re: #213 Nyet

This is a tactic used by your wingnuts to prevent any sort of state social responsibility. “If we have universal healthcare, we’ll be socialist just like USSR - remember GULAG?”. Bait and switch. Which is why associating welfare state with socialism is a bad idea even coming from the left. Capitalism can be made socially responsible without turning the whole system into a socialist one.

Also, this whole argument is nonsense. Republicans are going to call anything short of feudalism “socialist”, so there’s no point in trying to run away from it. And if you do manage to dissassociate those programs from the term “socialism”, they’ll just find some other angle of attack to whip their base into a frenzy over. It’s not the label they object to, it’s the idea. Did democratic ideas suddenly become more achievable because Democrats ran away from the word “liberal”? No, they did not. Running away from “socialism” will have roughly the same effect.

“Republicans will attack you” is almost never a compelling argument for not doing something. They’re going to attack anything worth doing.