If so, turn around three times and spit.  Just kidding!

Here is a nice account of "socialism" and what it means.  It's from the Brookings Institute, which is as establishment as you get--as if the Roman Catholic Church were to put out an official account of "Satanism." (OK, maybe that's a stretch as an analogy, but it seems legit.)

On this issue, a couple things: First, it seems to me that Werner Sombart's question is still open: Why did socialism not emerge as a powerful force in early twentieth-century America? Socialists were all over Europe. Was it because of the overlay of racism in the US? That seems plausible, but maybe too monocausal. Does anyone know of good analyses of this question?  (Yes, yes, I know that there was a visible movement early in the century, with Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas; but they were not significant players, I believe?, in American politics; more of a cul-de-sac.)

Second, debates about "the best regime type" are coming back, baby, back!  What do I mean?  Well, for a long time--most of the history of political thought, at least in the West, I'd say--political thinkers talked about what was the best regime type--was it better to have a monarchy, a democracy, an oligarchy, or something else?  Then suddenly, in the twentieth century, those debates ended, as everyone seemed to settle on "Democracy" as obviously, unquestionably, the best.  I remember reading, back in the early 1990s, John Dunn's nice little book Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future, wherein he points out that even the obvious enemies of democratic governance, like the German Democratic Republic (i.e. East Germany) or the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (i.e., North Korea) or the Islamic Republic of Iran, all still give lip service to "democracy."  Everybody was a small-d "democrat."

Well, you may have noticed that in recent years this has changed.  Now, of course, "socialism" is an economic system, not a political one.  But the return of interest in "socialism" is part of a larger shaking of public confidence in the received institutional forms that we have inherited, in particular that collection that go by the broad name "liberal democratic capitalism." The recovery of the legitimacy of "socialism" is part of that larger questioning of things.  (Consider Daniel Bell's The China Model of several years ago--a terrible book in itself, by someone who I suspect will end up remembered as the apologist for a terrible political tyranny, but it clearly surfed a wave.)  In other words, after a period in which everyone seemed to think that liberal democracy really was the best political system, or at least wanted to give it lip service, now it needs to defend itself.  (Thus, perhaps, the rush of books on "liberalism" over the past few years.)  I think this is actually a good thing for liberal democracy.  (And I think people will realize we can have capitalism and socialism at the same time--but only under liberal democratic structures.  But that's another post.)  Therefore this seems a fair, if noncommittal, claim:

The resurgence of socialism is a warning sign for those who want to preserve this system and an opportunity for those who would reform it. And, as has happened before, their two causes may come to overlap.

Third, the debate about "socialism" after World War II and up to the 2008 recession is really about USSR, as the Brookings primer makes clear:

In the post-war period, Americans viewed socialism through the prism of Soviet communism. Today, they view it through the prism of the welfare state, the system that Western democracies developed to make market economies more broadly acceptable and to blunt the appeal of communism, which had powerful support throughout Europe in the post-war decades. The Soviet Union threatened liberty. Norway, Sweden and Denmark do not.

This is important, and marks a larger change in the center of gravity of "politics" as we understand it.  After World War II, domestic policy was in many ways subservient to foreign policy (and, to a lesser or greater degree, foreign policy was largely defense policy).  This was an unusual condition in the United States: historically, most of the time earlier in American history the dominance went in the opposite direction. In the Cold War, things became different, and by and large we got used to the new: we now think of the government less as a domestic reality and more as about foreign policy.  (Again, that's a big fight, but I actually think I could win it; consider how much suspicion people have about government domestic policy, versus foreign policy.)  

But maybe now, things are changing again. Maybe demographics are changing them.  I was in a conversation with a friend at the Miller Center here at UVA at one point this summer; he noted that, when the Miller Center began almost forty years ago, it hired more scholars of foreign policy than of domestic policy moving from foreign policy to domestic policy, etc..  Now, with rising questions about entitlements, it seems likely that more domestic policy scholars will be needed going forward.  

A century or so ago, politics moved from being a "night watchman state" to being a somewhat stronger state; in the Cold War the worry was that the US could become a garrison state; is politics moving now from a garrison state to a retirement community state?  If so, what does that mean for politics?  Is this one of the reasons socialism is making a comeback?