The bogeyman, haven't you outgrown this by now?

Today my local newspaper included an editorial about Nashville's transition to a single city/county, metro style government. To people in Nashville today it is just accepted as the way things are and, overall, it works pretty well. Fifty years ago it was hotly debated and created a fair amount of fear and animosity.

Opponents of the change tried to use a tactic to sway opinion against the change that is still in use today, the bogeyman. They compared the change in Nashville's government to something that filled two criteria, it had to be 1. widely hated and 2. something that very few people had any real understanding or knowledge of. This allowed the comparison to sound valid and frightening no matter how ridiculous it was. So the opponents of combining Nashville and Davidson County compared the new government to communism. Of course this form of government had nothing to do with Karl Marx or Vladimir Lennin, but saying that it was the same thing made people fear it because the only thing they knew about communism is that it was bad and if the new form of government was the same thing it had to be bad as well.

Today the insult isn't "communism" (unless you are Republican Congressman Adam West who claimed personal knowledge of many communists in the House of Representatives), no, today the insult is "socialism".

The word "socialism" is bandied about by Republicans like a 4 year old with a new toy on Christmas morning. They love this word and they love using it even though most seem to have no understanding of what it means. The ones that do know what it means still use it in completely incorrect ways as they know the value of the fear the word inspires is much greater than the value of the word itself. I wish they feared Americans actually researching what the word means so that they could see that it is just another economic system that can be used and mis-used just as capitalism can. There is nothing inherently evil about socialism and it is, in some ways, even more effective, dare I say better, than capitalism. Of course Republicans don't want you to understand this, they want to keep you frightened and afraid. They want to be able to treat you like a little child that will fall for anything, that is where their power lies, not in their ideas or concepts, but in their ability to inspire fear in those too lazy to do their own research. Don't fear the bogeyman, fear those who use him to control you.

Here's the article.