Over the weekend, Mark Leibovich had an interesting an entertaining piece in the Times on how “socialism” has become the Republicans’ new all-purpose smear word attacking Obama in particular and Democrats generally.
Now, you can have a whole conversation about whether ramping marginal tax rates back to where they were in the go-go 1990s really constitutes socialism. But a different point occurred to me when I read the piece. I think this is probably the best evidence there is that the ‘liberal’ label simply doesn’t have the punch that it had going back a good thirty years in American politics.
If it did, they’d still be using it, since it at least has some relationship to reality. But it doesn’t, so they’re not.
