The new epithet is socialism. It is used by Republicans and right-wing commentators to describe the policies and inclinations of President Barack Obama's administration. It is so foul an ideology that children should not hear of it until they are old enough to order liquor, and they should use that to steady themselves.

The truth is elsewhere.

Long before Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx tipped political thinking toward that brand of socialism that we call communism, socialism was a current political idea in Europe, particularly in Britain and France.

In Britain, socialism grew out of the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and William Blake's "dark Satanic mills." Workers were exploited and lived short lives in dangerous conditions and polluted cities. To this day, the old industrial reaches of the British counties of Lancashire and Yorkshire are referred to as the Black Country, a reference to soot, coal dust and steel slag.

France, at once more rural and more feudal, owed its fascination with socialism to the traditions of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment and to its long line of social philosophers such as Jean Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire. Indeed, philosophers have informed politics in France more than in other country. The existential movement of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in the post-World War II years was the last great intrusion into French politics by France's philosophers.

When it came to political revolution, Britain, which has retained its monarchy and aristocracy, tended to give a little to keep a lot. People like Marx and Engels, who had been driven out of Germany and later France, were tolerated in Britain. Seven years after the Russian Revolution, Britain had its first Labor government. Socialism was voted in -- no revolution needed.

Many things fed socialism in the 19th century: working conditions, the Methodist Church and its close ties to the trade-union movement, intellectual romanticism, and a growing pushback against the British Empire. It was also socialism-lite. The extremes that followed the Russian Revolution effectively neutered communism as a viable political philosophy in Britain and the rest of Europe. Instead, socialism, which had been semantically intertwined with communism, became synonymous with democracy. On the continent, many added "democrat" to party names to emphasize the point. Sure, communist parties remain and are particularly active in France and Italy. But the milder socialism of today, with its enthusiasm for business as well as for social services, has triumphed over the superstate of communism.

By American standards, all European governments are socialist, including the right-wing governments of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy and Nicolas Sarkozy in France. Today's European governments all provide a plethora of social nets and services that set them apart from the United States. They also heavily tax and are laggards in defense spending.

While none of these governments rejects business, they have allowed their social consciousness to make doing business very difficult. Trade unions are intrusive and networks of rules and regulations mitigate against the entrepreneurial class. Those who have introduced socialism as an epithet into the debate over Obama's policies single out France as the poster child of the socialist contagion.

Pretty well every right-of-center politician in France talks about reform, but it has been hard to realize because France's two huge special interest groups are merciless: They are the public-sector unions and the farmers. The former strike when challenged and the latter throw up barricades and attack -- sometimes violently -- anything or anyone they see as restraining them.

Additionally, too much French talent is concentrated in the government and too little in medium-sized and large businesses. The ambitious seek career civil-service jobs rather than private ones. At the bottom, the French are hard-working and entrepreneurial in an over-regulated and difficult environment.

Yet France has an excellent transportation system, good state medicine and a functioning university system that, unfortunately, is fine-tuned to turn out bureaucrats.

There is much to criticize in Britain but the quality of life is good, transportation adequate, cultural life without equal and its health-care system is getting better.

Newsweek says, "We are all socialists now." Maybe. But if it is so, we have nothing to fear but the word itself.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle on PBS.

lking@kingpublishing.com