If not "socialism", what should we call "spending tax dollars on things that help everyone"

[fishwax]

85. In the United States, the label of "socialism" has long been applied to any government intervention

It's a weird sort of tempest we're currently witnessing on DU regarding the definition of socialism. There is, on the one hand, a pretty standard academic/economic definition of socialism which involves public ownership of (at least some portion of) the means of production.

But that is not the way that the term socialism has generally been used in the United States in our cultural or political debates. For well over a century now, any form of government intervention in the economy or in the process of production has been labeled by its critics and by capital interests as socialism. This was true of, for instance, the minimum wage, which was attacked as socialism in the halls of congress and in newspaper editorials across the land. It was true of child labor laws and it was true of environmental regulations. Virtually any major regulation of industry has been resisted with the label of socialism. The label has also been applied to other processes which capital interests (or simply conservative sensibilities) have found distasteful, such as "socialized medicine" to attack publicly funded health care, or the attack on public schools as socialism.

As a brief aside, I'll note that there is some justification, even by the oft-cited dictionary definition, to call such things socialism. Regulation is, after all, a restriction of the rights of ownership, and as such represents a public intervention and public control over the privilege of ownership. But that's kind of an academic argument that isn't really necessary to delve into for the bigger picture, imo, so I'll leave it as an aside.

The larger point is that, in cultural and political usage, the term socialism in the United States has pretty much always been used to refer to the things that the "democratic socialist" wing is now in support of. For a long time, the primary reaction among those to the left of center has been to run from the label. There were a lot of reasons for this, and some of them were probably pretty good ones. But if we look around, the results haven't been particularly encouraging. When Harry Truman proposed introduced universal health care, he was insistent that it wasn't socialized medicine. The AMA called it socialized medicine. The proposal was defeated. You can see that pattern repeat itself again and again over the next six decades. Obamacare, too, was called socialized medicine, and while I don't think the president ever actually called it that, one of the big differences between Clinton's first term (which saw "socialized medicine" go down in flames) and Obama's first term (which saw "socialized medicine" actually enacted) is that "socialized medicine" (and "socialism" itself) didn't have nearly the pejorative power a generation after the end of the Cold War. In fact, most of the public *wanted* "socialized medicine."