Why was Socialism considered a "radical" ideology?

[Josh]

and why didn't it flourish in early 20th century America?

Any help is great Thanks!

[Alpha]

This is all due to propaganda, especially in the Cold War, the US and several European countries (notably the United Kingdom) continuously attack the idea of Socialism.

In fact, the propaganda was so successful, any unethical experiments the US conduct (where do you think the term brain wash came from), they only need to claim that the "Communist are doing it too", and that they are "attempting to understand it for security reasons".

I doubt many have read Karl Marx's idea on the real ideology of Communism.

[epicpikachu]

do you have baxter?

[BD]

haha you totally have baxter good luck on the final guys!

[john]

we all have baxter... im not planning on going because the worlds gonna end tomorrow anyways!

[Underclass]

A radical policy is one that favours very fast, unilateral, ideological based change, usually very distinct to the current policy in a region. Radicals tend to have little patience for debate, compromise or gradually implementing their policies.

Socialism is an incredibly broad term, incorporating many varying ideologies, methodologies and purposes, but by and large it can be summed up as the belief that a government's priority is ensuring the well being of the majority of the people under its jurisdiction, primarily the most vulnerable. It also believes that the best way to achieve this is through government legislation. Almost nobody disagrees publicly with the most modest ambitions of socialism, they just distort the impact of their policies (in theory, George W Bush's 'no child left behind' policy was socialist, in reality its funding was undermined by two international wars and a reduced government revenue due to upper tax class cuts, and the result was that poor schools ended up with with less funding) in most states).

Many socialists are radical, especially up to the mid twentieth century, they wanted their goals achieved as soon as possible, good examples are the Communist States of Eastern and Central Europe after World War 2, which introduced universal education to a very high standard (easy to forget how admirable those governments were before they decided to ban other political parties and went from being Soviet-backed to Soviet enforced) and Clement Atlee's Labour government in Britain which introduced Old Age Pension and the National Health Service without listening to the objections of Churchill's conservatives (who maintained and expanded those policies when they returned to government because they realised how popular they were).

Less radical would be the Social Democrats of Scandinavia and Belgium, who preferred to debate their policies extensively and proceed only after broad support was evident.

Today, many people who would balk at the suggestion that impoverished have no right to an education, or that old people have no right to free medical care don't consider themselves socialist, despite espousing what would have been cornerstones of socialist ideology a few decades ago (just as someone who might not call themselves a feminist will nonetheless laugh at the prospect that women ought not to vote). It goes to show how successful socialist governments were, many of their ideas are accepted without criticism by their opponents.

Today Socialism is mostly democratic, the obvious failings of the Warsaw-pact nations and their allies staunched the taste for authoritarianism, which makes them by default less radical, but in for a century or more many socialists considered the ends far more important than the means.

Why didn't it catch on in America? Excellent question, it really should have after the Great Depression, which remains Capitalism's greatest crisis. Partly because America had (and has) a large rural population, which tends to shy away from socialism for some reason, secondly FDR implemented several socialist policies (the New Deal etc.) and undermined the support of his rivals on the left by doing so. There's also the fact that the American left saw greater need to address racial rather than socioeconomic inequality, so Civil Rights was a more pressing issue, largely speaking, than workers' rights. Also, even after the Great Depression America was a country where a huge amount of the nation's wealth was in very few hands, and those hands owned the media. They saw Socialism as a threat to their dominance and unleashed a massive propaganda campaign against it, from radio broadcasts to Hollywood's representation of Russians as evil, to McCarthyism. Propaganda works on a lot of people.