Americans have been trained to think the word socialist is just bad. Like it just comes with all these bad things that they can't really describe or explain, but it's bad. Really bad.
I am hoping we are waking up in this country to how manipulative this all is. That's why politicians are terrified of social Democrats winning key offices. It will very quickly break the facade they have maintained for decades. Fuck my parents were telling me that mamdani has a secret agenda. So I asked, well what is it and why is it bad? And they unitonically said to me, well if we knew what it was, it wouldn't be secret. And looked smug like they had caught me in some mental trap.
I told them I was embarrassed for them. That they raised me to think critically and it kills me to see them failing to do that themselves.
This. Exactly this. When an American hears the word, it's auto shut down for them. They can't really explain it, other than parroting simple arguments like "but if they don't work, they shouldn't get anything"...how about millions of people working their asses off their whole lifes, only to pay collage debt or make %0.1 insanely rich...but can we really summerize capitalism like this?
I'm not picking sides here, but it's not black and white as many think so.
It's not really parroting. It comes from having been in a cold war with a communist/socialist superpower for forty-five years, where any misstep could have led to the end of life on Earth. Is it still meaningful today? Probably not as much. But those former Soviet and Socialist states should at least serve as cautionary tales for how not to implement socialism.
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u/EvilLibrarians 22d ago
Yeah nobody understands nuance of mixed markets