This is sad indeed...

The NDP voted Sunday to take references to socialism out of the party's constitution, a controversial move to modernize that the party had to set aside two years ago.

Delegates voted 960 to 188 in favour of the change. The result was met with cheers of "NDP! NDP!"

The move was supported by popular former leader Jack Layton, who died shortly after leading the party to its best-ever federal election result in 2011. Layton felt the party needed to modernize the preamble in order to appeal to more Canadians.

Without socialism, Canadians would not be better off than us. Bloomberg: "Hardheaded Socialism Makes Canada Richer Than U.S."...

On July 1, Canada Day, Canadians awoke to a startling, if pleasant, piece of news: For the first time in recent history, the average Canadian is richer than the average American.
According to data from Environics Analytics WealthScapes published in the Globe and Mail, the net worth of the average Canadian household in 2011 was $363,202, while the average American household’s net worth was $319,970.
A few days later, Canada and the U.S. both released the latest job figures. Canada’s unemployment rate fell, again, to 7.2 percent, and America’s was a stagnant 8.2 percent. Canada continues to thrive while the U.S. struggles to find its way out of an intractable economic crisis and a political sine curve of hope and despair.
The difference grows starker by the month: The Canadian system is working; the American system is not.

The situation for American neoliberalism is so bad, that you can even find long and generally favorable pieces about Karl Marx in mainstream outlets like Time.

A growing dossier of evidence suggests that [Marx] may have been right. It is sadly all too easy to find statistics that show the rich are getting richer while the middle class and poor are not. A September study from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in Washington noted that the median annual earnings of a full-time, male worker in the U.S. in 2011, at $48,202, were smaller than in 1973. Between 1983 and 2010, 74% of the gains in wealth in the U.S. went to the richest 5%, while the bottom 60% suffered a decline, the EPI calculated. No wonder some have given the 19th century German philosopher a second look. In China, the Marxist country that turned its back on Marx, Yu Rongjun was inspired by world events to pen a musical based on Marx’s classic Das Kapital. “You can find reality matches what is described in the book,” says the playwright.