Socialism!

Matt Yglesias offers an appreciation of the Gotha Program:

Points one through seven seem a bit airy, rhetorical, and overblown but the final point, point eight, seems reasonably solid to me ... This program was, at the time, known as “socialism” and deemed by many to be unduly radical. Nowadays, of course, I take it that universal suffrage, free education, a ban on child labor, a progressive tax code, and a (two day!) weekend seem a lot like conventional wisdom. I’ll leave the implications for today’s political controversies as an exercise for the reader.

It's worth reflecting, from time to time, on how even our modestly ambitious brand of social democracy here in the United States was, once upon a time, considered to be out of the question. But the major programatic policies of the German Social Democratic Party in the 19th century are considered to be the status quo today. Nobody who supported these policies would be considered, by the sane, to be a socialist.

So when you hear people tossing around "socialism" as an epithet these days, just remember what socialism has brought us in the past, and consider what it might offer in the future.

As I said to a student yesterday, I get more Scandinavian by the day.