Welcome to From Insults to Respect.
This election cycle many Republicans have been hard at work attempting to insult Democrats by referring to them as socialists. This appears to be due to recent victories in primaries by candidates who refer to themselves as “Democratic Socialists,” along with approximately 50% of U.S. voters viewing socialism unfavorably.
But labor unions and socialism are interconnected through their shared goals of improving workers’ rights and conditions. Therefore, it may be puzzling why such a large percentage of U.S. citizens have such negative views of socialism since most are laborers under contract with business owners.
The negative view of “socialist” appears to me to be due to several countries that refer to their form of government as socialism when they limit freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and their leaders are authoritarians.
The problem with associating those countries with the U.S. form of Democratic Socialism is that in the U.S, central to our form of government is our constitution that guarantees for our citizens these freedoms. The Republicans are attempting, by their throwing the socialist descriptor at Democrats, to mask this enormously important distinction.
When a democratic socialist proposes some way to improve the working conditions of labor by, for example, providing free health care to all, it must first be debated by our elected officials, and then the majority of them must end up voting for it. If the intended positive outcome ends up being negative, the change can be modified or overturned by a democratic vote.
Currently in the U.S. the enormous wealth of owners of big business are terribly shortchanging our laborers. This is the reason for the recent increase in popularity of the democratic socialists. They are not socialist in the sense of many of the countries that call themselves socialist–they are social democrats that must abide by the U.S. Constitution. Personally, I would respect Republicans a whole lot more if they didn’t climb down into the gutter with this misleading socialist talk.
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Some people will enjoy reading this blog by beginning with the first post and then moving forward to the next more recent one; then to the next one; and so on. This permits readers to catch up on some ideas that were presented earlier and to move through all of the ideas in a systematic fashion to develop their emotional intelligence. To begin at the very first post you can click HERE.
