With all due respect to my fellow Americans, most of us simply don’t know that a “liberal/progressive” is not the same thing as a “socialist.”
A true “socialist” is someone who wants all of the businesses and workplaces to be owned and controlled by “the state” or “the government” or “the workers” or “the people” and not by individuals and groups of people who run them for profit as we have here in the United States.
The overwhelming majority of Democrats want our federal government to spend more on social programs to help the lower and middle classes as they struggle to survive and pay their bills. They are not “socialists. They are “liberals/progressives” who want our market-based capitalist economy to become more humane (and not replaced) by having our federal government spend more to help the lower and middle classes.
They know all too well that there has never been a truly “socialist” society in which socialism produced enough wealth to meet people’s basic needs. It has never “worked.” Thus, while most Americans seem to not be aware of this, and while conservative-Republicans and the conservative news media do not want the American people to be aware of this, most Democrats want our federal government to be more like those of almost every one of our traditional allies which spend more than we do, in proportion to their population sizes, on helping the lower and middle classes.
None of our allies are “socialist,” and they know it.
To put this simply, President Trump and the conservative news media who are calling Democrats “socialists” are either lying to the people, or are poorly-informed and just plain wrong.
Stewart B. Epstein
Rochester, N.Y.
