SOCIALISM SUCKS! SOCIALISM DOESN'T SUCK ENOUGH!

I'm back. Thank you, Yas, for some great work while I was away.

I just spotted this in my neighborhood:

This isn't unprecedented -- Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA and other right-wing groups like to sneak around and make their presence felt this way on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, after which they delude themselves into believing that they've successfully redpilled the libs. (They haven't -- Donald Trump got 12.3% of the Manhattan vote in 2020.)

But consider the slogan "Socialism Sucks." This is meant to convey the notion that liberalism (which is what right-wingers mean when they say "socialism") plunges its helpless subjects into a well of inescapable misery.

But what's really upsetting to the right about "socialism" is that, for ordinary people who've struggled through the pandemic, it doesn't suck enough:

An unexpected slowdown in hiring nationwide has prompted some Republican governors to start slashing jobless benefits in their states, hoping that the loss of generous federal aid might force more people to try to return to work.

The new GOP cuts chiefly target the extra $300 in weekly payments that millions of Americans have received for months in addition to their usual unemployment checks. Arkansas on Friday became the latest to announce plans to cancel the extra benefits, joining Montana and South Carolina earlier in the week, in a move that signals a new effort on the part of Republicans to try to combat what they see as a national worker shortage....

“More states are expected to follow,” predicted Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Tex.), the top Republican on the tax-focused House Ways and Means Committee in a statement Friday....

Or maybe the real point is that "socialism" is good, but for the wrong people. Despite all the pundit chatter about the Republican Party becoming the new home of the working class, this is old-school Republicanism -- exactly what Michelle Malkin meant in 2012 when she praised Mitt Romney, the party's presidential candidate at the time, in this sneering way on Fox News:

Romney types, of course, are the ones who sign the front of the paycheck, and the Obama types are the one who have spent their entire lives signing the back of them.

In economic matters, Republicans always regard the capitalists as the good guys. Workers are always the bad guys. Republicans may grumble about "woke capitalism" and piously proclaim that they'll no longer take corporate PAC money, but they still side with the owners any time the working class asks for (or actually gets) a break.