The perception, rightly or wrongly, in the rest of the world is that in the USA people go "OMG !!! IT'S SOCIALISM !!!! AAARRRGGGGHHHHHHHH !!!!" This is true, b

The perception, rightly or wrongly, in the rest of the world is that in the USA people go "OMG !!! IT'S SOCIALISM !!!! AAARRRGGGGHHHHHHHH !!!!" This is true, but only because most of the people decrying "socialism" don't understand that many of the things they support are also socialist. Both the right and the left are already fairly socialist in the US; Norman Thomas, who ran for US President on the Socialist Party ticket a bunch of times in the early 20th Century, was asked why he wasn't running again at one point and replied that the Republicans had embraced all his major platform points, and the Democrats were already beyond that, so he'd accomplished much of what he'd set out to do. I can't find this in a minute of googling, so maybe it's apocryphal. In any case, socialists on the right were discredited effectively everywhere by WWII, and in the US, socialists on the left were discredited by the collapse of the Soviet Union around 1990 and/or the (perceived?) near-collapse of Britain in the 1970s.