Social safety nets are socialism. Redistributing resources on the basis of needs - that's socialism, and that's how safety nets work. Socialism isn't only some whole-hog system with no free markets. Capitalism isn't only late-stage extremist neoliberalism.

Free markets and self-interest provide the only effective engine for prosperity creation. However, left to their own devices they are commandeered by the first successful people at the expense of everyone else. We need open markets with socialist policies of redistribution not based on ambition but on needs. Those safety nets should not satisfy ambition except for the least motivated conceivable, because ambition drives the engine that produces the prosperity that allows the functioning of the safety nets.

We need socialist policies together with capitalist markets.

We also need trust-busting like we had the last time lassez-faire threatened American society. We need regulation of avarice and restructuring of systems both official and unofficial, of unequal privilege. Busting the parents who buy corrupt entry to universities was a good start, but it's just a start of a re-orienting the whole society needs.

Those that think we need a political revolution to do this, well, that argument is going to lose electorally. Most of the country will go along with reform and restructuring for justice. They won't go along with revolution. Maybe they should, but they won't.