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The comment you're answering to cited "Canada, Australia, England and Argentina". None of these nations has anything to do with communism. What the propaganda h

The comment you're answering to cited "Canada, Australia, England and Argentina". None of these nations has anything to do with communism. What the propaganda has created is the idea that anything that isn't Reaganomics means Socialism which mean Communism which means murdering millions of people.

vidarh 11y ago
Incidentally, and I've mentioned this before, the complete tone deafness of the US right in this question is pretty much directly responsible for making it possible to have productive debates with Americans about socialism again. When even Obama - a conservative not much left of Reagan, that not that many years ago could have fit into the Republican party politically - was repeatedly accused of being a socialist there was a watershed. More and more the response was a "well, I kinda agree with Obama, so if he's a socialist, why do they say it's bad?" curiosity. The only reason it didn't backfire far worse was that there was no strong social democrat or socialist political organization ready to benefit. But I strongly believe that the only reason Bernie Sanders is getting any kind of hearing this election campaign is that the right laid the groundwork by making the term "socialist" socially acceptable again amongst large groups of the US public They overplayed their hand massively, and legitimated discussions of socialism by making the category so ridiculously over-broad that they defined people into it and forced those people to re-evaluate socialism rather than re-evaluate their own viewpoints. It's a truly classic failure to understand the psychology of propaganda that deserves treatment in university courses on psychology: You don't win a propaganda war by saying "these viewpoints you agree with makes this guy you're considering to vote for a [insert label believed to be offensive here]". You win propaganda wars by disassociating your opponent from the views of his base and presenting yourself as the protector of the same views. The right way to have fought Obama was not to label him a socialist, but to upstage him and paint him as unwilling to go far enough, and twisting the mechanism to fit whatever they'd wanted afterwards. It's not like this is a new strategy: Specifically within the context of welfare and healthcare, it was first used by Bismark in the 1880's, leading to the first welfare state, but at the same time both shoring up the German state by undermining support for revolutionary socialism, and establishing an insurance system that persists to this day that avoided a nationalisation of the entire system. Instead they walked right into what may turn out to be one of the largest political own goals for decades.

vidarh 11y ago

Incidentally, and I've mentioned this before, the complete tone deafness of the US right in this question is pretty much directly responsible for making it possible to have productive debates with Americans about socialism again. When even Obama - a conservative not much left of Reagan, that not that many years ago could have fit into the Republican party politically - was repeatedly accused of being a socialist there was a watershed. More and more the response was a "well, I kinda agree with Obama, so if he's a socialist, why do they say it's bad?" curiosity. The only reason it didn't backfire far worse was that there was no strong social democrat or socialist political organization ready to benefit. But I strongly believe that the only reason Bernie Sanders is getting any kind of hearing this election campaign is that the right laid the groundwork by making the term "socialist" socially acceptable again amongst large groups of the US public They overplayed their hand massively, and legitimated discussions of socialism by making the category so ridiculously over-broad that they defined people into it and forced those people to re-evaluate socialism rather than re-evaluate their own viewpoints. It's a truly classic failure to understand the psychology of propaganda that deserves treatment in university courses on psychology: You don't win a propaganda war by saying "these viewpoints you agree with makes this guy you're considering to vote for a [insert label believed to be offensive here]". You win propaganda wars by disassociating your opponent from the views of his base and presenting yourself as the protector of the same views. The right way to have fought Obama was not to label him a socialist, but to upstage him and paint him as unwilling to go far enough, and twisting the mechanism to fit whatever they'd wanted afterwards. It's not like this is a new strategy: Specifically within the context of welfare and healthcare, it was first used by Bismark in the 1880's, leading to the first welfare state, but at the same time both shoring up the German state by undermining support for revolutionary socialism, and establishing an insurance system that persists to this day that avoided a nationalisation of the entire system. Instead they walked right into what may turn out to be one of the largest political own goals for decades.