this post was submitted on 31 May 2026
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According to Helen Cox Richardson, socialism was a thought-stopping buzzword as far back as the antebellum 19th century as objectionable because it was about giving benefits to the poors who owned nothing and therefore deserved nothing. The US has been about the preservation of hierarchy from the beginning despite the alleged promise of the American dream, an honest day's work for an honest day's pay.
We've only begun to develop fundamental infrastructure and social safety nets for the public since FDR's New Deal, and that still didn't include women or blacks until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and Women's Lib in the 1970s.
All the while, the industrialists who supported Hoover were super sore about the New Deal and have been striving to gut those programs from day one, even though the US thrived with them in place in the 1950s and 1960s, our ownership class wanted to own everything, and to Hell with the worker class.
They got their in-road with the election of Reagan, thanks to Falwell's Moral Majority and the US evangelical movement (an early white Christian nationalist movement) uniting behind a single issue: abortion access. They didn't care about Reagan's gutting of social services, deregulation of businesses (who'd already shown they can't be trusted to self-govern), and the normalization of corruption in politics. They were just terrified that women were (allegedly) killing their own babies.
Anyway, Communism and socialism got a bad rap thanks to the USSR which was an honest effort at command economics during Lenin's rule, but got trashed by corruption with Stalin. It didn't help that since Wilson, the US and Europe had been sanctioning the Soviet Union just for trying to do a communism.
And, sometimes in the name of containment the US would seek to sabotage any other efforts at socialist democracy, first with CIA subterfuge and sometimes with military intervention.