Name-calling descends into idiocy

Socialist. Communist. Marxist. These words are being thrown around a lot lately, as epithets hurled at the Democrats' efforts to reform health care or, well, to do just about anything, in practice. The words are used like amulets, like a cross brandished to ward off Dracula, with no apparent sense of what they actually mean.

First, socialism is not the same thing as Marxism or Communism. Socialism is what France and Britain and Germany have. Socialism is stuff like Social Security and Medicare. People recoil from the word, but once they have the substance of it, they like it enough to raise pluperfect Hell if anyone tries to take it away.

The definitive characteristic of Communism in the Soviet sense is state ownership of the means of production. If the Democratic party supported nationalizing every factory and farm in the US and converting all the workers in them to government employees, it would be accurate to call it Communist or Marxist. Needless to say, it does not advocate anything resembling actual Communism.

As for the occasional Nazi comparisons, they mostly rely on a different form of intellectual dishonesty, exemplified by the quote here that Obama's idea for a civilian disaster-relief corps (also previously suggested by Bush) is "exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany". For all I know, Nazi Germany may indeed have had such an organization, but to make an analogy on this basis is deceitful. I assume that schools in Nazi Germany taught that the Earth is round, and so in a certain sense (Flat-Earth Society please note) it would be technically true to say that any country where the schools teach that the Earth is round is doing the same thing that Nazi Germany did. But everybody knows that Nazi Germany's status as the epitome of evil has nothing to do with that; it stems from the Holocaust, murderously-brutal military occupation policies, large-scale use of slave labor in the twentieth century, and so on. This is what an accusation that one's opposition is "like Nazi Germany" evokes. Silly analogies based on things that normal governments could and do do are a fraudulent abuse of history.