>>> Social Democracy Is 100% American <<<

[Triana]

. . .McCaskill said: “It’s not unusual for someone who has an extreme message to have a following.”

Extreme? McCaskill’s remarks indicate that we may be in more trouble than we thought. For some time we have feared that Republican politicians were losing their minds. Now it seems we must worry, as well, that Democratic politicians are losing their memories.

Clearly, McCaskill’s attack — which, to me, smacked of red baiting — was intended as a dismissal of Bernie Sanders’s candidacy based on the fact that Sanders, who has repeatedly won elections in Vermont as an independent and then caucused with the Senate Democrats, is a self-described “democratic socialist” or “social democrat.” And of course, we all know that social democracy is not just unpopular in the United States, it is un-American.

Well, think again. Social democracy is 100 percent American. We may be latecomers to recognizing a universal right to health care (indeed, we are not quite there yet). But we were first in creating a universal right to public education, in endowing ourselves with ownership of national parks, and, for that matter, in conferring voting rights on males without property and abolishing religious tests for holding national office.

But there’s even more to the story. It was the American Revolution’s patriot and pamphleteer, Thomas Paine — a hero today to folks left and right, including tea partiers — who launched the social-democratic tradition in the 1790s. In his pamphlets, Rights of Man and Agrarian Justice, Paine outlined plans for combating poverty that would become what we today call Social Security.

THE REST:

http://billmoyers.com/2015/07/03/social-democracy-is-100-american/

Author is on twitter: @harveyjkaye

[daleanime]

1. Hell yes....

[SoapBox]

2. Ditto...

Claire McCarthy can take a hike.

[Enthusiast]

3. K&R! This post should have hundreds of recommendations!

If you're a Democrat you will kick this, you will recommend this.

[PatrickforO]

4. Social democracy is common sense

How come when we ask for our taxes to be put to use on infrastructure, education, health care and other stuff that benefits us, we are considered some kind of fringe leftists.

Pretty good job over the last generation or so by corporate propagandists to twist it like that, eh?

[Triana]

6. Exactly. Been saying that since Bernie announced. Democratic principles...

... which Democrats themselves, most of them, seem to have all but forgotten.

"For some time we have feared that Republican politicians were losing their minds. Now it seems we must worry, as well, that Democratic politicians are losing their memories."

-Harvey J. Kaye

[newfie11]

5. K&R

McCaskill's is not someone I would want on my team! Dem in name only.

[joshcryer]

7. 100% necessary.

The US economy is going one way. It's just unavoidable.

[Scuba]

8. K&R

[raouldukelives]

9. K&R We have an opportunity to truly be the Greatest Generation.

And a Bernie shall lead them.

Seriously though, the world has faced no greater threat in our short existence than climate change. A threat that is now reality to those with eyes to see, ears to hear and throats to thirst.

Our Greatest Generation made the world safer for democracy. Gave us a second chance to make a better way, a more democratic world, in our image, and we did. We were just too blinded by greed to fully realize how ugly our true image has become. How awful our own threat to the world.

We can start righting some wrongs. We can maybe give Mother Nature a few more seconds of thought about letting us have a second chance. We can make an effort to retain the worlds animals and ecosystems.

I, for one, don't want the only trees our descendents ever touch to be in a museum and the only wild animals they will ever know to be stuffed alongside them.

If we fail, it all fails. If we succeed, we would truly be known as the greatest generation.

[TBF]

10. Bernie's ideas are not that novel -

should he be elected he is going to introduce programs that look very much like New Deal or Great Society. A pendulum swinging back after all the destruction of the Reagan/Bush years. Most Americans do not want to lose programs like social security.