What Would a "Democratic Socialist" United States look like?

[ElChupacabra]

If the United States were a small, ethnically homogenous nation then Denmark or Sweden might be an appropriate comparison, but it's not. If the left gets that much power here then we're going straight to Venezuela or worse.

Canada fits the bill of a more diverse nation as do some European countries as well.

 

[LowDown]

Canada fits the bill of a more diverse nation as do some European countries as well.

Canada's not socialist. They have high taxes and a lot of government services, but they are basically a capitalist economy.

 

[ElChupacabra]

Canada's not socialist. They have high taxes and a lot of government services, but they are basically a capitalist economy.

Neither is Denmark or any of the other listed. The question is a matter of how much of balance goes to social programs for its citizens. The US is a mixed economy in that regard as well.

 

[LowDown]

Neither is Denmark or any of the other listed. The question is a matter of how much of balance goes to social programs for its citizens. The US is a mixed economy in that regard as well.

If it's just a matter of that balance then I have no problem with a democratically decided one. It's when the leftist goons decide that the people haven't gone far enough democratically, and democracy gets chucked, that it becomes a problem.

 

[ataraxia]

Here we go with the New Soviet Man style rhetoric.

No, it is not in our power to change human nature.

Appeals to "human nature" have almost always turned out to be just a front for resistance to cultural change. Historians, anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists, all agree that human nature is far more malleable than we think. What's difficult to change is culture and mindsets. That can take generations. But that's just about culture, not human nature.

 

[ataraxia]

If it's just a matter of that balance then I have no problem with a democratically decided one. It's when the leftist goons decide that the people haven't gone far enough democratically, and democracy gets chucked, that it becomes a problem.

Well right now we have a president where the majority of the people voted against. He got elected by a weird quirk of the contingent electoral system we have. Is that democracy getting chucked?

 

[ataraxia]

Canada's not socialist. They have high taxes and a lot of government services, but they are basically a capitalist economy.

Not too different from European countries, or other developed Asian countries. They all have basic, humane safety nets for their citizens. Why can't we?

 

[ataraxia]

This is likely the "Bluedog" or "Kennedy" branch of the Democrat Party.

I can't imagine this group still being large enough to be politically successful.

And they are definitely no longer represented by the new Progressive Democrat Party.

But I'm happy they're still around...Hopefully they can free the Democrat Party from the jaws of Socialism.

An Eisenhower Republican today would be labelled a communist by today's conservatives. Anyone not advocating social Darwinism and the 'natural freedom" of the law of the jungle is called a communist.

 

[Checkerboard Strangler]

The leftist do have a reason for "****ing over the country"...In order to fix it, they must first break it.

Remember the old adage "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"; well the left views anything that isn't Socialist, including the United States, as being broke.

Despite the fact that for the past couple hundred years, millions of people from all over the world have been drawn here to experience the American Dream.

Yeah but capitalism isn't BROKEN, it's just tweaked right now as an inverted socialism model, i.e. "trickle down economics", and the last four decades have proven that the working families in this country, the middle class, has been getting a lousy deal from trickle down when one compares what they had during the New Deal.

In the New Deal era, there were plenty of filthy rich people, and there were poor people, but even a minimum wage worker generally was able to make ends meet. No, they didn't have the latest fancy consumer goods, but they had food, medical care, access to education, a place to live and there was enough upward mobility that they were able to set goals to better themselves. And there were an enormous amount of decent paying jobs, skilled, semi-skilled and professional, that paid well enough to lift the average American out of poverty.

I was a starving student in Minneapolis in 1978, making minimum wage and going to school. My rent on a tiny bachelor pad was $110 a month but I was making about $350 a month maybe. That was enough for me to get by. Moonlighting a second job at night added another 200 bucks a month and suddenly I was doing well.
That's just one example but it's a valid one because you cannot really point to any minimum wage workers TODAY who can afford their own place to live and get by unless they live in a remote tiny one horse town. Even the tiniest, cheapest apartments in most parts of the country are out of reach.
Medical care consists of ER visits, and college is unaffordable. And most blue collar jobs are going away.

Capitalism is not broken, it is distorted. It can be fixed.
So you can prattle on and on and on about "what the Left wants" till the cows come home, but if you think you've struck a blow for victory, you have missed the point. The point is, when the average working family knows that they "have enough to get by", they don't even THINK about "socialism".

But instead of wanting to fix capitalism, you're hiding behind some paranoid screeching about encroaching socialism and the slippery slope argument about Communism, things which will NEVER happen in America.

You asked a question, you don't believe the answers, but worse yet, you're pretending that you don't even HEAR the answers, so in reality you never wanted to know the answer. You just want to hear yourself preach.

A democratic socialist America would actually be a social democrat America, which means it would look like FDR's New Deal Era, the time period when the standard of living in this country was the envy of the world.

And you're SCARED to admit that might be the truth.

 

[Checkerboard Strangler]

doesn't this whole Democratic Sociasm debate come down to one thing?
Government run health care?

Government RUN health care is a system in which the government builds and operates hospitals, and doctors are government employees.
The United States has a completely built and matured system of hospitals and clinics, and doctors do not work for the government if they run a private practice. Hence there has never been a need to operate a government run system.
The issue is SINGLE PAYER, and single payer PAYS private doctors and it PAYS hospitals and clinics.
MEDICARE is single payer. Medicare WORKS.

You have to understand the difference between these things in order to understand the issue.
And Democratic Socialism in America would wind up being a social democracy, i.e. FDR's America.
Americans aren't interested in "socialism", thus democratic socialists would wind being what they are in Europe, social democrats.

 

[Checkerboard Strangler]

would you care to expound on that?

https://www.debatepolitics.com/general-political-discussion/326969-would-democratic-socialist-united-states-look-like-post1068876759.html#post1068876759

 

[Checkerboard Strangler]

But? Do non-SD parties really have the power to unravel the deeply entrenched socialist power structure in Europe?

I didn't know Socialist would so easily cede power...Don't they have strategically placed barriers to protect their utopia?

Just look at the previous US election...The Democrats believed they were solidly entrenched after the Obama Presidency and even insured with the rigged system put together by his "Deep State" appointees.

Not to mention their ever-loyal Main Stream Media that promoted their lies and covered up their crimes while viciously attacking their political opponents; all of which continues to this very day.

After all this and despite their political rejection by US Voters, (according to results of a 100% legal election) here they are nineteen months later, still throwing a world-class tantrum!

Ooups; another one of my tangents...sorry Swede~ :giggle1:

Deep state? That belongs in the Conspiracy Theory section on DP.
I thought we were talking about the real world, not the right wing version of "chemtrails" and Flat Earth.

 

[Checkerboard Strangler]

The USSR just called itself socialist. It's propaganda. You fell for it.

Is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea really democratic? Do you get it now?

And Hitler used the term in his "National Socialist Worker's Party" for the same reason, it attracted worker support.
History shows what he did to worker rights, it wasn't pretty and it wasn't socialist.

 

[Checkerboard Strangler]

the rest of the first world isn't truly socialist, as the means of production have not been turned over to the workers. most of what Sanders was proposing has been status quo in other first world countries for decades. as for what has worked,

View attachment 67237560

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/quality-of-life-full-list

Like ANY president, even the most popular ones, Sanders would only get a fraction of what he proposed no matter what.
You have to deal with CONGRESS and Congress is made up of Democrats and Republicans, that is, liberals and conservatives, with most of the liberals being mainstream.

 

[Checkerboard Strangler]

Anyone who prefers Europe to us, I highly recommend that they leave and go there to live.

And anyone who prefers strongmen like Vladimir Putin, and the Russian way of doing things, I recommend Aeroflot.
They have flights leaving DAILY, we'll even set up a GoFundMe page for you guys!



Your hero will most likely flee there and stay come springtime.

 

[Checkerboard Strangler]

did you miss the first part of the post?

as for the "love it or leave it" bull****, i highly recommend that government minimalists move to Somalia. i will stay here and support progress and improvement.

 

[Checkerboard Strangler]

Oh please.

The only difference between a communist state and a libertarian state is whether the guy who rules over you is called a "Premier" or "CEO".

Libertarian state? I was trying to look up the libertarian countries, which ones are they?

The Republic of JohnGaltia?

 

[Checkerboard Strangler]

Whats the democratic socialist party?
Who is in it?
Whos pushing for it and what are they pushing for?
opcorn2:

I can tell you this much: They dissed Bernie when he announced.

"Yawn, what a sellout."

"Not a real socialist."

That's because they knew he was actually a New Deal liberal Democrat and not really a socialist.

 

[AGENT J]

I can tell you this much: They dissed Bernie when he announced.

"Yawn, what a sellout."

"Not a real socialist."

That's because they knew he was actually a New Deal liberal Democrat and not really a socialist.

thanks but that doesnt answer my question at all

 

[SonOfDaedalus]

An Eisenhower Republican today would be labelled a communist by today's conservatives. Anyone not advocating social Darwinism and the 'natural freedom" of the law of the jungle is called a communist.

I think the problem occurred because of the Cold War. The Russians called themselves socialists so that meant we had to be the opposite. That's how FDR's Second Bill of Right's died.

To make America great again we need to return to New Deal Democrats of the FDR era.

 

[Checkerboard Strangler]

I think the problem occurred because of the Cold War. The Russians called themselves socialists so that meant we had to be the opposite. That's how FDR's Second Bill of Right's died.

To make America great again we need to return to New Deal Democrats of the FDR era.

That's the era I grew up in, I know how good the New Deal was by firsthand experience.

 

[Helix]

Like ANY president, even the most popular ones, Sanders would only get a fraction of what he proposed no matter what.
You have to deal with CONGRESS and Congress is made up of Democrats and Republicans, that is, liberals and conservatives, with most of the liberals being mainstream.

it's going to take a while for the US to catch up to the rest of the first world when it comes to health care access, as well as in other areas. though i voted for Sanders, i didn't expect it to move that quickly even if he did win.

 

[Checkerboard Strangler]

it's going to take a while for the US to catch up to the rest of the first world when it comes to health care access, as well as in other areas. though i voted for Sanders, i didn't expect it to move that quickly even if he did win.

Of course it wouldn't.
That's why I laughed at all the people who were freaking out and saying we'd all be wearing hammer and sickle armbands and dancing like Cossacks on vacation in Havana.
Give me a freeking break!
Sanders would have faced monumental opposition from conservatives even AT BEST, even if all the Republicans were moderates like McCain or Goldwater.
And he would have had friction from Chuck, Nancy, the whole mainstream moderate Dem coalition.

I do think he would have managed to pull together enough support for some kind of watered down single payer system, like a partial Medicare-4-All.
Maybe community colleges would have gotten a shot in the arm so that they could offer more advanced 4 year curriculums, most likely a public/private partnership deal with the big tech firms, maybe.
Really, when you think about what presidents really actually GET when they finally get in the White House, none of them get more than a fraction of what they think they're going to accomplish.

And that's not altogether a bad thing all of the time either, because it is proof of the fact that we ARE a REPUBLIC.
We have representative democracy, not PURE democracy, but it functions inside the framework of a REPUBLIC, so things cannot "move too fast" unless there's some kind of global disaster or something on that level. Otherwise, the natural tendency of our legislative branch is to be slow and deliberative.
The problem is, we've become too VITUPERATIVE.

And Sanders has proven that he is okay with working with conservatives in the past. That's something too many people forget.
He likes to demonstrate that he's a consensus builder. You didn't see people in New Hampshire hunkering down for a red tide of commies coming in from Vermont, did you?

We have to talk in REAL TERMS, politics is the art of the possible. Bernie knows that. Bernie believes in that.
His biggest problem is that, in terms of his own personal identity and brand, he's too much of a sentimental old fool and he thinks that the "socialist" tag is very romantic.
But he's been a New Deal liberal Democrat since the day he first set foot on Capitol Hill, and that's not a bad thing, at least not in my book.
Watching him work with others in Congress proved that to me.

 

[Empirica]

An Eisenhower Republican today would be labelled a communist by today's conservatives. Anyone not advocating social Darwinism and the 'natural freedom" of the law of the jungle is called a communist.

I don't know very much about Eisenhower but I do find it hard to believe a two term US President and decorated WW2 Army General would create suspicion as to his loyalty by publicly espousing "communism".

Especially during the 1950s when those Commie Russians and the US were having a mexican standoff with hundreds of atomic ICBMs aimed at each other while America's school children practiced sheltering under their desks.

I'm pretty sure the Cold War created a lot of hate and suspicion among Americans for anything communist.

 

[Helix]

Of course it wouldn't.
That's why I laughed at all the people who were freaking out and saying we'd all be wearing hammer and sickle armbands and dancing like Cossacks on vacation in Havana.
Give me a freeking break!
Sanders would have faced monumental opposition from conservatives even AT BEST, even if all the Republicans were moderates like McCain or Goldwater.
And he would have had friction from Chuck, Nancy, the whole mainstream moderate Dem coalition.

I do think he would have managed to pull together enough support for some kind of watered down single payer system, like a partial Medicare-4-All.
Maybe community colleges would have gotten a shot in the arm so that they could offer more advanced 4 year curriculums, most likely a public/private partnership deal with the big tech firms, maybe.
Really, when you think about what presidents really actually GET when they finally get in the White House, none of them get more than a fraction of what they think they're going to accomplish.

And that's not altogether a bad thing all of the time either, because it is proof of the fact that we ARE a REPUBLIC.
We have representative democracy, not PURE democracy, but it functions inside the framework of a REPUBLIC, so things cannot "move too fast" unless there's some kind of global disaster or something on that level. Otherwise, the natural tendency of our legislative branch is to be slow and deliberative.
The problem is, we've become too VITUPERATIVE.

And Sanders has proven that he is okay with working with conservatives in the past. That's something too many people forget.
He likes to demonstrate that he's a consensus builder. You didn't see people in New Hampshire hunkering down for a red tide of commies coming in from Vermont, did you?

We have to talk in REAL TERMS, politics is the art of the possible. Bernie knows that. Bernie believes in that.
His biggest problem is that, in terms of his own personal identity and brand, he's too much of a sentimental old fool and he thinks that the "socialist" tag is very romantic.
But he's been a New Deal liberal Democrat since the day he first set foot on Capitol Hill, and that's not a bad thing, at least not in my book.
Watching him work with others in Congress proved that to me.

he wouldn't have been able to accomplish much, IMO, though he would have been able to sell the ideas better. the midterms would have probably been a wipeout red wave, as well. probably the same thing in 2020, as Democratic fatigue could have propelled someone like Paul Ryan to the presidency.

is that better than this Trump insanity? i don't know. it's mostly speculation.