@MontereyJack,
MontereyJack wrote:
No, I'm sorry, but you are pushing the usual uber-conservative line that democracy is socialism. Doesn't wash. Has never washed. ZSince Joe McCarthy and Robert Welch, through Limbaugh and Coulter and Hannity and Fox and Friends, the right has refused to compromise and been the real haters. Remember Merrick Garland.
Democracy isn't socialism, but socialism can be pursued and pushed using the institutions of a democracy-oriented government, as well as by other means.
First of all, let's check and make sure we're both referring to the fiscal-transfer meaning of 'socialism.' There's also the socialism that's about pushing people to give up their resistance to submission to social/collective authority, but I assume you're talking about the fiscal-transfer meaning.
If so, don't you see that all sorts of methods are used to stimulate spending and fiscal stimulus by governmental policies, program funding to create jobs, laws that facilitate and protect non-governmental tactics to achieve fiscal-transfers, and so forth?
What these identity-politicking politicians are doing to facilitate socialism is as follows: they are simply using their fabulous identities to market support for their party's program, and a big part of their party's program is to dismantle resistance to subjugating the US economy to global socialism, which seeks to use it as a cog in its machinery.
The irony is that the Democrats used to be the party of stopping US jobs from being exported overseas and the Republicans were the ones who argued it was better for the overall economic greater good. The Democrats' response to that was that the 'outsourcing,' as it was called, may be good for the economy, but that it disproportionately benefited the rich while eliminating jobs for working/middle class people.
Now it seems they've figured out how to use global economic growth to their benefit, so they have abandoned the anti-outsourcing thing to Trump. They are still socialists, though; only now they want to do it by coordinating with global capitalism and making the growth/profits taxable to pay for all the stimulus spending and other social spending they do to redistribute the money before it has even been made.