I'm not sure when socialism became a dirty word. It's a bait-and-switch. Socialism defined in one way (collective ownership and management of the means of pro

I'm not sure when socialism became a dirty word. It's a bait-and-switch. Socialism defined in one way (collective ownership and management of the means of production) is anathema to almost all Americans and probably (I'm guessing) to most Europeans. Americans believe it's an inherently inefficient system leading to relative poverty compared to private ownership and competition, not to mention much less freedom. That kind of socialism is unpopular and indeed scary. Collective ownership and management of some fraction of economic output -- i.e., taxation and public spending -- is universally practiced throughout the world and nearly universally accepted (though in many cases the collective nature of management is just theoretical, with the majority of citizens having no say.) The genius of right-wing American scare pundits is to erase the difference between these things in the American mind, making "common sense" exceptions for some kinds of spending. Spending on the wrong things is "socialism." It's a flexible and pragmatic smear. Right-wing pundits and politicians have a lot of reasons for disagreeing with different kinds of government spending (some very sensible): it's inefficient, it takes from the deserving to give to the undeserving, it hurts poor people by making them lazy, it gives too much power to unelected officials, and so on. Whatever the reason for attacking spending, any bad spending is "socialism" and, being logically indistinguishable from full-scale authoritarian Socialism, might lead to it. (The focus on logical equivalences and consequences, and the fear that runaway logic can blow up a society the way a runaway reaction can blow up a nuclear plant, is reminiscent of arguments between parents and children. It makes more sense to be afraid of runaway sentiment, but they're not going to say anything bad about unfounded, immoderate emotion because unfounded, immoderate emotion is their business.) Thus, they can take any minor disagreement about the scope of government involvement between citizens in a stable, relatively politically homogeneous country (especially considering our remarkable diversity in other ways) into a clash of ideas between sensible conservative people (who closely resemble the average American) and card-carrying, bomb-throwing, society-subverting leftists, or their stooges who are too naive to realize the importance of the logical equivalence between taxation and collective ownership.