Many of us suffer misconceptions about socialism, having been conditioned to the knee-jerk linking of it with communism. We know that Communist tyrants perverted socialism to control their citizen-victims. But socialism is primarily an economic, not a political system.
In American history, socialist influences go back to the 1790s when the great patriot Thomas Paine described a social security system, a system of pensions and social welfare supports for the elderly, the infirm, children and others who might otherwise suffer in extreme poverty. Thanks to labor unions, our democracy, during the 20th Century, put this economic system to good use, often in the face of brutal resistance by the forces of capitalism. Read your labor history.
Thanks to visionary socialist thinkers and decades of union pressure, our workplace is more humane than ever. Today we have sick leave, Social Security, minimum wage, child labor laws, 40-hour work week, 8-hour work day, overtime pay, sexual harassment laws, unemployment insurance, etc.
How we treat our children, our poor, our unemployed, our veterans, and our mentally fragile tells who we are and what we value as a people.