(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump’s favorite attack line is calling Democrats "socialists" for advocating wealth redistribution, nationalized health care and other ideas he depicts as downright un-American.
The president’s offensive leaves Democratic presidential candidates doing a delicate dance: embracing more left-leaning policies without getting tagged with a politically damaging epithet that many shun.
Trump is seizing on a wide-ranging debate within the Democratic Party about moderating the excesses of U.S. capitalism after decades of rising income inequality.
The 2020 candidates overwhelmingly support policies to expand the social safety net that many Republican voters consider anathema, including wider health care coverage, higher taxes on the rich, tougher financial regulation, student-debt forgiveness and an increase in the minimum wage.
The Democrats ignore the president’s efforts to tar them with the s-word at their own peril, says Neera Tanden, who runs the Center For American Progress, a liberal think tank.
“I’ve seen this in some polling on socialism and other issues — Donald Trump has a gigantic megaphone and he does have the ability to define the terms of debate,” Tanden said. “Democrats can and should rebut his lies. I do think Republicans will use the attack on socialism as a weapon. And that’s up to candidates to see how they want to take that on.”
All of the two-dozen Democratic candidates except Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders reject the "socialist" tag. Most ignore it; others use it to differentiate themselves from the ascendant left wing of the party; and yet others argue that the term is used in bad faith by Republicans to attack progressive ideas.
"A lot of people are throwing around these words like socialism, right?" South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg said earlier this month in Dubuque, Iowa. "Mostly because they think it’s a kill switch on a Democratic idea like the Affordable Care Act, conceived by conservatives and invented by Republicans. And as soon as a Democratic president said we ought to do it, well, that’s socialism.”
Historic Cudgel
The term "socialism” has long been a cudgel in U.S. politics. It was weaponized by conservatives against Democratic-led social welfare programs, including the Affordable Care Act in 2010 and Medicare in the 1960s. Progressives argue that the new wave of ideas Democrats are now proposing represents a return to the mainstream economic populism of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal.
A Gallup poll in August 2018 found that 57 percent of Democrats had a positive view of "socialism" while 47 percent had a positive view of "capitalism." Voters age 18 to 29 had a slightly more positive view of socialism than capitalism.
In a Gallup poll published last week, 43 percent of respondents said "some form of socialism" would be a good thing for the U.S., while 51 percent said it would be a bad thing.
Trump is intensifying his attacks. A campaign email to supporters Tuesday included the subject line "Reject socialism" and took shots at the Green New Deal resolution by left-leaning Democrats to zero out fossil fuel emissions by 2030. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, last week repeatedly condemned what he called the "new socialist Democratic Party."
These broadsides haven’t deterred Sanders, who identifies as a democratic socialist and has called for measures such as a tax on financial transactions. He has cited Denmark and other countries as models on policies such as universal health care, child care and paid time off. His campaign rejects the idea that this embrace will be an albatross in a general election, arguing he’s uniquely equipped to respond.
“Donald Trump is going to say that about every single candidate in the field, whether you’re Kamala Harris or Beto O’Rourke or Pete Buttigieg,” Faiz Shakir, Sanders’ campaign manager, said in an interview. “The only difference is that Bernie Sanders is going to lean into it. He’ll talk about the corporate socialism of Trump.”
Matt Bennett, a co-founder of the centrist Democratic group Third Way, said that tactic could backfire: “Don’t lean into it. Why would you do that? Self-identifying as a socialist is not a good place to be in American politics."
Steering Clear
Some Democratic contenders are steering clear of the party’s most leftward ideas that are being attacked as socialist. Joe Biden, the nomination frontrunner, opposes a Medicare for All system that would end most private insurance, calling instead for a public option for people who want to enroll in it.
Others are fighting back. Harris, a California senator and a 2020 candidate, says taxpayer-funded benefit programs like Medicare for All aren’t socialism. “It’s about providing health care to all people," she said in a February interview with MSNBC. “Your access to public education, public health or public safety should not be a function of how much money you have."
Senator Elizabeth Warren, who shares many of Sanders’ policy ideas, also rejects the socialist label and instead says she’s a capitalist who believes corporations must be regulated so they’re not “cheating people.”
“Capitalism without rules is theft,” Warren said in a January interview with Bloomberg TV.
Moderate Democrat John Hickenlooper is using the tag to take veiled swipes at Sanders in an effort to raise his standing in the nomination race.
“Donald Trump has been fueling this national crisis of division and it’s taking our country backwards. And the answer is not socialism,” Hickenlooper said Sunday on ABC’s "This Week."
O’Rourke, a former congressman from Texas, says socialism isn’t required to help those who lack access to health care, workers with multiple jobs to make ends meet, and students with crippling debt.
‘Inclusive Capitalism’
“We can be responsive to all those needs and at the same time harness the extraordinary engine of capitalism to allow us to accomplish those goals,” O’Rourke told reporters last week in Davenport, Iowa. “This moment calls for a far more conscientious and inclusive capitalism than we’ve practiced in this economy."
Some Iowa voters said the socialist label was a concern. “It definitely concerns me -- the fact of the government taking over so many things,” said Andrea Compton, 56, of Solon.
Steve Ungar, a 73-year-old Iowa City resident, said he doesn’t fear the word, though he worries that it is often co-opted and used as scare tactic.
“My concern is that if people want to appropriate the term to attack the policies that are being associated with it, that strikes me as counterproductive,” he said. “It’s taking the kind of things Bernie stands for and turning it into an opposition platform.”
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