The Gallup Poll reports that a majority of Democrats, 53%, have a “positive” image of socialism, which includes independents who lean toward the blue party.
Only 17 percent of Republican and GOP-leaners hold socialism in a positive light. In total, more than one-third of Americans, 36%, have a positive image of socialism.
Also viewing socialism positively: 61% of liberals, 39% of moderates and 20% of conservatives.
Really, the whole "We're not Socialists" thing has been one of the more asinine components of American politics for awhile. I ran a bookstore Washington DC for years and I saw firsthand what sorts of things "Democrats" and "liberals" were buying, and it wasn't anything supporting classical liberalism. It was socialist garbage like Howard Zinn or Neo-Marxist insanity like Hardt and Negri's Empire . In the universities it is "Democrats" and "liberals" that are pushing socialists/communists like Alinsky or, even worse drivel, like Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
And, I'm not talking about the fringes here. Socialist ideals, of the Fabian or state socialism variety, have become the norm over the last two decades. It's true that in the 1990's you still had a core of Democrats who held basically liberal belief systems that individuals could run their own lives largely free of the state's "help." Clinton's welfare reform, for example, had this belief at its heart. Today, however, such a belief in entirely absent from the leadership of the Democratic party. When the President makes speeches like the SOTU where he is constantly referring to himself, "I this" and "I that," it is not an expression of narcissism as some on the right would have folks believe, but instead an expression of Obama as the leader of a government that will use its power and expertise to "save" us from ourselves. Relocating the central concern of politics away from the choices of free individuals in favor of the role of the state is socialism.
If you don't like it, then believe something else.
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