Lumpy wrote:"You can vote your way into socialism, but you have to shoot your way out."
Hmm, the only example that I observed up close, in my homeland, had it the other way around: Great October Socialist Revolution was violent in itself and led to an even greater bloodbath; dismantling socialism in USSR was mostly done in the parliament, though smaller-scale armed conflicts did occur in the outskirts of the country in the aftermath. The 1991 event in Moscow that marked the ultimate dissolution of USSR claimed exactly three lives, to a traffic accident involving a tank, if memory serves.
I suspect we call different thing "socialism". There is one thing strikingly in common between USSR in the late 1980s and USA in the last decade: overwhelming amount of reality-defeating lies initiated by the government; I wouldn't call that commonality "socialism".