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The Difference Between Social Democracy and Democratic Socialism

Democratic Socialism is a term that often gets confused and misused in everyday political conversation. Countries like Norway, Sweden, and Denmark are often incorrectly called Democratic Socialist countries and praised for being a “mix of socialism and capitalism,” when actually they are Social Democracies. These two terms sound similar but their meanings are very different. —source

Many Americans confuse Democratic Socialism with Social Democracy. In fact, a number of US politicians who call themselves Democratic Socialists (including Bernie Sanders and AOC) are more aptly described as Social Democrats in that they are primarily reformers.* *

Below is a chart that explains some basic distinctions between these two political movements. Under the chart are some of the reasons I DON'T agree with everything in the chart.

Chart source [reformatted to increase reading legibility]

Although I think that a lot of the above chart accurately describes some differences between Social Democrats and Democratic Socialists, I disagree with the unknown author's position that "Social Democracy is just capitalism with regulations," and that capitalism and socialism are not viewed as being able to co-exist** in either of these political-economic systems.

Social Democrats believe that essential social services (like healthcare, public education, public libraries, elderly services & income, police & fire departments, natural disaster emergency services, welfare programs, public transportation, the military, etc.) and many utilities and infrastructure (like electrical grids, dams, waste disposal, water reserves, public highways and bridges, wireless/ broadband technology, etc.) should be (and in many countries ARE) socialized, and that they can (and DO) coexist with a free market that promotes small businesses and a well-regulated capitalism that discourages monopolies and prevents excessive exploitation of labor and the environment.

The Scandinavian countries (and to a lesser extent the US) already have socialized services, utilities and infrastructure that exist in addition to a free market/ capitalist economy. However, to my knowledge, the Scandinavian countries have more socialized services, utilities and infrastructure than the US, and a more highly-regulated capitalist economy. Consequently, those countries do not have the level of income inequality and exploitation of labor and resources that one can find here in the US.

Meanwhile Trump is busy dismantling many of our labor and environmental regulations and weakening our social safety net here in the US. And it is MAGA's ignorance of what it means to have a social democracy that keeps them cheering Trump on as he destroys the very institutions that make life better for the average working American.

[Below the cut, you can see some footnotes that further explain some concepts discussed above, including Marx's definitions of socialism and communism, and why things went wrong with these systems in the 20th and early 21st centuries because some of these movements' leaders didn't let these systems evolve naturally as a mass reaction to late stage capitalism, but prematurely imposed them on populations.]

[edited]

officialfoxsquadron

audiences have no idea how to be uncomfortable anymore

officialfoxsquadron

watch movies that make you uncomfortable read books that make you uncomfortable go to plays that make you uncomfortable watch tv that makes you uncomfortable look at paintings and sculpture and artwork that makes you uncomfortable. it is spiritually and morally and ethically and artistically really really good for you. think about why you are uncomfortable. what biases do you bring to art? what biases does the art bring to you? how do you reconcile this? how does your worldview grow and expand and change? all this and more will be answered and available to you if you just engage with art that does not coddle you and treats you like an intelligent human being that can sit through discomfort

Semiquincentennial Red White Blues

I was eleven during the Bicentennial and I know what I saw then. Not so much from the Federal government but local and state gov'ts were doing fairs and parades, Ice Cream trucks were all around for the summer. Retailers turned their flyers red, white and blue and created all sorts of themed sales. On TV the networks were giving us Bicentennial minutes of history and playing all sorts of Patriotic stuff, Up on the hither UHF regions, the stations trotted out a lot of WW2 propaganda films. It really felt like a whole society celebrating. You knew what it was about. Today we have the least creative, least thoughtful, and least caring administration in history. The feeling of a national celebration is not present at all. And to celebrate an America which is so inimical to the people who love it, and seems like it's mortally wounded by the politics of the day can seem wrong...Maybe what the Semiquincentennial needs is get well cards. And a revolution.

#Bicentennial Memories #Semiquincentennial Blues #Revolution Needed

infectiouspiss

disabled ppl we need to start lying to nosy people okay? you tell me i'm too young to need a cane and i will tell you point blank that maybe you should tell that to the guy who ran me over. you don't get an explanation of my health issues you get lies and depending on how much of an asshole i want to be that lie will be anything from a humble car crash to a 1 billion lions attack. mind yr business.

infectiouspiss

"i could never live like that" well maybe you'll have to because this happened overnight. yeah you heard me i was the most able bodied man in the world but then one morning bam i woke up disabled. yeah you could have that too. there's no cure either you'll just wake up one morning and now you have to live like me

infectiouspiss

"what happened" well have you ever seen looney tunes? yeah an anvil landed on me and squished me flat.

otherboxesareavailable

I am so doing this.

scarletxteeth

🖤 Was xscarlet-teethx 🖤 Made the rash decision to deactivate and I’m regretting it 😭 please reblog to help me find my moots 🥺🫶🏻

liberalsarecool

All day, every day. #BackwardsAssMorons

sandersstudies

Every time you go in a public place and something ISN’T disgusting it’s because somebody cleaned it. Every time you feel comfortable using a public bathroom or sitting at a restaurant table or setting something on a gas station counter or playing on a playground it’s because somebody cleaned it.

Thank you to everyone who cleans the world, especially those who are underpaid and under appreciated.

my-life-is-a-sidequest

I worked in a supermarket for 7 years and I don't think I can understate just how much cleaning you had to do for it to look clean (it very often where not in the places you aren't supposed to see)

sandersstudies

True for food service, retail establishments, gyms, outdoor areas, schools, religious buildings, office buildings, hospitals and medical buildings, etc. People usually only notice when a space is NOT clean, meanwhile every time a space is clean it’s only because of the diligent work of janitors, maintenance staff, custodians, parks workers, or volunteers.

otherboxesareavailable

In my writing after their exciting year running a starship and saving the Earth the crew created a discord where they could all keep up with each other. It's private and only for Kamar vets.

"Hey Captain! Were the cleaning robots really that good? I mean except when were all shot up the whole ship was always pretty clean."

"Dude, your missing some data. The DC techs had shifts where they would assist the robots. Robots do a good basic job but they can't clean for odor as humans do. And I hate to tell you so many of the good public spaces you visit have a dedicated cleaning staff working it behind the scenes."

"Yeah I was thinking that the ship kind of felt like a mall. Mall's must have cleaning staff."

"I live to educate."

Gotcha!

The guy I got on the phone when I called about the letter I received cancelling my EBT was so happy to tell me that the form I was sent was old and that the age requirement is no longer 50, but is 64 according to new Fed Rules. MN is a democratic state but there is a lot of conservative meddling underneath the social stuff. However, I was not ready to hear "Gotcha! said with such glee after waiting forty minutes to get someone to pick up. I am 61 and I really wanted to retire next year but that's probably changed too and I didn't want to starve for the first three years. I've never felt more like my government wants me dead.

#EBT #Conservative flavored Democracy #Rant

contemplatingoutlander

In their version of our history, everything was always perfect.

Celebrate Juneteenth. Annoy MAGA.

by William Kristol

Today is Juneteenth, a holiday long celebrated, especially by black Americans, to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States. In 2021, Congress, recognizing that the end of slavery was an event worthy of formal recognition by the whole nation, established it as a federal holiday for all Americans. The holiday’s name refers to June 19, 1865, the day when Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3 ordering the enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”

In the midst of this year’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the commemoration of Juneteenth can have special resonance. But not for the Trump administration, which, so far as I can tell, has not deigned to acknowledge the holiday this year. [....] One understands why Trumpists choose to neglect Juneteenth. After all, Trump’s vice president claimed earlier this week at a campaign event in New York that “they’ve become anti-white in the Democratic party.” If you’re... the party that wants to foster and exploit white grievance, then you have little interest in calling attention to a holiday that is a reminder of the terrible injustices caused by fantasies of white supremacy.

But beyond this, Juneteenth isn’t a holiday that fits into the cartoonishly whitewashed Trumpist view of American history. [....] Struggling with complicated truths... is not a Trumpist thing. To some degree, it has often not been an American thing. As Kevin Levin, who writes the newsletter Civil War Memory, put it this week,

For generations, the history of slavery and emancipation has been minimized, distorted, or simply written out of the national narrative by white Americans. The story of Juneteenth survived because Black families carried it forward, year after year, while the broader culture looked away or invented comforting fictions in its place.

Trump and Vance are not interested in challenging any of those comforting fictions. [....] But the rest of us can do what the Trump administration won’t do. We can engage in a struggle with complicated truths that makes possible a truer and deeper celebration of our history.

As Levin writes,

Juneteenth is a federal holiday now. It belongs to the country, which I understand to mean that it belongs to all of us . . . because the story of how four million people moved from slavery to freedom is the central drama of this nation’s history.

So many millions of Americans will commemorate Juneteenth, in local and civic celebrations across the country, even as Trump and Vance ignore the holiday [....]

theoutcastrogue

The bipartisan push to remove anonymity from the internet is ushering in an era of unprecedented mass surveillance and censorship.

"The problem is that there’s no way to reliably verify someone’s age without verifying who they are. A platform cannot magically discern that a user is 16 without collecting identifying information, whether through government documents such as a passport, payment information like a credit card, or other identity-disclosing data. Whether that data is stored by the platform itself or outsourced to a vendor, the result is always the same: A user’s offline identity is forever linked with their online behavior.

Stripping anonymity from the internet would constitute one of the most sweeping rollbacks of civil rights in recent history. It would allow for unprecedented levels of mass surveillance and censorship, endangering the most marginalized members of society. Whistleblowers exposing corporate wrongdoing could be tracked and fired, government employees speaking out about illegal behavior or bad policies could face prosecution, and activists organizing protests could be identified and surveilled before ever setting foot on the street."

otherboxesareavailable

The internet was fun when it was new, the commerce smothered it and it was less fun but this. If I have to be restricted to what I post on Facebook and Bluesky, what is the point?

old-melissax77

what-even-is-thiss

The thing that really sucks about the North American housing market besides all of the lack of affordability everywhere that’s not the middle of an abandoned corn field is that there’s no in between options.

In most of the US and Canada there’s detached single family homes with a yard and there’s high rise to mid rise apartments. Very little in between.

Row houses, duplexes, large family sized apartments, etc. do exist but outside of a few locations they’re unusual or only seen as something that poor people live in.

Thing is though that there’s a market for these in between types of housing and they could really help with our density problems where cities are so spread out due to all the detached single family houses that it becomes expensive and environmentally problematic to get utilities to all of them.

I know that I would very much like a cute duplex or row house when I feel financially ready to have kids. Walking distance to a school and a bus stop, tiny yard for an herb garden and citrus tree but not so big that it’s a pain to maintain it, neighbors nearby, easy walking and biking access to the road, hopefully a playground nearby for my kids to use.

But that sort of thing doesn’t really exist where I live and doesn’t exist in a lot of North America. You either live in a small apartment or you live in a house and either way you’re probably forced to own a car.

Anyways our zoning laws in this part of the world are terrible and probably racist and I hate them.

justinspoliticalcorner

Southern Poverty Law Center releases report as US government pursues federal fraud charges against group

Maya Yang at The Guardian:

A new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) finds hard-right groups have increasingly expanded their influence across the US government, which is pursuing a federal fraud case into the civil rights organization. Tuesday’s report – which identified 1,263 hate and anti-government groups in operation throughout 2025 – comes less than two months after it was indicted by the government it says the hard right has infiltrated. According to the SPLC’s annual Year in Hate and Extremism report, Donald Trump’s administration has “radically transformed government policy in favor of far-right interests and individuals” since the start of his second presidency in early 2025.

In addition to the administration’s “full, complete and unconditional” presidential pardons of approximately 1,500 people involved in the January 6 Capitol attack in 2021, the report cited the administration’s shifting the focus of federal law enforcement from combating violent crime to conducting immigration raids against marginalized communities. The report said 23% of all FBI agents have been reassigned to immigration enforcement, leading to the stripping of personnel from other areas including white-collar crime, counter-terrorism, organized crime and cybercrime. “The Trump administration’s shift away from traditional law enforcement priorities, staffing and funding, along with its embrace of dangerously aggressive and reckless immigration enforcement tactics, has made US citizens less safe and more likely to be victimized,” the report asserted.

It also said that the administration has “downplayed the threat of right-wing extremist violence” – and in the process has increased the threat posed by far-right extremism. The report pointed to the US Senate’s confirmation of senior administration officials including defense secretary Pete Hegseth, FBI director Kash Patel and former National Counterterrorism Center director Joe Kent, all of whom have espoused racist and misogynistic views.

In addition to the administration’s dismantlement of a national database that tracked domestic terrorism and hate crimes, the SPLC report cited the justice department’s removal of a peer-reviewed study from its website that found far-right attacks continue to “outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism”. The report also cited a rise in younger, digitally savvy rightwingers who have been “granted unprecedented access to the federal government, gained political power in exchange for creating content that helped sell the administration’s policies targeting immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, women and poor folks”.

The SPLC-- which is under the scope for bogus “fraud” charges by the Trump Regime-- released its annual The Year In Hate and Extremism report.

The report reveals that hard-right groups have increasingly expanded their influence across the US government as a result of Donald Trump returning to office.

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