Modhat: Attack the post and not the poster please.
This is just a guidance, not a warning. Nothing on your permanent record.
The reasons to rename socialism would be that it polls poorly, and also that it can be misunderstood due to the old meaning of government ownership of industry.
Liberal was renamed progressive for only one reason I know of — liberal polled poorly.
I wonder if anyone has evidence on whether the renaming of liberalism to progressivism worked politically.
“Jeez, things aren’t changing as fast as I want them too so I’ll take my ball and go home” is not a productive outlook. It’s a work in progress and many things have changed for the better in recent decades.
Or we could sell it on an honest basis. In other words, that it’ll mostly free people from worries over lack of coverage and individually going bankrupt to pay out-of-sight health care costs - but that overall health care spending probably won’t be much different than it is now (it may even increase substantially under federal oversight) and many won’t be as happy with single-payer (at least initially) as they are with their current private plans.
But honesty is virtually never the way politicians sell their ideas.
I don’t care about polls, they don’t have an impact on what I support and believe in. And after this last election, a lot of people are going to trust polling a lot less anyway.
And socialism never meant government control of industries, that is just the propaganda that the government has been spreading all throughout the Cold War. Socialism is the collective ownership and control of the means of production by the workers themselves - it is inherently democratic in nature. It’s about the workers as a whole reaping the benefits and profits instead of a few capitalists who own all the capital that the workers need.
That must sound wonderful to you and utopian maybe but to a large number of Americans that sounds anti-American.
I’m old enough to remember when the Unions were out of control and mad with power. Strikes all the time, industry fled the country. Socialism is a hard sell to those that remember the 70s.
You’re not going to win with posts like yours. You need to win incrementally. Start with improving Health Care and other safety net programs. Understand it will take decades to get to where you want to go and any hint of revolution will cause a huge backlash.
Workers, no one dreams of being a worker. They might dream small of being a skilled employee, professional or small business owner or dream big of being a senior officer in a large corporation or a major politician. Who dreams of being a 1/5000th owner and worker of a steel plant?
Then single payer is a champ because the phrase is inherently dishonest. In almost every single payer system, anyone who can halfway afford it buys supplemental insurance.
Most universal health care systems have competing insurers. Why this obsession with a type of system that goes against American traditions?
With Medicare, I absolutely need two insurers. With the British or Canadian system, I would want it.
With the German, or Swiss, or Dutch, or, dare I say, Israeli, system, I could choose a competing plan that comes fairly close to my needs.
Destroying Blue Cross would not be as popular — or pleasant — as most here seem to think. No, I do not work for them 
Which is great! The taxes on that help pay for the public (bare-basics) plans. It’s win/win/win! People get the rock-bottom care they need, and can (free market!) get fancier, prettier care if they can afford it. It’s how all those other countries make it work, and it’s wonderful! It would certainly work here!
Incrementalism gets us nowhere, it is usually just empty promises that never come to fruition. It just keeps our society in perpetual stasis and people end up suffering for much longer. And with the threat of global climate change at our doorstep, policies like Green New Deal are essential. There absolutely cannot be any incrementalism there!
The American Dream is dead, and has been for a while. We millennials and the zoomers have realized it was just a lie to pacify us with false hope so the few that can achieve that dream can reap the benefits. The fact is that actual capitalists are few and far between is proof of this. It’s a casino where the house always wins.
Because most of our “traditions” need to be done away with. A tradition isn’t useful if it keeps you in barbarism. It’s just an excuse to why we can’t be as advanced as other first-world countries.
That’s why I support Bernie’s plan of complete coverage, where the government will pay for everything so supplemental insurance will become unnecessary. And it will lead to the abolition of private insurance, as vultures profiting off of human misery will become unnecessary as well.
Well, Climate Change is one that Progressives should keep championing. Far more people will rally behind not losing the coastal cities and half of Florida than will do anything but fight the collective ownership of industry. That won’t sell.
Green issues are tough fights but ones that can be won.
Health Care is another.
I think the problem is more fundamental than that single-payer is not being “sold” persuasively enough. The problem is that the idea – like many progressive ideas – faces a tsunami of lying propaganda from corporate powers, the wealthy plutocracy, and the millions of rubes who have been bamboozled by them. It’s the same reason that, until fairly recently, a majority of Americans had little to no concern about climate change, and many denied that post-industrialization human activities were the primary cause. It’s not that the majority of Americans want to see their livelihoods, their economy, or their very lives jeopardized by a dangerously changing climate, it’s that they’ve been fed a load of bullshit for so many years that they believed it. By the same token, most Americans are not lacking in compassion, nor in respect for efficiency, when it comes to health care. But they’ve been fed a load of bullshit for so long that words like “socialist”, “taxes”, “government regulated”, or (God help us) “government-run” are just automatically anathema to them. The problem, in my view, is not American ideology as such, it’s the problem of who controls public messaging in America, and the unlimited power of the moneyed classes to own the hearts and minds of the general public and use the veneer of a supposed democracy to further their own interests. You have only to see the widening disparity between the very rich in America and everybody else to see the truth of this.
Where can I find an economy that runs this way on a wide scale? I’m aware of things like co-ops, which I think can work in some situations. But I’m not aware of an economy that runs substantially on the kind of model you propose, and I don’t think it’s because anyone’s conspiring against such a system.
It is all worth championing and fighting for: Green New Deal, Medicare For All, Abolish ICE, Defund the Police, $15 Minimum Wage, Free Public College/Eliminate Student Debt and everything else we are fighting for.
Just because an idea isn’t popular, doesn’t mean you should give in and accept that there will be no meaningful change. Conservatives and liberals both want us to give up on our ideals and ideology, but that ain’t happening. I don’t care if it isn’t selling, I’m going to sell it anyway.
It doesn’t exist. And yes, it is because the capitalists don’t want such a system to happen. It would mean them losing all their power and capital and having to be just one of the workers. But for the workers it means they can produce without having their surplus value stolen from them by the few that own what they need TO produce.
Defund Police almost cost Biden the election. It is a stupid idea. Reform the Police would have worked a lot better.
$15 minimum wage is fairly safe.
Abolish ICE is a tough sell. Do you mean abolish and build a new agency or just forget about it. Allow everyone in if they can do it? Because that will never fly.
Free Public College is a tough sell but probably doable. Can it be tied to service? I don’t mean military but maybe some sort of works service to rebuild infrastructure, help improve nursing homes and other social programs?
Medicare for all, please keep fighting for it. And while fighting and losing for a while, increment increased coverage. Drop from 65 to 60. Then fight for 55.
Green New Deal (emphasize new American jobs created) is winnable but tough of course.
I have no intention of watering anything down to try to sell it better, but your input is noted. I don’t alter views that are important to me based on which way the wind is blowing. That’s what the Democrats do.
While how good it it depends on your age and income level, the Affordable Care Act ACA isn’t barbarism. From what I can see, it is often better than the Canadian or British system, or American Medicare .
Bernie has no secret sauce that the Canadian Liberals or British Laborites – who, when in power, have much more control over their legislature than is possible in the U.S. – lack. The only country I know of that has something like Bernie’s vision is Taiwan, and it works there, in part, because people don’t ask for more than the system can give (although each patient is different and, if there is an overworked Taiwanese physician on the board, they are liable to disagree). In Taiwan, they don’t do the record-keeping expected here, and doctors visits, except if your illness is life-threatening, are quite brief. Americans would not accept that. Also, Taiwan is another country where the legislature tends to be much more aligned with the executive than is possible in the U.S.
This does not mean I like for-profit health care, I don’t. The Netherlands (universal care, competing insurers) has been moving to force insurers to a non-profit model. While for-profit is not our most important problem, I would support forcing the for-profit insurers to re-mutualize, and also would discourage for-profit hospitals – after we get universal and improved ACA. .
That fine, stand by your convictions but also be realistic and no that you won’t win on most of them.
I use to be an angry young man, now I am just older and smoldering and happy to compromise.
There are individual companies that are employee-owned, but then some of those have essentially a similar top-down corporate structure with similar profit sharing. Then you have cooperative businesses and businesses with a more lateral structure; however this doesn’t seem to be the norm. I’m sure that conventional top-down capitalists have biases against these types of businesses, but I also suspect that running a cooperative has its own challenges, both at the start up stage and throughout the life cycle of the business.
Lol, really? A system where we give taxpayer money to private health insurers so they accept more people onto their crappy plans is nothing compared to the Canadian or British systems (which have their own problems, mostly due to their systems not going far enough). It is a band-aid on a gaping wound and needs to be replaced by something better ASAP. I benefitted from the Medicaid expansion part of it, but that was the only aspect of it I supported.