A simple European-style welfare state with universal healthcare is all you need to satisfy 90% of people but the elites in the US and the UK refuse to provide that.
Its only popular as an aesthetic. On both left and right, most politically inclined people don't have the reasoning skills to talk about politics effectively, nor would the actually enjoy living under their hypothetical best system of government.
Most political discourse is used as a signal to show what kind of person you are in conversation. And generally, there is a trend of people who basically have nothing of value to demonstrate about themselves attaching their identity to politics as a way of giving their life purpose.
>simple European-style welfare state with universal healthcare
You make it sound very simple. Its not. It sure would be nice to have if you could just will it into existence, but with realistic means, the amount of issues that you would have solve for, given the people doing the solving, its not guaranteed to turn out well. Id rather see EU adopt a more competitive business strategy and immigration policies to attract money and workers so that anyone wanting to benefit from the EU policies can immigrate easier.
This is a good way to put it. I have friends who got very mixed up with the El Chapo Trap House content. It has certainly scrambled their brains and made them insufferable - but for all of the worship of dictators and crude jokes about guillotining dentists they now make, none of them really care enough about local politics to actually start attending caucuses, let alone create militias.
It's clearly not that hard, if most of Europe can pull it off with dramatically less money than the US. Where's our American exceptionalism when it comes to catching up with any random European country?
The issue in the US isn't a lack of means, it's a lack of will. Our political system is bought out by unimaginably rich interests, who's interest in the common welfare will only begin when it has fully eroded the foundation that they built their wealth on.
... with a whole different set of legislature, political history, and even cultural history, all of which GREATLY matter for implementing something like healthcare.
Simplifying this all down to "capitalism bad" is virtue signaling just like I talked about in my original post. Either talk about real solutions or don't talk about it all.
I cannot speak to any but Canada, but the MOST people here do not want pure communism, they want Scandinavian/Nordic socialism. Our policies tend to venture into a weird combination of that and American policy copies, so we end up with a very weird mix.
The DSA, the biggest, by far, left-org in the US appears, at least to me, to be pushing a platform indistinguishable from a Euro model.
Outside of some existential threat like war, it doesn't seem at all possible for everyone in the US to start rowing in the same direction.
It would take a political miracle because of our thoroughly corrupted political system, but once it existed as an option, I have no doubt that trying to kill it would be political suicide. The problem is that our far right party is A-Ok with working class people going broke from healthcare costs, and poor people just dying, and our center-right party has pretty much adopted a platform of "We won't make things any worse".
My theory is Boomers and Gen X have had a huge amounts of lead poisoning from leaded gasoline. This shifted their politics to be more conservative. The 'culture war' we are fighting now is really a generational war. One with people who have lead poisoning and another without.
Canadians of all people also ought to remember how they got their system, which was by voting[1] for parties that supported it in elections. It had basically nothing to do with threat of communism.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_Saskatchewan_general_elec...
Conservative parent/teacher/etc: "So you want free education and healthcare for everyone, are you some kind of communist or what?"
Young person, after reading the philosophy textbook chapter about Marx and ignoring a lot of history: "I guess I am one then"
it's a shame people like you never consider this