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Things that make you go "hmm.." 🤔
(lemmy.nz)
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this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2026
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FDR wasn't a democratic socialist and was only a social democrat by our current absolutely fucked standards but sure whatever everyone just lies about everything anyways why not.
They're not lying so much as they just don't know what those terms mean. They don't know what socialism is, or what the difference between social democracy and Democratic socialism is.
All they hear is "government does good things and must be socialism of some kind."
To be fair to people in the US, this is because Bernie and all who followed have referred to themselves as DemSocs when they're SocDems. As someone who studied PolSci this has annoyed me since the beginning, but at this point it's too far gone to do anything about it.
That's about where the political vocabulary in the US stands. 10 years ago, supposedly educated journalists were calling Bernie Sanders a democratic socialist. When asked about it I wish so hard that he said "no, I'm a social democrat, but for most people that distinction isn't important right now", but he leaned into it and here we are.
Yes clearly nomenclature is our biggest problem rn
Considering the brainless, knee-jerk demonization of words without comprehension, I think nomenclature is actually a really damn big problem these days:
Democratic Socialist is mostly a U.S. centric (post) Cold War era term, designed to work around red scare propaganda. Older references I have been able to find are mostly either French mistranslations of social democrat (the grammar has a different word order) or intended as adjectives (socialists who are democratic).
In 1944 it would have been considered a distinction without difference.
From my understanding, both Social democrat and Democratic socialist were interchangeable terms at one point, but eventiay came to mean 2 different ideologies.
Democratic socialist are socialist. they want to bring about socialism under a democratic system.
Social democrat want to apply socialist principals to the existing democratic, capitalist framework. Examples of this would be the Scandinavian countries.
“Democratic socialists” are just called “socialists” in places where they do not have to contend with red scare propaganda. Almost all European countries have or used to have socialist parties.