AMERICANS WANT "SOCIALISM"! They just don't know it...

Many Americans have been brainwashed to the point of mistaking LIBERALISM for SOCIALISM, or even worse, thinking SOCIALISM is FASCISM.
This ignorance has lead to the misinformed, prejudicial and damaging reluctance to embrace liberal policies (proposed mainly by Democrats), which would otherwise be happily accepted by the majority.
Not a surprise considering how prone conservatives (most of them Republicans) are to cuts in the education budget to have some extra bucks for the army, or their own bank accounts.

Evidently the dirty work of mislabeling and defamation has worked so well that conservatives themselves really want what they incongruously claim to abhor :
Based on surveys and studies by professors at Duke and Harvard, THIS REPORT showed that over 90% of AMERICANS WOULD PREFER A COUNTRY WITH THE WEALTH DISTRIBUTION OF SWEDEN, and that people are highly IGNORANT regarding the degree of inequality of today's wealth distribution in the USA.
Concepts haven been so muddled up ("...the far right, for instance, has succeeded in promoting the myth that **liberalism equals socialism equals big government**", Steve Kangas), that people fanatically argue against what they don't even understand. The country is full of people who "...only embarrass themselves by attacking an ideology, only to discover they can't even define it" (Steve Kangas).

"In general, the only thing that unites liberals and socialists is the belief that corporate totalitarianism should be avoided. But they differ on how to make businesses more socially responsible, and uninformed critics who lump the two together should not be taken seriously" (Steve Kangas).

The difference between socialism and liberalism was magnificently expressed by Winston Churchill in a speech LONG time ago, but that's hardly an excuse for our society to have forgotten it:
"... Liberalism is not Socialism, and never will be... there are immense differences of principle and of political philosophy between the views we put forward and the views they put forward ... Liberalism has its own history and its own tradition. Socialism has its own formulas and its own aims. Socialism seeks to pull down wealth; Liberalism seeks to raise up poverty. Socialism would destroy private interests; Liberalism would preserve private interests in the only way in which they can be safely and justly preserved, namely, by reconciling them with public right. Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference. Socialism assails the pre-eminence of the individual; Liberalism seeks, and shall seek more in the future, to build up a minimum standard for the mass. Socialism exalts the rule; Liberalism exalts the man. Socialism attacks capital; Liberalism attacks monopoly".