The meaning of democratic socialism -- a mixture of political and economic democracy -- should be no mystery to Americans, who appear happy enough with a wide range of democratic socialist institutions in the United States, including public schools, public parks, minimum wage laws, Social Security, public radio, Medicare, public libraries, and the U.S. postal service.  Even so, a remarkable number of Americans mistakenly associate democratic socialism with dictatorship and oppression.  For more than a century, communists and conservatives helped cause this confusion.  

In recent years, internationalism -- cooperation among nations for promotion of the common good -- has acquired a bad reputation.  But this loss of support for internationalism, especially among progressive thinkers and activists, is based upon a hijacking of the term by the leaders of the major powers, who have employed it to mask their struggles for world dominance.  Cooperative internationalism is quite different, and could prevent international aggression, as well as address the climate catastrophe, the refugee crisis, the destructive policies of multinational corporations, and worldwide violations of human rights.    

Although the pundits say the U.S. economy is booming -- and it certainly is for the country's billionaires -- it's doing very little for the incomes of American workers.  And much of the responsibility for this situation lies with Republican officeholders, especially Donald Trump.

The Trump administration has unilaterally withdrawn from the Iran nuclear agreement, destroyed the INF Treaty, indicated its intention to scrap the New START Treaty and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, embarked on a massive nuclear arms race with Russia and other nuclear powers, and lowered the threshold for nuclear war.  And so, dear presidential debate moderators, don't you -- as stand-ins for the American people -- think it might be worthwhile to ask the candidates some questions about U.S. preparations for nuclear war and how best to avert a global catastrophe of unprecedented magnitude?

Is the United States becoming a plutocracy?  As American wealth becomes ever more concentrated in the hands of a small number of individuals, these billionaires have acquired a central role in American elections.  The result has been a decisive shift rightward in U.S. politics and public policy.

As U.S. college students and their families know all too well, the cost of a higher education in the United States has skyrocketed in recent decades.  College enrollment was once available free of charge or at a minimal cost -- at least until state and local governments, under pressure from the wealthy and their conservative political allies, slashed funding for higher education.  But an American college education could become affordable once again.

As the United States and most other nations continue their race for bigger and better weapons to destroy one another, it's worth considering alternatives.  One of them, suggested by a prominent American peace activist, was proposed in the early 1960s by the Kennedy administration:  a "peace race."  And it had substantial resonance in world affairs.

Vieques is a small Puerto Rican island with some 9,000 inhabitants.  Fringed by palm trees and lovely beaches, with the world's brightest bioluminescent bay and wild horses roaming everywhere, it attracts substantial numbers of tourists.  For about six decades, it also served as a bombing range, military training site, and storage depot for the U.S. Navy, until its outraged residents rescued their homeland from the grip of militarism.

Trump's nationalist approach to the world involves walking away from cooperative agreements with other nations and relying instead upon a dominant role for the United States, undergirded by military might, in global affairs.  Nevertheless, as numerous recent opinion polls reveal, most Americans don't support this policy.

In recent weeks, Donald Trump and his Republican acolytes have denounced their political opponents as "socialists" who will inevitably transform the United States into a land of dictatorship and poverty.  But, over the centuries, socialism has meant different things to different people, and democratic socialism -- like the substantial public sector in the United States -- has been perfectly compatible with free societies and vibrant economies.