They (American conservatives) are so terrified of "socialism" (what they imagine when they hear that word) that they can be fooled into living under the grossest oppression and want, Royston. It isn't that they are particularly selfish people...most of them are not, except for the few very rich at the top. Most of them are as nice as people anywhere else and are good neighbours if you get to know them. It is just that they have been fooled all their lives by a few scare words that they don't understand.

To be called a "socialist" in much of the USA is about the same as being called a rapist, a pedophile, a Satanist, a murderer or a Stalinist in most places.

They have no conception of socialism as a democratic principle of a democratic society. In Canada we have a major political party that has always proudly labelled itself as socialist, and that does not scare the majority of people in this country at all. It is to that party and its most courageous leader, Tommy Douglas, that we owe our universal health coverage. Without him, we might never have got it, and certainly not as soon as we did.

When you can successfully convince a public that socialism is inherently evil and inherently opposed to both democracy and human rights, well...you could probably convince them of just about anything. It's stark ignorance, maintained by a constant flow of inflammatory propaganda, and where does that propaganda come from? It comes from a consortium of wealthy corporations, banks, and monopolistic lending institutions who care not one bit for the health or future of ordinary Americans...only for their own balance sheet at the end of each fiscal year. They pretend to be friends of small scale capitalism (local businesses), but they destroy small scale capitalism relentlessly and replace it with huge corporate monopolies. They are slaveoweners, and they do everything in their power to keep all the "slaves" thinking that they are free.

How is it done? Mostly through a flood of misleading TV advertising and programming, false feelgood images of a vanished small town American way of life that THEY destroyed and replaced with strip malls, and a few rabid political propaganda mouthpieces like Glenn Beck on radio talk shows and in advertising.

The foxes are running the henhouse, you see...but the hens think they are free!