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Biden’s Focus on Americans’ Needs Makes Him a Little Bit Socialist. Is That So Bad?
After President Joe Biden earned the Democratic nomination to run for president, he seemed compelled to distinguish himself from his top competitor, Vermont Senator and self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders, and to disavow any connection to socialism.
“I beat the socialist,” Biden reminded the media. “That’s how I got elected. That’s how I got the nomination. Do I look like a socialist? Look at my career — my whole career. I am not a socialist.”
Biden, no doubt, was moving to protect himself from a label that still provokes anxiety, even fear and antipathy, in many Americans, albeit they may have no clear idea of what constitutes socialism or what it would mean for their lives.
Ignorant of what socialism is, Americans have nonetheless been taught to fear it. The Cold War hard-wired “socialism” into the American lexicon as one of the dirtiest of words.
So, it made sense, to some degree, when Donald Trump and Republicans continued to paint Biden as a radical socialist, that Biden insistently repudiated the label. Indeed, the socialist tag arguably cost him Florida in the general election.
Of course, Republicans continue to try to brand everything Biden and the Democrats pursue as a radical…
