Why America Is So Scared of Socialism.

And why we shouldn’t be.

I’ve only followed two other elections besides the 2016 election. That was in 2008 and 2012. I am seventeen years old and I will be able to vote by the time the general election rolls around. I first heard of Bernie Sanders when he announced his campaign for the Presidency. I was absolutely enamered by the things that he was saying. I thought that it was amazing that we had a candidate that raised all of his campaign finances through donations of one hundred dollars or less. In fact, one of the key slogans of Bernie’s campaign is, “Paid for by Bernie 2016, not the billionaires.” His self proclamation of his socialistic ideals also really hit home with me, but this is also why many believe Sanders is not electable.

I’ve always noticed that the term socialism was very misconstrued. It’s just that term that you never put very much thought into learning anything about because, from birth, you learned that it was wrong. Socialism is Stalin and Mussolini. Socialism is affiliated with Nazism and the KGB and not a Democratic Oligarchy like the United States. At some point in time, I began to learn that socialism was none of those things. I believe this was during the passing of the Affordable Care Act and the absolute hell that ensued.

Socialism, or communism, was a Utopian solution to the Capitalistic abuses that people were dealing with, leading up to and during the Industrial revolution. This Utopian solution was proposed by Karl Marx. The World Socialist Movement describes socialism as,

Central to the meaning of socialism is common ownership. This means the resources of the world being owned in common by the entire global population.

Socialism is what created Finland’s world class education system. Socialism is social security and universal health care.

People tend to wrongly associate socialism with other countries. North Korea is called the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. But, I do not believe anyone for a second would associate democracy with North Korea. The same goes for the “Communist” Party of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was not communism. It was plain and simply a dictatorship. I am saying this because one of the main reasons people seem to be so scared of socialism is because they believe it is synonymous with the likes of the Soviet Union and a dictatorship. It is easy to fall for these falsehoods that are not familar with us. As we can see through North Korea’s sly misconstrued association with democracy easily, it is much harder with that of Communist Russia. I believe this is because the United States government is a “democracy”. We tend to know what a democracy should look like.

I believe that Bernie has the right ideals to bring our country in the right direction. And I don’t think America’s misunderstanding of socialism should prevent him from doing so.