If elected, Bernie Sanders wouldn’t be America’s first socialist president [View all]

[cal04]

From the Revolutionary War, to the New Deal, to Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, American socialism is nothing new


(snip)
First, socialism and capitalism are not mutually exclusive concepts. Senator Sanders will tell you as much. When he advocates for Nordic-style social democracy, he isn’t talking about capital-S “Socialism” of the kind that inspired so much McCarthyist paranoia in mid-century America. He’s talking about European economies that essentially operate on the free market (under reasonable government oversight), serving a populace than enjoys robust social-welfare programming.

(snip)
Even Republican presidents have enacted socialist projects. President Dwight D. Eisenhower (in office 1953-61) continued the post-World War II GI bill into peacetime, which is often attributed for creating the much-talked-about mid-century American middle class, the men and women who drove the economy into hyperdrive. He also created the Interstate highway system, a perpetuation of the New Deal, and enforced Brown v. Board of Education, a landmark case in the fight for equal access to public education for African Americans.

(snip)
John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Harry Truman—they all demonstrated socialist politics in some form or another (and were often accused of big, red Communism as a result).

In short, socialism vs. capitalism is, and alway has been, a false dichotomy. It’s a specter raised by anti-regulation, libertarian types to drum up public antipathy for government oversight. It’s language that cleverly stokes the embers of Red Scare. But, as history indicates, social welfare and free-market economics have operated side-by-side in America for centuries. And that isn’t likely to change.

chart at link
http://qz.com/534368/if-elected-bernie-sanders-wouldnt-be-americas-first-socialist-president/