Dropping the mask
Democratic politicians and pundits are increasingly embracing the socialist label, or at least a “democratic socialist” variant that sounds better than that icky kind once practiced in Moscow, Budapest, and Warsaw.
In a way, this is refreshing, even bracing; a certain belated honesty in advertising that puts an end to decades of playing footsie. One suspects that coming out of the ideological closet can also be a psychological relief for Democrats who always knew they were socialists but couldn’t admit it for reasons of political viability.
Of course, as hard as it might have been to embrace the socialist label, it becomes harder still for Democrats hereafter to articulate exactly what it means and to scrape off the barnacles in preparation for electoral rollout.
If what Democrats mean by democratic socialism is just more free stuff (college and health care) and continued expansion of the welfare state (to include perhaps guaranteed federal jobs for all), and maybe even the nationalization of a public utility or heavy industrial firm here or there in British Labor Party fashion, then it really isn’t socialism (properly defined) at all, just an extension of the redistributionist politics Democrats have been practicing since the New Deal up through the Great Society and Obamacare.
The intriguing part under such circumstances would be found in the marketing role reversal — embracing socialism instead of liberalism/progressivism as a label for the same old-same old, on the assumption that it polls better, at least among dimwitted young people who know nothing about the history of socialism (or the history of liberalism or progressivism or history in general).
On the other hand, if the socialism being embraced is indeed the genuine article (and a perusal of the website of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s vanguard Young Democratic Socialists of America certainly reveals lots of hard-core stuff couched in the usual stale Marxist terminology), the burden shifts to trying to explain why this time around things won’t end up like in the USSR, Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania and contemporary Venezuela. More specifically, why the most prosperous nation in history should abandon the capitalism that produced that prosperity in favor of a system that has everywhere produced only mass poverty (and usually tyranny and mass bloodshed as well).
The dodge on this one tends to come in two well-practiced forms — first, that socialism has “never really been tried” (despite claims to the contrary by “dictatorships of the proletariat” in diverse parts of the world over time), and second, that the “right people” with good intentions will finally be in charge (Lenin, Stalin and Mao, however, worshipped by socialists in their day, having been mere charlatans using socialism as a vehicle for their own ambitions).
Either way, American politics is about to get a great deal more interesting in an ideological sense in the run-up to 2020, as the likely huge array of Democratic contenders are forced to embrace the socialist label under pressure from an increasingly hard-left, radicalized base in the primaries and then try to explain come fall why it isn’t Uncle Fidel or Grandpa Nikita’s socialism.
As such, it is always interesting to note that even mild welfare-state socialism is simply a sequential phase in the evolution of capitalism, that in those supposedly wondrous Nordic countries it is capitalism that came first and thus serves as a precondition by creating the wealth (the pie, so to speak) redistributed by the welfare state.
Karl Marx himself identified capitalism as a necessary stage of economic development which must be passed through to get to socialism/communism, because it provided for the first time in human history a sufficient bounty with which to satisfy basic human needs, awaiting only a more equitable distribution of the kind our contemporary socialists are once again promising to carry out.
In the end, an abundance of historical evidence suggests that the genuine socialism of the kind envisioned by Marx can’t work because it destroys capitalism, but the warm fuzzy kind envisioned by Bernie Sanders can only work, if at all, because a vilified capitalist economy picks up the tab and provides the largesse (the free stuff).
Socialism thus remains an ideal that retains appeal only so long as it stays firmly at the theoretical level, and can therefore be usefully compared on that basis to grubby real-world capitalism. It exploits human frustration with everyday life and promises a “better” system than whichever one actually exists in a glorious future that conveniently always stays in the future.
But becoming the official socialist party in the global epicenter of capitalism is not without risk; at some point, the fairy tale has to be translated into an actual, detailed political program that can be defended. Free stuff is always appealing unless you figure out that others are getting it and you’re paying for it (and given CBO estimates that Bernie and friends’ proposals will require an immediate doubling of federal spending, there will be a lot to pay for).
Socialism is self-flattering to believe in, providing its adherents with a certain romantic idealism and revolutionary frisson.
But only so long as you know you’ll never have to live under it.