Why Are US Citizens Terrified Of Socialism?
Pavlov would be proud of the degree to which propaganda has conditioned the US mind
Anyone who’s spent any time at all talking with US citizens who lean (or these days, waddle) to the right of the political spectrum knows that the easiest way to frighten them is to utter the word “socialism.” For people who watch Fox News and listen to ultra-right-wing shock jocks, the word socialism has the same effect as uttering the words Baba Yaga to any Russian-speaking child. Decades of relentless indoctrination has yielded eighty million US voters who fervently believe that the greatest evil in the world is socialism and that only their bibles and their guns and their loyal voting habits can keep the USA safe from this terrible scourge.
Amusingly, not a single one of these Republican-voting citizens has any clue what socialism is. Even small Russian-speaking children can offer some sort of description of Baba Yaga, but no Republican-voting “patriot” can do more than make strained choking noises when asked to describe what socialism looks like. This is because socialism, for Republican voters, is basically today’s version of witchcraft. Just as unscrupulous religious leaders used to terrify their congregations with the threat of witchcraft in order to control them and keep them firmly in line, so too…
