OPINION:
The Washington Times opened a recent editorial on the Democratic Socialists of America by comparing the movement to a Nuremberg rally (“Comparing the DSA to the Tea Party is obscene,” Web, Aug. 7).
Perhaps that works when you are preaching to the converted. But it does little to persuade anyone else. Once you reach for Nazi imagery, readers who are not already with you stop listening. What follows begins to sound less like argument than performance.
And there is an argument worth making.
The Tea Parties sought to pull the Republican Party toward limited government and fiscal restraint within the existing constitutional order. The DSA’s 2026 platform goes considerably further. It calls for abolishing the Senate and subordinating the presidency and Supreme Court to a unicameral legislature.
That is not conventional reform. It is a fundamental redesign of the separation of powers and it deserves serious scrutiny.
But the Times editorial didn’t stop there.
It summoned Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson as guardians of American tradition, then accused the DSA of hating our history because it believes that America was shaped by slavery, oppression and exploitation.
Jefferson owned more than 600 human beings during his lifetime. Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act. I grew up in the Florida Panhandle when the law still told me which water fountain was mine.
Recognizing those facts is not hatred of American history. It is knowing American history.
The editorial warned that taxpayers will become “slaves” of immigrants. Slavery is not a synonym for paying taxes to support policies you oppose. Using the word as political hyperbole cheapens the history the editorial claimed to defend.
There is a stronger conservative case available. Government-run grocery stores raise legitimate questions about efficiency and taxpayer risk. Fare-free transit is not free. Expansive public childcare requires workers and sustainable funding. Dismantling constitutional checks and balances deserves vigorous opposition regardless of who proposes it.
Those arguments require evidence and trade-offs. They might even persuade someone who doesn’t already agree.
Predicting “re-education camps” and “secret police” won’t.
Perhaps persuasion isn’t the point. Perhaps the point is to reassure people already convinced that the other side is not merely wrong, but dangerous.
If so, the editorial succeeded.
But preaching to the converted is not argument. It is applause.
RAY WATFORD
Hilliard, Ohio
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