Last week, Donald Trump threatened Apple with a 25% tariff if it failed to move production of the iPhone to the United States. In so doing, he revealed himself as a socialist.
Socialism is generally defined as “a populist economic and political system based on collective, common, or public ownership of the means of production. Those means of production include the machinery, tools, and factories used to produce goods that aim to directly satisfy human needs.” In today’s world, smartphones meet a human need; without one, it is nearly impossible to connect with vital services, from checking accounts to healthcare websites. By attacking Apple’s production autonomy, Trump is asserting state control.
As such, he is a far more radical socialist than self-proclaimed socialists such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. What they advocate is not the aggressive version adopted by Trump. Actually, they are Social democrats who work within a capitalist, private enterprise economy to achieve a fairer, more equal society, captured in the famous line from socialism’s early days: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This concept, when isolated from all the negative propaganda surrounding the word “socialism,” characterizes deep beliefs held by Americans, who favor such programs as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, as well as universal childhood education.
Ever since my adolescence, when politics entered my awareness, I have opposed socialism’s extreme, called communism, because it necessarily entails violence. It took no act of imagination: Atrocities in Russia and China proved it. But I do believe in fairness.
Trump has a habit of taking the worst part of a philosophy or ideal while and jettisoning its good. As demonstrated by his “big beautiful bill,” he is an advocate of greater wealth for the already wealthy, capitalism’s antisocial extreme. He is also an advocate of violence, a perversion of his pleas for justice, as evidenced by his pardons of every single person who followed his urging to mob the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Trump’s gestures at economic fairness, such as his proposal to spare tips from taxation, are belied by the much more significant pro-wealth provisions of that “big” legislative plan. Meanwhile, he claims state control of the means of production. Not only is he a socialist, but a socialist of the most dangerous kind.
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