Among the various scare tactics used against Obama — a candidate I personally find unremarkable, as I’ve explained here numerous times — the one calling him a “socialist” amuses me in particular. With the rampant nationalization and government aided consolidation that’s gone on, conservatives throwing around “socialist” has become so garbage that even Hugo Chavez has standing to laugh. Yet, there’s a deeper issue behind the much-deserved snark…

Anyone familiar with historic conservatism (read: longtime philosophical stances that would fly over the heads of the average Limbaugh listener) knows their number one stated value is Order. Yes, capital O. To the conservatives of those dusty history books, of the pre-mass media era, stability and calm are freakin’ awesome, no matter what. That in mind, consider what has tended to happen when the balance of wealth in a nation has shot apart past a certain point. Think about it, picture the uprisings and outpourings of rage, the indiscriminate bloodying, just let them simmer in your head for a bit.

Now, contrary to popular belief among the right-wing, we were never close to a communist overthrow, ever. But I do recall a period in US history where people could get serious votes — and even in some cases win office — as self-described socialists. At the moment, well…there is Senator Bernie Sanders.

It has been argued by both liberal intellectuals and radical libertarians — for different reasons — that many of the shifts in approaching the economy by government around the New Deal era served to defuse more critical sentiment, “fixing” capitalism or even saving it outright. My own view on correcting such imbalance is more along the lines of crossing neo-Wobbly labor tactics with dismantling the welfare that the wealthy enjoy, but say we humor the more common interpretation: the market faced a crisis, the State stepped in, people put down their pitchforks and went back to work, all was well.

If that’s true, then a conservative denouncing a few percentage points on the top income tax bracket as a raging commie plot is, to put it bluntly, playing with fire. It speaks volumes about the modern right-wing that they’d deny history suggesting it could always be worse…

(cross-posted to FreedomDemocrats)