So the point of this thread is to get some insight on socialist attacks by many Americans. It sounds like to a lot of people, socialism is just a boogy man word, you call something socialist then it’s automatically invalidated despite it’s merit. So how do you combat this? Do we just say fuck it and call ourselves socialists like Bernie did? Or do we try to pussy foot around the socialism term?
Say you’re arguing with someone about why America should transition into a mixed or public healthcare system. They could even agree, privatized healthcare systems aren’t good, but when you bring up M4A their immediate reaction is, nope thats socialism it’s bad. Does the conversation just end there, and they’re TFG, can’t reason someone out of something they weren’t reasoned into? What do you say to someone who just demonizes everything thats aimed to help people, protect consumers, workers, etc… as socialism. Is there even a conversation that can be had, when someone is hung up on the socialism boogyman? Should the focus to be to convince people why socialism is good in some cases, or should it be to focus on the merit of the actual topic, such as a single payer system like bernie’s M4A bill?
What this usually boils down to is, “the government can’t do anything right”, “big government is the problem, we need less government”, even when it comes to topics like Healthcare, the immediate response by most right wingers is “big government is bad!”, or “it’s socialism!!!”. Why are so many Americans hung up on this, why do no right wingers understand that the government does some things better than the private sector. Such as running the healthcare system, fire departments, or military. How do we take right winged voters who hate anything that expands government, or is “socialist” in nature? Is it possible to frame the healthcare conversation in a way that “big gov is bad” or “its SOCIALISM” doesn’t come up? Is there a way to reason someone who gets caught up on these trigger words out of their irrationality?
When people don’t like something, they will naturally latch on to the bad examples of something rather than the good examples of it. And you can find good and bad examples of almost anything.
That being said, the responsible thing for democratic socialists would be to 1) acknowledge that Venezuela is indeed a failed case of socialism, and 2) explain why their plan for America ***isn’t ***Venezuela.
Interesting question. On one hand, Venezuela may not be the place to be right now. On the other hand, according to the 2019 Happiness Index, the happiest country in the world is currently Finland. The largest political party in Finland is the Social Democratic party, which is, sure enough, a member of the Socialist International, etc.
I have a real problem with the term “socialism.” When you add up all the deaths caused by socialism in Russia, China, Cuba, by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, North Korea, East Germany you get somewhere between 100-150 million people killed in the 20th century. This is a lot more than the Nazis (who btw were right wing Nationalist Socialists.)
So, I find the term alarming and am surprised anybody would want to associate with the idea in any form.
“socialized healthcare” reads to me, like we are going to replace our expensive faulty healthcare system with an incredibly corrupt, more inefficient, centralized one, that will concentrate power in the hands of evil oligarchs that will use it wield arbitrary power and control over the populace turning us into slaves.
Can we maybe get a proposal for a healthcare system that doesn’t borrow from Stalin?
You’re right, “National Socialist” = not a cool name.
“Social Democratic Party” (or Socialist party) = still OK. I mean, not to the right wing, but you can still call a party that these days and even win elections.
Venezuela seemed to be doing pretty good at first when they became “socialist”, but once oil prices plummeted so did their economy, they had little investment in agriculture and infrastructure, not many markets, and not a very diverse economy.
From my understanding of people who actually live in venezuela, many of the socialist policies or proposals were just to drum up support and get votes, not a real intention of making the country better or improve peoples lives.
I think if you’re going to blame venezuela’s economic problems on socialism, you need to be specific about what socialist policies you’re talking about.
That’s pretty much always the case (or at least that’s the conservatives perspective on the matter). I regularly hear criticism that the dems are just trying to “buy votes” with their latest give-away to the poor.
If you want to refute / defeat / win the arguments against big government / socialism, you need to do government better. If people didn’t routinely have the first-hand experience or hear second-hand stories about how every government entity from the local zoning board to the alphabet soup federal agencies have royally fucked over some typical American families / small businesses, big government / socialist programs wouldn’t sound so terrible to so many people. Clean up the VA, kick the corrupt bastards out, make the EPA less of a PITA, etc. and then you’ll find a receptive audience when you want to expand the size and scope of government. When people are filled with dread at the thought of going to the DMV or having to interact with a law enforcement agency, they’re not going to want to empower .gov bureaucrats to do more of anything.
The concentration of power in the hands of those who ran the state, aka the government, under the oh-so-noble sounding pretense of helping the people is what led to the deaths of those 10s of millions. That’s what makes socialism dangerous. It’s a sugar coated poison pill easily peddled to those ignorant, willfully or otherwise, of human nature, history, and economics.
The concentration of power in the hands of one or a few people tends to lead to deaths, and it doesn’t really matter whether those people claim to be socialist or anti-socialist or something altogether different. Pinochet’s Chile killed more people than Allende’s Chile, although the latter was the socialist regime; czarist Russia lacked the organizational skills and machinery to be as brutally efficient as Stalinist Russia, but it wasn’t thereby any more benign to those opposed to the government of the day.
Countries with strong democratic institutions can protect individual rights and freedoms no matter what kind of economic policies they implement; countries that don’t, can’t. Commodus, reigning in Rome in the late second century, was at least as nutty, ruthless, and corrupt as Hitler or Mao; his death toll is so much smaller only because the second century didn’t offer the same logistical support for mass murder as the twentieth.
Government healthcare actually predates any communist government, so I don’t see why it would be an issue. Say what you will about Otto von Bismarck, but the guy definitely was NOT a socialist.
Ah yes. When someone proposes something like universal health coverage for citizens, we skip right past Canada, Great Britain, France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, and literally every other first world country out there and go right to being the Soviet Union with gulags right around the corner.
They must know they’re full of shit because they know if they said “Socialism!? Do you want to be like Norway/Germany/Canada where human life has value?!” people would say “uh… actually… that sounds pretty good”
Almost every “socialist” proposal in the USA would be considered weak tea, barely left at all in the rest of the civilized world. But these people rely on pretending that the rest of the civilized world doesn’t exist, that we’d be conducting some craaaaazy experiment that could not possibly go well and could only end up like the Soviet Union or Maoist China.
It’s not an argument in good faith, and it’s not worth arguing with people who do not argue in good faith.
Exactly. With all these examples of successful and wealthy countries with overly socialist programs for health care and other things, it’s patently ridiculous to use the spectre of failed authoritarian and klepto-states like Cuba and Venezuela.
American socialists want to be more like Canada. Those who disagree should engage on this ground - what’s so scary about Canada? Why is Canada so terrible, and how would Americans be harmed by similar policies? Using Cuba and Venezuela is not making a good faith effort to engage the actual argument.
Looking at this from outside, this seems to be the core of the issue. Heaven knows we have boneheaded “computer says no” jobsworths in plenty of government jobs (notably in immigration control and social security, though the perception depends on one’s prejudices). But, for example, most of us have no problem with our DVLA, so it sounds very peculiar when your DMV is a go-to example of bureaucratic incompetence and inertia.
And when it comes to our socialised NHS, we don’t see it as "government’. True, funding depends on government’s overall budgeting, but I think most of us still see it as all of us doing our bit to help those of us who need medical care. That the money goes through government to get from us to the doctors and hospitals doesn’t lessen the sense that it’s a direct connection between us and the NHS. It’s ours, not any given government’s (AIUI Americans can feel the same way about Medicare). It’s part of the social contract, not just a matter of individual service transactions.
I think another factor might be what seems to me, as an outside observer, the tendency among your legislators to use primary legislation to micromanage public services to a degree that would be unthinkable here. Having the executive directly embedded in and accountable to the legislature can mean that MPs can get more effective influence over how public services are run, more quickly, by treating administrative questions separately from the instinct that “there ought to be a law”.
Both problems were diagnosed and treated promptly. (I even had an ambulance trip once the blood test came back with the sepsis.)
Since the UK has a ‘socialist’ approach and I’m a pensioner (aged 66), all treatment was free.
I paid taxes all my working life, which is how the NHS is funded.
I spoke to an American friend about my remarkable experience.
She said:
the treatments I had (MRIs, Ultrasounds, blood tests, two operations, two stays in hospital etc.) would have cost an American at least $250,000
since the NHS was ‘socialist’, the US system was superior. :smack:
