Most Americans Are "Democratic Socialists" at Heart

They left out some programs, such as the federal government's insurance of bank accounts.

The term "democratic socialism" is misleading. It's actually a mixture of socialism and capitalism, a way to make capitalism work w/o causing widespread misery and unfairness.

My experience is that most people are for programs that help them with situations they have personally experience.

Fiscal Times

By Jay Mandle, The Conversation
November 7, 2015

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decades of income stagnation have transformed political attitudes in ways that don’t appear reflected in Washington. A recent Marketplace-Edison poll suggests that though they might not know it, many Americans, at one time hostile to socialism, have become democratic socialists. Their socialism is not the version that called for the public ownership of the means of production. Rather, what they support are programs that reduce the risks that accompany life in a market society.

The survey, released late last month, asked a representative sample of Americans about their attitudes toward seven different “safety net” programs – the kind that characterize democratic socialism in Europe and are espoused by socialists elsewhere. As Bernie Sanders has put it: “20 years ago when people here thought about socialism they were thinking about the Soviet Union, about Albania. Now they think about Scandinavia.”

The results of that survey were astonishing in their consistency across age groups, gender and ethnicity. More than 80% of respondents supported unemployment benefits for people who have lost their jobs, food stamps for the poor, college assistance for low-income families and job training programs.

Only slightly lower levels of support were recorded for subsidies for health care benefits (78.2%) and for college tuition assistance to middle-income families (75.3%). The weakest level of support was for programs to help pay mortgages, but even here a majority offered approval (56.4%).

Yet we have a campaign finance system that makes it almost impossible for someone actually advocating socialist ideas to woo enough of the handful of donors with deep pockets necessary to win.

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