Capitalism Needs Socialism to Work—Which Is Why Bernie Is So Popular [View all]

[Ferd Berfel]

http://www.alternet.org/economy/millions-now-understand-capitalism-needs-socialism-work-which-why-bernie-so-popular

Millions Now Understand That Capitalism Needs Socialism to Work—Which Is Why Bernie Is So Popular

Sanders' vision of democratic socialism is just capitalism with a safety net.

Three short years ago, the idea of a major candidate in a presidential election openly describing himself as a socialist would have seemed unthinkable. President Barack Obama had entered his second term and the Democratic Party had won the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections not by running to the left, but by campaigning mostly from the center. In 2013, “socialism” was still a dirty word in American politics. But that was before Bernie Sanders ran for president and before polls showed the word socialist taking on an increasingly positive connotation among millennials in the United States. The word is still rejected by most strategists in the Democratic Party, but in 2016, it at least gets a seat at the table in the marketplace of ideas.

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Context is important. When Sanders describes himself as a democratic socialist, he is referring to democratic socialism as practiced in Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Italy,

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Sanders is not anti-capitalist, and the economic views he identifies with are not those of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara or Vladimir Lenin, but those of President Franklin Roosevelt and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Capitalism needs a certain amount of socialism in order to function well: when Americans are broke and unemployed, they have less ability to make the purchases that keep companies in the black. And at the same time, a social safety net needs successful free enterprise and entrepreneurs to contribute to the tax base.

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Let's not forget that 'trickle down' was a lie and fraud pushed by the 1%