Last Friday, Bill Maher dedicated his “New Rules” segment to fighting socialism’s status as a four-letter word in America. For some who have had hands-on experience with socialist states, this was probably a rather naive stance. But self-avowed socialist Lawrence O’Donnell replayed the segment as a “guest Rewrite,” explaining that he was not a socialist exclusively (perhaps unlike Maher’s definition), but found it bizarre that many refused to accept that all governments were “mixes” of socialism and capitalism.

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O’Donnell began recalling the Newsweek cover “We are All Socialists Now,” and noted that “I, of course, have been calling myself a socialist since I first read the definition of socialism in the first economics class I took in college.” But he took the time to explain that that did not mean he was in favor of a fully socialist economy, because that was not possible. “There is no capitalist economy anywhere in the world and there is no socialist economy anywhere in the world,

” he argued, “not even Cuba… we are all mixes.”

He did not bother to name a single capitalist feature in the Cuban economy, though the tourist-only Havana hotels may, in some skewed way, count. Instead, he gave China as an example of the middle ground: “China has a lot more capitalism than Cuba, but a lot more socialism than the United States.” And, for good measure, gave an example of a type of socialism he hates: agriculture subsidies. “I’m a socialist, but I hate bad socialism,” he noted, “and there is plenty of bad socialism out there.”  He concluded he was “as much as a capitalist as I am a socialist,” and that the stigma the word has in American culture was undeserved. Then Maher took it away with his “It Gets Better” segment.

The segment via MSNBC below:
Tags: Bill Maher, Lawrence O'Donnell, MSNBC, Newsweek, Socialism, The Last Word