what is socialism?

With all the screams of "socialism" by the McCain camp, a thoughtful electorate might shake its heads and move on, or perhaps use this as a teaching moment. I have yet to believe we have such an electorate, but who knows?

If you are of a certain age, when history was still taught in American schools, you know that socialists believed that the "means of production" should be owned by the people, not by private interests. Railroads, mines, utilities, banks, insurers — it's a very 19th and early 20th century concept (unless you're the Bush administration and Hank Paulson). Real socialism also never took hold in America, not even in the Great Depression. For one thing, it was co-opted by the Progressives and the New Deal. Socialists weren't communists. The two detested each other.

Europe saw the evolution of social democracy, which combined a large welfare state and activist government with democratic freedoms — this is pretty much the governing model in much of the EU today. In America, you could probably fit all the true socialists into a mid-sized tavern or faculty lounge.

No, when wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III and his running mate, the unqualified and dangerous Sarah Palin, yell that Obama is a "socialist," they're not giving a history lesson. They're engaging in soft McCarthyism.