when those new faces are using the same ancient words as their elders.

The bottom line is socialism isn’t really a dirty word for the vast majority of voters under 45. Indeed it’s not even a word we’ve heard all the much during our lives except in history class. And so as we have been saying here at Get Real repeatedly in reference to Limbaugh and Jindal and the GOP in general: Keep it up if you want to help President Obama because you’re doing him a lot more good than the members of his own party.