Political Discussion and Commentary

America is a capitalist nation. The Republicans openly support it. The Democrats less openly support it.

Socialism breaks the mold, it evens the playing field for everyone - people part of the establishment will always oppose it.

I thought Democrats embraced socialism.

Democrats, the party and politicians, no. Not even close. As much as Fox News would love you to believe that.

Democrats, the voters, much more so. The majority of people in the US are like you. When presented with actual socialist policies, they're on board. But most people are also not engaged enough in politics to recognize that the Democratic party doesn't actually believe in socialist policies, they just vote for "the left". Or, they do recognize it, but feel that they have no better options.

For generations, Americans have been raised to believe that socialism and communism are the same thing, and that they're not only bad policy, but actively un-American and evil.

Helping people is woke.

Every transaction has two sides.

If a politician says we can't afford something, what that really means is they see they would be paying for it, not being paid for it.

In short, current admin is corrupt.

Liberals hate progressive more than they hate the GOP. But this way Democrats keep saying every election is the most important election in our lifetime. They still expect the vote blue no matter who, so Democrats want nothing more than to have the progressive fall in line.

I hate it here. I want off this ride.

1 word: pluralities.

Democracy and Capitalism are inextricably linked in American politics. 'Democratic Capitalism' is the predominant social and economic culture.

Changing the capitalism part is as revolting as changing the democracy part.

And that's without trying to disambiguate Social Democracy from Democratic Socialism.

Nothing.

The main potential problem of democratic socialism is that it can fuel a sort of populist policies, where politicians promise all kinds of benefits to the voters. The politicians who promise and implement those things only get the benefits (votes and power) and never have to answer for the problems (e.g. inefficient and expensive structures that were perhaps not needed at all) they create. It's always the cleanup crew (the politicians who are responsible and implement austerity) who get the blame.

Like almost all things in this world, democratic socialism can also be great if it's implemented well. For instance, well-funded and well-planned public schools can be awesome for the whole society, both the poor, the rich, and everyone in between. But that requires skill, intelligence, hard work, all of which are scarce resources.

I thought Democrats embraced socialism

There is no time in the history of the US Democratic Party that they embraced socialism as a party.

Democratic Socialism

This is not actually the same as socialism. It's confusing, I agree. The closest comparison is to "social democratic" parties in Europe, which offer expanded government programs but leave capitalism intact. The simplest definition of socialism is "when the workers own the means of production" (with "means of production" being things like factories, farms, etc. Any business, really). The Democratic Party has never pushed for that and Mamdani is not pushing for that now.

Swede here, if we compare the two political parties in the US to the Swedish political spectrum, the Republicans would be far to the right of even Sverigedemokraterna, the Democrats would be center-right.

What the US calls the left side of the political compass is nowhere near the actual left on a proper political compass.

The US badly needs a new voting system, the current one promotes stagnation and I can't see it ever having more than two realistic choices again.

Democrats aren't socialist but there are socialists who are democrats. The majority of the party are beholden to big donors just like the Republicans and view anything even remotely socialist as not only a threat to their donors but a threat to their position in the party.

The democrats are melting down over Mamdani because he might cause a wave of socialists primarying them.

They are also melting down because the main attack they used against Mamdani - calling him an antisemite when he's really just an anti-zionist - had zero affect. This is huge because it's been a tried and true tactic to use against socialists most famously in the UK against Corbyn.

The DNC are just republican lite, madini upsets thier status quo, aka center right, so not even on the left. the voters may support DS, but the politicians dont at all, all that money that comes with being like the gop is too god to miss.

Are you joking or seriously asking, I am not joking it is hard to tell genuinely.

Simply put, he's not on their team and as mayor of New York it's a good amount of power and if he wins there it'll encourage more and suddenly they'll have less chums in positions they like and won't get what they want done

Democrats, democratic socialism and socialism are all different things. The Democratic party has different objectives from Democratic socialists. Perhaps it would be helpful to label Democrats as the "center moderate" party, democratic socialists as "left and the Republican party as "fascism".

The quick answer is that the Democratic Party isn't socialist. Socialists work against the interests of capitalists and guess who the Democratic Party takes a lot of money from? The few socialists or democratic socialists that try to run through the Democratic party are fighting an uphill battle and are only doing so mostly because the two party system makes it impossible for 3rd parties to win in most cases.

This has always been the case, but what might cause this confusion is that the Democrats appeared to favor more socially oriented policies in the mid 20th century with The New Deal and The Great Society. But the thing to understand about that is:

• Despite creating some social spending programs, they kept capitalists in power.
• They never stopped doing the other part of capitalism: Imperialism.
• There was a lot of pressure from outside the government. Unions were stronger. The Great Depression was the greatest crisis capitalism had seen up until that point, and the success of communist revolutions in other countries could have shown the American working class a different path forward.

In the 90s, with the Soviet Union dissolved and the power of unions thoroughly gutted, the Democrats under Clinton did a realignment to the right. Clinton famously passed welfare "reform" (read: gutting it) calling it "an end to welfare as we know it." Clinton entered us into NAFTA, a trade deal that helped facilitate corporations moving production to other countries to exploit cheaper labor. He passed the Crime Bill which is credited with being a huge contributor to mass incarceration. Etc.

Since then Democrats have looked a lot more like Clinton than FDR, and even FDR wasn't a socialist. So yeah, the people who helped take things away from the working class aren't super thrilled about someone who wants to take some of that stuff back for us.