At a 2005 party for American Prometheus, Kai Bird’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, discussion about the great man, father of the atom bomb, turned toward his suffering during the Red Scare of the late 1940s and 1950s. He had come under official suspicion and was hounded for his communist sympathies and friends, some of whom were Soviet spies.At a point in this conversation more than 20 years ago, an English journalist said he did not understand why Americans won’t or can’t see socialism simply as one among many possible forms of government to choose from, but regard it instead as wholly incompatible with the idea of America.As uncomprehending as this statement was of this country, it also hit a truth: Few Americans at that time, and until recently, have seen socialism in the same way that most other places in the world see it. It has not been merely disliked more here than elsewhere, although that is the case, but recognized as poisonous to the air of American freedom we breathe. Socialism is toxic, and has long been understood to be toxic, to the political culture in which Americans have been formed for 250 years.
(Illustration by Jason Seiler for the Washington Examiner)
