Bhaskar Sunkara’s recent essay in The Nation, Letter to ‘The Nation’ From a Young Radical, argues persuasively that American liberalism is “practically ineffective and analytically inadequate” to the twin political tasks of mobilizing supporters and generating policy.

Little noticed by most Americans, Merriam Webster, one of the world’s most important dictionaries, announced a few months ago that the two most looked-up words in 2012 were “socialism” and “capitalism.”

Traffic for the pair on the company’s website roughly doubled from the year before. The choice was a “kind of no-brainer,” observed editor at large, Peter Sokolowski. “They’re words that sort of encapsulate the zeitgeist.”

Today is the 45th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King. Contrary to the sanitized saccharine version of Martin Luther King most school children are force feed stands the real man. A radical. A democratic socialist. A man truly despised in the circles of power. Who, in the last campaign before he was struck down, expanded the search for justice beyond nondiscrimination into the realm of true empowerment.

My wife, Disgusted in Euclid, actually came up with this, not I. She was saying that a lot of people confuse socialism with things like Stalinism and Maoism because of about a century of propaganda broadcast not only by capitalists, but by the old Communists themselves. “You want to see socialism in action? Go to the public library,” she said.

She’s right..

While in Israel Mitt Romney praised that country’s high quality, low cost health care system. This resulted in a predictable round of mockery from people pointing out that Israel’s heavily government controlled system is exactly the type of “socialism” Romney claims would destroy freedom and economic success if implemented in America.

Your worship of your own economic freedom is no reason for me to pay for your health care.

In this segment, I emphasize the importance of having a real vision of the world we wish to see; if we don’t have an answer to the question “If you don’t like capitalism, and you don’t like state socialism, then what do you want?”, then there’s no reason to take what we’re saying seriously.

In this second segment, I examine the history of the idea of “socialism,” tracing out how the ideal of an egalitarian society has animated religious as well as secular movements for change. I also discuss the relationship of “socialism” to the state, and how the caricatured understanding of this relationship—where socialism is synonymous with ‘Big Government’—gets in the way of imagining a bottom-up, 21st century socialism. At the same time, I emphasize the pitfalls of isolated experiments without a framework for engaging politically with the larger economic context.

What do you think of socialism, and do you feel insulted or complimented with being identified with that particular philosophy/economy/practice. Or do you think we have a need to reject an identification with a philosophy that’s been misused – just like every other philosophy, including democracy?