That "SOSHULISM!" thing you Repukes keep blabbering about? Er, no one cares.

[HughBeaumont]

Really, should Conservatives be continually bringing up this boogeyman? Never mind all of the existing services (that our tax dollars pay for) that I and many others pointed out in many previous threads. Never mind that many of them use these services and are completely oblivious to that fact. Never mind that 94% of them have never experienced even a liberal government or economy, much less a supposed "socialist" one, to even know the difference.

Does this antiquated "boogum" even strike a chord with the majority of voting Americans any longer?

http://www.clevescene.com/cleveland/a-conservative-eulogy/Content?oid=1567519

Here's another Code Orange News Alert for all you indignant conservatives bellowing "socialism!" Guess what? That term has zero emotional significance for anyone under the age of 45. Cold war? Russia is no longer an evil superpower but another country that can be seen from the shores of Alaska. Time, my aged darlings, has marched on. You have not.

[BOSSHOG]

1. I'm really impressed with these patriotic conservative citizens. Imagine

they provide their own police and fire services, pave their own roads and maintain them, take care of all their household sewerage output, and apparently maintain their own armies and navies. That might get a little crowded but they just glow red, white and blue. They are just the fucking salt of the earth.

[tridim]

2. They've already blown their entire -ism wad

They've tried Socialism, Communism and Fascism and so far nothing has even come close to sticking.

[theoldman]

3. Jesus practiced Communism and Socialism.

What was good enough for Jesus is good enough for me. Thanks to Socialism I was able to retire. My SS is small and the HMOs are not the best but it surely beats nothing. The bottom line is that right wing Republicans are stupid.

[BrklynLiberal]

4. Excellent article in Sunday Time Magazine about "Soshulized" Society in Holland

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/magazine/03european-t.html?pagewanted=all

<snip>

Then there are the features of European life that grate on an American sensibility, like the three-inch leeway that drivers deign to grant you on the highway, or the cling film you get from the supermarket, which clings only to itself. But such annoyances pale in comparison to one other. For the first few months I was haunted by a number: 52. It reverberated in my head; I felt myself a prisoner trying to escape its bars. For it represents the rate at which the income I earn, as a writer and as the director of an institute, is to be taxed. To be plain: more than half of my modest haul, I learned on arrival, was to be swallowed by the Dutch welfare state. Nothing in my time here has made me feel so much like an American as my reaction to this number. I am politically left of center in most ways, but from the time 52 entered my brain, I felt a chorus of voices rise up within my soul, none of which I knew I had internalized, each a ghostly simulacrum of a right-wing, supply-side icon: Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, Rush Limbaugh. The grim words this chorus chanted in defense of my hard-earned income I recognized as copied from Charlton Heston’s N.R.A. rallying cry about prying his gun from his cold, dead hands.

And yet as the months rolled along, I found the defiant anger softening by intervals, thanks to a succession of little events and awarenesses. One came not long ago. Logging into my bank account, I noted with fleeting but pleasant confusion the arrival of two mysterious payments of 316 euros (about $410) each. The remarks line said “accommodation schoolbooks.” My confusion was not total. On looking at the payor — the Sociale Verzekeringsbank, or Social Insurance Bank — I nodded with sage if partial understanding. Our paths had crossed several times before. I have two daughters, you see. Every quarter, the SVB quietly drops $665 into my account with the one-word explanation kinderbijslag, or child benefit. As the SVB’s Web site cheerily informed me when I went there in bewilderment after the first deposit: “Babies are expensive. Nappies, clothes, the pram . . . all these things cost money. The Dutch government provides for child benefit to help you with the costs of bringing up your child.” Any parents living in the country receive quarterly payments until their children turn 18. And thanks to a recently passed law, the state now gives parents a hand in paying for school material.

<snip>

There is another historical base to the Dutch social-welfare system, which curiously has been overlooked by American conservatives in their insistence on seeing such a system as a threat to their values. It is rooted in religion. “These were deeply religious people, who had a real commitment to looking after the poor,” Mak said of his ancestors. “They built orphanages and hospitals. The churches had a system of relief, which eventually was taken over by the state. So Americans should get over ‘socialism.’ This system developed not after Karl Marx, but after Martin Luther and Francis of Assisi.”

<snip>

[MisterP]

5. the USSR's shattering has, ironically, allowed Marxism to come out of the closet in the US

Britain's been cool with Red intellectuals (E.P. Thompson) since the 60s, but most Americans were split between "fight the Devil's Earthly Domain" (GOP) and "fight the expansionist Muscovites" (Cold War Dems). After 1991, the neoliberals and techno-utopians prophesied a glorious Millennium--but reality walloped them over the head in the 90s and with the 2001 crash (the end of welfare as we know it doesn't help people "get on their feet," it just leaves them vulnerable when the Good Times stop rolling), and all they're left with is Tony Blair and Marshall Herff Applewhite Ray Kurzweil. Turns out the "backward" Derrida's Specters of Marx and Whipping Boy Nader were more right than many would like to admit.