Faulty reasoning signals

• Confirmation Bias - 7.8% (81 hits)
• Anchoring Bias - 1.6% (17 hits)
• Availability Heuristic - 4.1% (43 hits)
• Representativeness Heuristic - 5.1% (53 hits)
• Hindsight Bias - 0%
• Overconfidence Bias - 2.6% (27 hits)
• Framing Effect - 3% (31 hits)
• Loss Aversion - 0%
• Status Quo Bias - 1.2% (12 hits)
• Sunk Cost Effect - 0%
• Optimism Bias - 2.7% (28 hits)
• Pessimism Bias - 5.8% (60 hits)

Article text

Donald Trump Has a New—and Stupid and Likely Ineffective—Favorite Word

Donald Trump has a new favorite

word.

He’s been calling

Democrats “communists” ever since a few democratic socialists won some House primaries.

“These are hardcore, godless communists,” he

told

the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference last month.

“This is the most

serious threat to our country since its existence.” GOP House Speaker Mike

Johnson, the ever-loyal Shih Tzu

on his emperor’s lap, has picked it up as well.

The midterms, he

said

recently, will pit “common sense versus communism.”

Well.

The first question here is

whether Americans even know what communism is (or was) anymore.

There are five

countries in the world that still call themselves communist, but one of those

is China, which at least in economic terms barely counts (the others are Cuba,

North Korea, Vietnam, and Laos).

More than that, it’s getting to be close to 40

years now since the Eastern bloc collapsed.

A person would have to be at least

45 years old to have any memory of all that.

Right now, 57.5 percent of

Americans are

under

that age.

As you’d expect, young people who

weren’t alive to see how cruel, corrupt, and lethargic the Soviet Union was either

don’t know much about communism or don’t see it as such a bad thing.

A

poll

released last week

by the libertarian Cato Institute had some interesting

numbers.

Among all Americans, capitalism was viewed favorably by just 52

percent (that’s the number that would be worrying me if I were a Friedmanesque

free-marketeer; it’s insanely low!).

Socialism was viewed favorably by 37

percent.

And communism got a thumbs up from 21 percent.

That’s overall.

Among respondents

under 30 years old, 38 percent said they had a favorable view of communism.

But

in the Queens of Donald Trump’s youth, calling someone a commie packed a real

wallop, so he clearly thinks it still can.

The word doesn’t actually apply to

any of these people he’s trying to condemn, of course.

As I

noted

last week

, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani, and even Bernie

Sanders himself aren’t really socialists, in the proper historical sense of the

word.

I don’t hear any of them calling for the state to seize the means of

production, which is the basic historical position of socialism.

They’re social

democrats.

The only one among the crop who has

apparently

said

a few nice things

about actual communism is Darializa Avila Chevalier, the

32-year-old who won the Democratic primary in an upper Manhattan district.

Her

leftism appears to be much more of the campus-radical variety than Mamdani’s

sewer socialism; we’ll see in two years whether the voters of her district are

good with that, or whether she has indeed “grown considerably” since she wrote

those social media posts.

Meanwhile, on the Fourth of July, a

bunch of white supremacists from something called the Patriot Front felt at

home enough in Trump’s Washington to

march

in front of the Capitol

wearing masks, sunglasses, and ballcaps with the

group’s logo boldly displayed, and carrying an array of flags including the

Confederate flag.

(These ghouls undoubtedly went unmasked during the pandemic

to protest supposedly totalitarian public health policies, and now they’re

dressing like totalitarians in an attempt to terrorize regular people.)  

And that night, of course, America, or that

portion of it that was interested, listened to another windy address from a

president who once invited avowed white supremacist Nick Fuentes to dine with

him at his house and told the extremist Proud Boys to stand by.

That same president participated

back in May in

Rededicate

250

, a Christian nationalist prayer gathering that, whatever its organizers

said, was clearly intended to pound home the idea that the United States is

supposed to be a Christian nation, which of course it is not.

Democratic

Representative Jared Huffman of California accurately told PBS that the event

“would have the founders rolling in their graves.” 

This doesn’t begin to

scratch the surface of right-wing radicalism in this country, most of which

Trump tacitly or sometimes explicitly endorses with rhetoric that’s clearly

fascist.

And beyond Trump himself, many rank-and-file Republicans are shocking

extremists; remember

Nazis

mingling openly

at the 2024 CPAC conference, or

those

leaked text messages

by young Republicans last fall (“I love Hitler”)?

It’s crystal clear in a factual

sense which party is more radical today.

The Democrats could elect two dozen

socialists and they

still

wouldn’t be anywhere near as far left

as the GOP has gone far right.

Oh,

and by the way: For all the media attention socialist candidates get when they

win, it’s still a fact that on balance, mainstream and even centrist Democrats

are winning more primaries this year.

The Cook Political Report

revealed

over the weekend

that in the 22 GOP-controlled congressional districts

where Democrats have held primaries so far, 14 have been won by candidates with

mainstream and centrist backing.

Only four have been won by candidates backed

by the Progressive Caucus.

So in swing districts, Democratic voters are still

mainly choosing the nominees they calculate have a better shot at winning

such a district.

But we’re going to be hearing all

about communists for the next four months.

Trump is obviously trying to make

the midterms a referendum on the Democratic Party and not on him. 

History tells

us this rarely works.

It didn’t work for him in 2018, when he was

around

40 percent

in the polls and tried to make the dreaded caravan headed toward

the Rio Grande from Central America the central issue.

And the economy was

comparatively good then, unlike now, when a soaring stock market is benefitting

the rich while most Americans continue to struggle with Trump-juiced inflation.

So Democrats, who tend to freak out

about things, should not freak out about this.

Sure, communism is a scary word,

at least to people of a certain age and ideological bent.

But I’d imagine very few people who

aren’t dyed in the wool MAGA believe the Democratic Party is a bunch of

communists.

I hope that instead of lamely denying it and moving on to gas

prices, they have the guts to fight fire with fire and point out to voters who

the real extremists in this country are.