Rahm Emanuel, the former Chief of Staff for President Barak Obama and now Mayor of Chicago, is worried about socialism. Of course, he’s a proponent of redistribution and collectivist initiatives such as socialized medicine. He just thinks it’s bad politics.

He believes too many Americans aren’t yet keen on overt socialists running for office.

According to Emanuel, Democratic candidates and operatives should distance themselves from using the word “socialism” and find other ways to describe their agenda.

If they don’t, they may lose in 2020. He thinks President Donald Trump is vulnerable, but not if Trump and other Republicans can pin the socialist label on Democrats and use the candidates’ own rhetoric to do it.

Emanuel drafted a March 10th editorial in The Atlantic outlining the danger for Democrats. He writes:

Earth to Democrats: Republicans are telling you something when they gleefully schedule votes on proposals like the Green New Deal, Medicare for all, and a 70 percent marginal tax rate. When they’re more eager to vote on the Democratic agenda than we are, we should take a step back and ask ourselves whether we’re inadvertently letting the political battle play out on their turf rather than our own.

If Trump’s only hope for winning a second term turns on his ability to paint us as socialists, we shouldn’t play to type.

Emanuel knows a direct assault on America’s pro-freedom values being waged by many of his party’s rising stars is no way to win an election.

But he takes care to ensure the ideologues in his party don’t misunderstand him. He isn’t criticizing their values:

That’s not to say Democrats should abandon our priorities. We should work hard to combat climate change. We should fight to expand health-care coverage and reduce costs. We should find ways to make the tax code more progressive.

Emanuel thinks Democratic luminaries, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, really need to be more careful about what they say out loud, in public. Otherwise their political adversaries will find it child’s play to link their ideas to all of the other times and places they have been tried and failed.

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