Everywhere I listen to Alaskans discussing Bernie Sanders, I hear socialism confused with communism and mistaken for the dictatorships that claimed to be socialist. I am not a fan of Sanders, but I understand he admired dictators when he mistook them for socialists. Castro, Ortega and Chavez called themselves socialists and used the label to fool their people. Let’s not be fooled.
Look at the word. Its root is social. Social as in society. Socialism is simply a way to organize society in a social way. Socialism is government among ourselves, for ourselves, for everybody.
Socialism is compatible with capitalism. Capitalism is the accumulation and management of means to produce and to continue to produce wealth. The purpose of wealth is to distribute goods and necessities in the most socially beneficial ways. In a social society, the economy is shared equitably.
Sanders is an ideologue. Elizabeth Warren is more capable than Sanders. He is a visionary. She is a planner and a thinker. In the United States, neither Sanders nor Warren will be able to make a power play to pervert our sociable nature into submission. Either of them will play by the rule of law, by the checks and and balances written into the Constitution.
The real danger to our social contract, our agreement as neighbors to look out for one another, is Donald Trump. He is anti-social. His government is an oligarchy on the way to becoming a dictatorship. He deliberately sows chaos in order to keep us apart. His idea of making America great is to return us to the greedy capitalism of the the 19th century.
Let’s be social and move ahead into the kind of government that unites us. Getting along and taking care of one another is the way to finally make America great. This is what is intended by the so-called socialists of our times when they say “socialism.”
— John Welsh
Sitka
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