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August 25, 2020 Socialism can be extremely difficult to pin down. It's not that socialists have difficulty explaining themselves, it's that they very seldom talk about socialism. The confusion comes from the harping of conservatives. They are forever saving mankind from socialism. It's about like saving people from the green Martians. Conservatives explain socialism like they explain the green Martians. Here's some detective work on the meaning of socialism to conservatives. The harping often gets to the homeless with a focus on heroin addicts. Supposedly, the liberals created the homeless and heroin problem. How come conservatives don't have that problem solved? Homelessness was created in the late seventies (that's 1970s, for the x,y and z generations), while heroin addiction has been around longer than the historians. Yet Reagan, Bush, Bush and Trump have done nothing to end those problems. They seem to expect the liberals to do that for them. The failure of liberals to solve those problems is at the center of the socialism that conservatives harp on. Socialism is implicitly the reason why liberals didn't solve those problems and might have even created them. Was Carter a socialist in kicking off the homeless problem? (Carter was an extremely conservative Democrat who refused to sell wheat to Russia because of its invasion of Afghanistan and ended an irrigation project after a mile of the canal had been dug during the Ford Administration.) The real kicker in revealing what conservatives consider socialism to be is in saying the socialists are making us slaves to the homeless and heroin addicts. Socialism is what enslaves us to the conservative version of dregs. (Disclaimer. I have existed in homeless shelters in the past, perhaps tainting the view of what conservatives consider dregs to be.) Socialists enslave us to dregs, according to conservatives. What would not being enslaved to dregs be? Would it be the method that Reagan, Bush and Bush used to deal with the dregs? If there is a difference there, it doesn't seem worth mentioning let alone creating the basis for politics. So we have to read between the lines to see what conservatives are saying. They try to pretend that too much money is spent on socialism to a point of bankrupting governments and burdening tax payers. But the amount isn't even rounding error in government spending. However, conservatives imagine a welfare system at the bottom of society which is where their money is disappearing. There never has been a welfare system for adults in the U.S. There was Aid To Dependent Children, until it was abandoned during the 1980s, because Reagan said it was creating "welfare queens." It was costing about $80 billion per year at that time—not even sneeze money to conservatives when stoking corporations with tax payer largess. In other words, the problem is pure psychology with no relationship to objective reality. Conservatives are fighting a war against the lower classes and all vulnerable persons including immigrants, minorities and losers. The why encompasses all of morality and psychology but nothing in politics.
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