1. “Since they tended to alternate in office with more conservative non-socialist parties, however, it was not really accurate to refer to their countries as socialist.”" Well, neither of these was ’socialist’ in a third, perhaps most important, historically traditional meaning: workers and communities owning the economic means. Those European examples were not ’socialist’ since they were capitslist economies (corporate owned factories etc) and USSR was certainly not an economic model that has democratic real worker-community ownership/control, either. Now I agree with you that it’s important to point out how these groups *called* themselves socialist…but we must not give the false impression that those were the only two with that name nor give the false impression that more-honestly-”socialist” examples didn’t exist. Mongragon, Kibbutzim, and other examples in practice, as well as the worker/community control model, have (a)been called socialist to some degree and (b) are more accurately s-word than the two examples you listed.

2. “many evils have existed in systems that have called themselves socialist (think of Stalin’s crimes) or capitalist (as some of Michael Moore’s films depict) —though no fair-minded person would argue that the latter examples are as monstrous as Stalin’s evil.” sure, but how about a more apt comparison of Stalin’s crimes to whose of US-backed, US-financed, US-armed-and-trained Guatemala and El Salvador in the 1980s where tens of thousands of “communists” (which as Amensty International pointed out, in reality were: professors, students, priests, human rightsh workers, cooperative members, trade unionists etc) were murdered, tortured, and had their mutilated bodies dumped in the street? How quickly we forget to look in the mirror when it comes to crimes sponsoered by our own government!

3.It’s sad that the S-word is not used even more extremely to refer to almost any government program that dares spend the public’s money on the public (what a crazy idea!) be it education, health, etc, rather than on more militarism, prisons, tax breaks for the rich and for corporations, etc. But it’s equally sad if we forget that socialism not only doesn’t mean “any government program” (a better term is the European “social democrat” for that, perhaps) but it also doesn’t mean mere reforms, and it certainly doens’t mean a one-party dictatorship (USSR) nor a social-democratic party in a capitalist country (e.g. Sweden etc). It means something deeper: workplace democracy and economic democracy more generally. The first two cartoons at http://economicdemocracy.org/cartoons.html give an idea. In the short term one supports governmental programs while the private tyrranies of corporations are around like hungry wolves; in the longer term, deeper from-the-ground-up institutions of worker and community control over all economic matters, is key.

For more, I invite readers to look at http://economicdemocracy.org/analy.shtml which has not only several excellent summaries by Noam Chomsky, but also has a copy of the 1907 humorous but very well written pamphlet How the Miners Were Robbed by John Wheatley. Cheers,
-EconDemocracy