Americans seem to believe it too. I talk to people all the time who won't believe me when I say polls consistently show that Americans are to the left of both political parties.
Polls are hilarious, when weighed against how much people even understand what it is they're giving their opinion on. Affordable Care Act is a great example. It has an overall negative poll rating, but each of the individual components has overwhelmingly positive poll numbers. Polls show that Americans are to the left of what is considered mainstream in the conventional wisdom, but you can only tell by teasing out of them that it's not that great of an idea to get constantly ass fucked by rich people.
You have to counter a massive propaganda system that demonizes buzzwords in order to make it easier to extract wealth. Edit: Also the Affordable Care Act doesn't have negative favorability. Last I check it was ~37% disapproval. Whereas Obamacare has 47% disapproval.
I really wonder if that's because Americans are constantly comparing themselves to their European, Canadian, and Australian cousins, and realizing that their political system leans quite far to the right compared to other developed western countries. I used to hear it said on cable news that "America is center-right". Perhaps that's true compared to, say, Sweden or Canada. But if you're measuring against the spectrum of beliefs found in our two-party system, it doesn't appear to be that way.
I think so. We're constantly inundated with the message that Democrats are like Europeans: "communist" and "socialist".
If only. Really, if only one of our parties pushed for social ownership of capital. It hurts to have to keep explaining that a welfare state is not the same thing as socialism. Redistributing wealth accrued in a capitalist system is not even close to the concept of socialism. But it falls on deaf ears when some people are still fighting the Cold War in their minds.
I introduce the concept of socialism by avoiding using the word until I've explained what it means. When you get them to accept the idea sans the term used to describe it they are, in my experience, much less likely to suddenly hate socialism again.