Do you think Bobby Jindal even knows what he is afraid of, at this point? Never has The Socialismz sounded both
so terrifying and so vapid.
“I’m running [for president] because I want to stop President Obama and Secretary Clinton from turning the American dream into the European nightmare,” Jindal said on John Catsimatidis's radio show on New York’s AM 970. “We are on the path towards socialism. It’s not too late, but the hour is late.”
The hour is late! The minute is nigh! Socialism is getting off the freeway and pulling into a gas station to fill up—it will be at your house by suppertime!
Jindal has been to Europe. It is not the hellscape of Muslimy no-go zones that he imagines it to be; it is true that it generally has crazy lower-priced health care and dangerously reasonable family leave laws, and so on, but many of the nations there are mired in their own happy bouts of racism and the omnipresent calls for austerity that manages to be austere for everyone but the financial wizards demanding it, so there is plenty there for both the fiendish socialists and the goodness-and-light Stupid Party to get their knickers in a twist over. Calling it a "nightmare" is a bit much, especially for someone who thinks they ought to be head person in charge of negotiating things with the "nightmare" nations.
But what of this notion that "socialism" has run rampant in the United States? Based on what? It seems governance for corporate benefit is in no immediate danger—even the most socialism-y thing the nation has attempted in a generation, slightly better health insurance, was crafted as an enormous cake presented to private companies so that they might generously allow sick Americans to access the greatest healthcare system in the world even if doing so might make a spreadsheet somewhere sad. Efforts to raise the minimum wage to something vaguely akin to past iterations—is that the impending doom?
Is this about The Gays?
I understand that a certain element of conservatism, which unfortunately for all of us happens to be the element that has risen to the most prominence over the last half-century and now is the tail that wags the beast, is based on identifying an existential horror and then wetting your pants over that thing as ostentatiously as possible in order to convince other pants-wetters that you can wet your pants more prominently and forcefully than anyone else. But the threat here seems abstract, and a bit too melodramatic to serve as fodder for anyone except the crowd currently eyeing local military exercises as secret lizard-person plot. Yes, yes, we are all supposed to be a'feared of Scandinavian family leave policies as if they were the new Viet Cong, just one well-stocked rowboat from storming our beaches and offering frightened passersby coupons to a local daycare. Because Europe, and "socialism" and whatnot.
I'm not saying you couldn't get a certain subset of the party base to wet their pants over that, mind you. I'm just marveling at how low you have to set the pants-wetting bar these days. It used to be the communists and nuclear bombs, then it was petty dictators and yellow cake, and now it's Dangerous Ideas Peddled By Norway These Days. A decade from now it will be Butterflies That Look Like Hitler. The only logical endpoint of all this is that the Republican Party ceases to exist as electoral force after every last one of their frightened voters locks themselves in their homes with fifty years worth of canned food and refuses to come out again.