For decades now, the Right has rallied around more or less the same reductive and Manichean narrative of American politics. In one corner — or so successive generations of reactionaries from Ronald Reagan to Sarah Palin to Donald Trump have insisted — stand the forces of freedom and liberty; in the other, adherents to a creeping, tyrannical, and godless ideology bent on strangling the American way of life. In defining and identifying the latter, the Right has never been especially discriminating. “Socialism,” at least in the hands of your average Republican politician, can in fact be applied to almost anything if partisan conservatives are opposed to it.

In 2018, Mitch McConnell deemed strong borders the opposite of “socialism.” During the 1990s, Bill Clinton’s rather tepid strategy for health care reform was branded as “socialism now or later” by Newt Gingrich, who declared it a plan to seize “control of the health care system and centralize power in Washington.” The Obama-era Affordable Care Act, whose architects ironically drew inspiration from the right-leaning Heritage Foundation, was similarly denounced. While running against Barack Obama in 2008, the late John McCain deemed his opponent’s tax plan “socialist,” adding, “at least in Europe, the socialist leaders who so admire my opponent are upfront about their objectives.” At a 2005 event in honor of Ayn Rand, future House speaker Paul Ryan warned that Social Security represented a “collectivist system” that, if preserved, would inevitably lead to socialist tyranny.

Pejorative use of the label, of course, goes back much further.