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Showing Original Post only (View all)Democrats should counter the "Socialism" scare by committing to Social-Democracy. [View all]
Socialism is the control of all property by society as a whole.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
In theory.
In practice, it always ends up with some corrupt, self-appointed upper class being effectively in charge.
Democratic Socialism is the control of all property by democratically elected institutions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_socialism
In theory.
In practice, things can go economically really, really bad, because of the danger that incompetent people get put in charge by a corrupt government. Like in Venezuela.
Social Democracy is a capitalism that gets regulated by a democratically elected government to prevent it from verging off into economic and social injustice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy
In theory.
In practice, it's the system Europe has and it works great.
Never forget the 2014 midterms. The democratic candidates tried to have it both ways with the voters: Running as red-blooded Democrats while simultaneously distancing themselves from the democratic President.
The result? Nobody knew what they stood for and the Democrats were slaughtered at the polls.
The worst mistake would be for Democrats to run away from "social". Because their political platform is effectively "social".
Running away from your own political platform would be the mountaintop of stupidity.
Republicans use the term "Socialism" wrong, because what the Democrats want is not Socialism. They want a system that is basically the same the US has right now but more economically and socially just.
Instead of running away from "Socialism" and ceding the propaganda battlefield to the Republicans (like Elizabeth Warren does), Democrats must counter-attack and clarify that their ideas are Social-Democracy, not Socialism.
Social-Democracy, not Socialism.
Plus, social-democracy is more of a european thing. The Republicans can tingle the racist nerve of their voters by scaring them with latin-american socialism, but it would be harder to scare them with european social-democracy.