> And Socialism presents zero threat to the republic these days, while fascism is unfolding daily
I think if you're saying "current administration bad" then fine, but that doesn't seem to be to do with this topic. I'm saying you could say "current administration acting like the USSR" and achieve the same thing with the same list, is my point.
Socialism gave us Walter Ulbricht, Erich Honecker and a wall splitting the country. The 5 days working week was introduced in the West in 1965 under a conservative government. It took 2 years longer for the socialist East to do the same. A 40 hours week was never achieved by Socialism but was only introduced after reunification.
The word Socialism might not mean the same for everyone.
Edit: Before you downvote read Webster's definition I posted further down. To be clear, I don't believe the conservative government of Ludwig Erhard would have introduced the 40 hours week out of their own good will. You can read about the union's campaign here: https://www.planet-wissen.de/geschichte/deutsche_geschichte/...
> The 5 days working week was introduced in the West in 1965 under a conservative government.
And the government just decided to do that out of the kindness of their hearts?
There was years/decades of agitation and pressure by labour to bring the idea to the forefront of people's thought.
> The rallying cry of the 19th-century labor movement was “Eight hours labor, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest,” a phrase first coined by Robert Owen, a Welsh textile manufacturer turned labor reformer.
[…]
> The next big push came on May 1, 1886, when Chicago unions and political activists called for a nationwide “May Day” strike for the 8-hour day. More than 10,000 people gathered in Chicago for what was supposed to be a peaceful demonstration. Tensions escalated between strikers and police, resulting in the death of four demonstrators. In response, rioters and anarchists took to the streets on May 4, a violent clash that ended with a deadly bombing in Chicago’s Haymarket Square.
In the US, Labor Day is in September, but for the rest of the world it is called May Day and celebrated on May 1, which was decided at the Second International socialist conference:
Again, socialism might not mean what you think it means, especially in other parts of the world.
Let me give you an example in English.
Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary from 1981 [1] gives the following definition of socialism:
"1: any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods
2 a: asystem of society or group living in which there is no private property b: a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state
3 : a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done"
That is the entire entry. Only later other meanings have been added to it.
The word has been abused, especially in the US, as a label for anything that protects worker's rights or tries to keep the social chasm between rich and poor at bay. Even entire countries that are actually very capitalist like Sweden have been mislabelled "socialist", either because of ignorance or some weird political agitation.
So no, Socialism is not what gave us a 40 hour workweek, but the political engagement of unions and of those who believe that unchecked capitalism is not a good idea. If you believe those people are socialists, you might want to ask yourself whether you have fallen for some kind of propaganda that tries to paint those ideas in a bad and dangerous light.
> Again, socialism might not mean what you think it means, especially in other parts of the world.
Whether it is "socialism" or progressive or whatever label you want to use, just because a conservative government just happened to have passed some legislation does not mean it was a conservative idea.
See also Nixon and the EPA:
> Still, Brinkley said, Nixon was one of the nation's four greatest environmental presidents. The historian's short list also included Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. Whether or not Nixon cared about the issue, Brinkley said later, is another matter. According to Ruckelshaus, not only did Nixon not care about the environment, "he wasn't [even] curious about it." Even Reagan had more interest in the subject, he remarked.
> Nixon's lack of interest notwithstanding, "he had to do something about it," Ruckelshaus says, "because the public demanded it." Nixon took office just in time for the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969. An offshore well in the Santa Barbara channel blew out eight days after his inauguration. Pictures of oiled seabirds made TV news and newspaper front pages all over the United States. That June, Cleveland's Cuyahoga River — or at least the oil and debris floating in it — famously caught fire. Clearly the images of those disasters had impact, but were they responsible for the popular uprising that made Nixon an environmental President?
> That’s not to say that Nixon personally embraced the environmental movement. He did not campaign on environmental issues, and, privately to Henry Ford II, he worried, vividly, that the movement wanted humans to go back to living like “a bunch of damned animals.” But despite his ideological differences with aspects of environmentalism—and unease with it—he presided over the biggest expansion of federal environmental protections ever.
> One way to explain this is that Nixon’s presidency coincided with a groundswell of environmentalist fervor, with membership in the Sierra Club tripling between 1965 and 1970, and the share of the American electorate believing that pollution was a serious problem going from one-third to 70 percent during that same period. So, while the tension between businessmen and “tree huggers” existed during Nixon’s time, there was nothing to be gained politically from exploiting it: Environmentalism was popular, and Nixon responded to the moment.
> Whether it is "socialism" or progressive or whatever label you want to use, just because a conservative government just happened to have passed some legislation does not mean it was a conservative idea.
I never said that. Maybe you should re-read my posts.
And also you might want to stop your American navel gazing. Whatever Nixon or whoever said about some EPA or whatever is totally irrelevant to what I said.
And that kind of American navel gazing is exactly part the issue I raised. Americans throwing around words like socialism without having even the faintest clue about the historic relevance of the word to other parts in the world. And Americans believing some of their local political issues need to be steamrolled across the rest of the world.
