It’s widely agreed that Bernie Sanders fell short in the Democratic primary because he described himself as a socialist. As a movement, socialism has never had mass appeal in America. Even at its strongest, in 1912, it garnered fewer than one million votes for presidential candidate Eugene Debs, who was trounced by Woodrow Wilson. More often, Americans have used the word ‘socialism’ as a synonym for communism, to signify everything America doesn’t stand for. Pundits put Sanders’s failure down to his attempts to give the word a positive spin. On the other hand, a dispassionate glance at American history shows that Uncle Sam has already gone a long way down the road of democratic socialism.
Every American state decrees that all its children shall be educated at state expense, no matter how rich or poor. The idea began with Horace Mann in Massachusetts back in the 1830s, and eventually caught on nationwide. The principle of responsible citizenship, established during the War of Independence, specified equal opportunity for all, which would be meaningless if some citizens grew up illiterate.
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