Republicans, their conservative media allies, and more than a few Donkey Party apostates, have been calling Democrats “socialists” for a long, long time. The habit really began with FDR, who was generally thought to have introduced a social-democratic strain to American liberalism. His predecessor as Democratic presidential nominee and as governor of New York, Al Smith, said this to a room full of anti-Roosevelt conservatives in 1936:
Just get the platform of the Democratic Party and get the platform of the Socialist Party and lay them down on your dining-room table, side by side … After you have done that, make your mind up to pick up the platform that more nearly squares with the record, and you will have your hand on the Socialist platform.”
At least FDR was indeed advocating significant new public policy restraints on private enterprise, if not anything you could really characterize as “socialist” by historic standards. But the same label was applied to virtually every post–World War II Democratic president other than perhaps Jimmy Carter.
View the complete March 7 article by Ed Kilgore on The New York Magazine website here.