Robert Reich's Bluesky posts today

[JHB]

2. The Right won the War of the Word, it seems, by calling everything they don't like "socialism"...

Last edited Fri Dec 26, 2025, 02:20 AM - Edit history (1)

...and persons who should have been pushing back against that framing had other priorities.

Once upon a time, conservatives/RWers had to keep their freakishly expansive RightWingonese definition of the word among themselves, because they'd look like loons if they said that among normal people. But that was back when there was an obvious counterexample: the big country on the other side of the world with "socialist" right in its name. To most people, what they did was socialism, so calling anything we did by that name was just nuts.

Then the Soviets fell, and they responded by pushing that definition more and more, to the point where that freakish definition is apparently the general usage.