War on socialism will fail
By E.J. Dionne Jr.
Columnist
February 10 at 6:50 PM
... Socialism goes back a long way in the United States, and it has taken doses of it to keep the market system alive.
Going back to the late 19th century, Americans and Europeans, socialists and liberal reformers, worked together to humanize the system’s workings and to find creative ways to solve problems capitalism alone couldn’t. This has been well documented in separate books written by historians Daniel T. Rodgers and James T. Kloppenberg. “The New Deal,” Rodgers wrote, “was a great, explosive release of the pent-up agenda of the progressive past.”
Think about this when pondering the Green New Deal put forward last week by Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y). It’s sweeping and adventurous. There is virtually no way it will become law as long as Republicans control the Senate and Trump is president. And if something like it eventually does get enacted, there will be many compromises and rewrites.
But there would be no social reform, ever, if those seeking change were too timid to go big and allowed cries of “socialism” to intimidate them ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-war-on-socialism-will-fail/2019/02/10/b6fe3a6a-2be4-11e9-b2fc-721718903bfc_story.html?utm_term=.4d682c62bdc8
