Ron Johnson called Joe Biden 'a liberal, progressive, socialist, Marxist.' Can someone be all those things?
Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson has been serving up opinions and quotes in various forums the last few weeks, including TV interviews, a virtual press conference and a telephone town hall meeting.
He has said a lot of things as he ponders whether to run for reelection next year.
But perhaps Johnson's most unusual statement came at the beginning of an interview Thursday night with Sean Hannity on Fox News.
Johnson was asked about recent Biden administration moves to block the Keystone pipeline, waive sanctions on the company behind Russia's Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, and drop a Trump administration order targeting Tik Tok.
Johnson replied: "Because he's weak. And don't ask me to get inside the mind of a liberal, progressive, socialist, Marxist like President Biden."
That's a lot of political ideology heaped on one political figure, let alone Biden, who has been in national politics for nearly a half-century.
RELATED:Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson suspended for a week from YouTube after Milwaukee Press Club event
When asked by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to elaborate on his comments Friday, Johnson didn't go for the big four: liberal, progressive, socialist, Marxist.
In a statement released by his office, Johnson said: “President Biden is exacerbating the problems facing this nation. Border crisis, national debt, international weakness. Who knows what label to apply to these policy catastrophes, but we certainly know he’s no moderate.”
He later tweeted the response.
Let's define the words
Liberal and progressive are often used interchangeably to describe those who believe in using government to back social and political change.
Franklin Roosevelt and the Kennedy brothers were liberals. "Fighting Bob" La Follette was a Wisconsin progressive and leader in an era of social activism and political reform.
Socialist often refers to those believe in socialism, where the state takes responsibility for the health and welfare of their citizenry.
A Marxist refers to those who support the political, social and economic theories of German philosopher Karl Marx, who sought to overturn capitalism.
Joe Biden: 'left liberal'
Kennan Ferguson, at UW-Milwaukee political science professor, said: "I don't think anybody can be all those things. Certainly the last three are like nesting dolls. Almost all Marxists are socialists and many socialists are progressives. But liberalism in the United States was developed as an anti-Marxist political theory."
Ferguson said by his usage of the words, "Johnson means them all as epithets rather than ideological descriptors. You can see that in that he doesn't know the differences between them."
Richard Avramenko, a UW-Madison political scientist and director for the Center for the Study of Liberal Democracy, said Johnson would have been more accurate to describe Biden as a "left liberal."
RELATED:Meet the five Democrats already running for Ron Johnson's seat in Wisconsin's 2022 Senate race
"Liberals, socialists and Marxists are, by definition, progressives," Avramenko said in an email. "But Biden is not a 'classical liberal' (i.e., libertarian) — he’s a 'left liberal.' "
Avramenko added, "If he said, 'Don't ask me to get inside the mind of a liberal, progressive, socialist, Marxist — whatever you want to label him — like President Biden' it would have been less questionable."
So, what's really going on here?
Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette University Law School Poll, said that "for folks on the right, at this point those labels have become more or less synonymous regardless of what their dictionary meanings are. From my point of view it represents the blending together of these terms without much care or concern for the actual substantial differences in meaning in those four words."
"But from Senator Johnson's point of view they're kind of indistinguishable from one another and therefore stringing them together in one label is not that stunning," Franklin said.
No comments:
Post a Comment