The S-word isn't quite as spine-chilling now to millennials, with no memory of the Cold War or the fall of the Berlin Wall.The upheaval that shaped their political perceptions was the financial meltdown of the mid-2000s. That made them keenly aware of what the Occupy movement captured with the new phrase "the one percent."As John Nichols points out, the recent popularity of socialism has a lot to do with the way the right-wing media slathered the word overObama's programs. That's a risk the GOP run when they frame the Dem's positions as socialistic — they may inadvertently detoxify the brand, particularly when the connections to Marxism are hard to discern "From Social Security & unemployment insurance to Medicare and the Affordable Health Care Act, Republicans have labeled every social welfare program proposed by the Democrats as "socialist," "socialistic" or "creeping socialism."
At www.npr.org
