MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell has outed himself as a socialist in the past. He’s even echoed a Newsweek article and claimed “we are all socialists,” referring to the socialism that has creeped into some aspects of the American economy. But now Larry is clarifying: he’s not just a socialists, he’s now “as much a capitalist as I am a socialist” and he hates “bad socialism.”
What inspired this bloviation on socialism? O’Donnell was moved by Bill Maher’s Friday monologue in which he declared socialism shouldn’t be considered a bad, four-letter word. O’Donnell, then, decided to replay Maher’s thoughts as his “Re-write” segment. But, as Mediaite notes, not before adding some of his own thoughts:
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.
Watch below as Larry and Bill try their darndest to remove any stigma from socialism:
In the end, socialism is socialism.