Up from the Grave

As the new face of the movement, the magnetic Ocasio-Cortez became an overnight celebrity, making the rounds of the major entertainment as well as talk shows and making herself available for a full-length portrait in the New Yorker, which editor David Remnick entrusted to no writer other than himself. The New York Times ran eight major pieces on democratic socialism this summer in the news, opinion, magazine, and Sunday Review sections, only one of them critical, topping it off with an interactive feature on the paper’s website in which readers could answer a series of questions to help them discover, “Are You a Democratic Socialist?”

The sudden success of “democratic socialists” accords with national public opinion surveys showing higher favorable ratings for socialism than capitalism. The meaning of this is murky since the same samples prefer “free enterprise” to either of these options and also give high approval ratings to “entrepreneurs,” but clearly “socialism” is no longer a scare word.

So what, then, is “democratic socialism”? Where does it come from? And, scary or not, is there anything wrong with it?

Although most socialist history has been written elsewhere, “democratic socialism” is predominantly an American coinage. Before Lenin’s seizure of power in Russia in 1917 there were never clear theoretical distinctions between the various terms socialists called themselves—socialist, communist, social democrat. Lenin’s band was called the Bolsheviks, a faction of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ party before going independent in 1912. With his 1917 triumph, Lenin decreed that henceforth his party would call itself Communist. At this point every socialist party in the world, whatever its name, split between those who embraced Lenin’s model and those who rejected it as being too bloody and tyrannical. The former groups called themselves Communist and never again social democrat, while the latter mostly called themselves social democrat and never again communist. (Usually thereafter Communist was spelled with an upper case “C,” denoting a formal affiliation with the Communist party. It remained unclear what the term “communist” with a lower case “c” might mean.)

The schism was wide. Over the ensuing decades, the Communists murdered many social democrats, and some social democrats played pivotal roles in the defeat of communism, notably former U.K. foreign minister Ernest Bevin, who first thought up NATO, and former Portuguese prime minister Mário Soares, whose underdog triumph over the Communist party in 1974 was a Cold War turning point. Nonetheless, terminological confusion endured because both sides continued to claim the label “socialist.”

When I joined the Socialist party in the 1960s and its youth wing, the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL), the term “democratic socialist” had been favored for some decades, serving primarily to underline the distinction from Communism but also from European social democrats who had, over the years, become too compromising. We democratic socialists would not be content to reform capitalism. Rather, we believed in unalloyed socialism, that is, the elimination of private property in favor of shared ownership of “the means of production” and an egalitarian distribution of wealth and income, “to each according to his needs.” However, in contrast to Communists, we envisioned achieving this entire momentous transformation by legislation enacted by duly elected officials. Indeed, we prized democracy and argued that all we wanted was more of it; that is, to wrest control of the economy from private hands and entrust it to elected officials.

Having never come near political power, our theories remained pristine. Our European counterparts, whose half measures we disdained, had a different experience. Through the middle of the 20th century, and especially in the decades following World War II, they often secured enough votes to form governments. When unhampered by coalition partners they were free to launch peaceful transitions to socialism.

None exemplified this better than the British Labour party, which was swept to power in a landslide in 1945 by an electorate aching to turn from the rigors of war to the enjoyments of peace. Labour leader Clement Attlee later explained: “Our policy was not a reformed capitalism but progress toward a democratic socialism. . . . [W]e would go ahead as fast as possible.” The new government, firm in its conviction that “social justice” “could only be attained by bringing under public ownership and control the main factors in the economic system,” set about at once to nationalize banks, mining, aviation, trucking, electricity, gas, and cable and wireless communication.

Notwithstanding socialist theory, which held that eliminating the profit motive would enhance efficiency, within two years several of these nationalized industries found themselves in trouble, forcing the government to begin subsidizing coal, rail, and aviation. The party’s left wing was unperturbed and proposed to accelerate the march to socialism by nationalizing additional sectors, specifically insurance, food imports, and much of heavy industry. But this met resistance within the party, where second thoughts were sprouting. When a proposal to nationalize iron and steel was put before the party’s executive committee, the representatives of the iron and steel unions, having observed the experience of their fellow unions in coal and other nationalized businesses, voted against it.

Labour began to beat a retreat and was voted from office entirely in 1950. Not that its program was all a failure. On the contrary, it established the National Health Service and other cornerstones of the British welfare state, notably social insurance of all kinds, subsidies for the poor, public housing, and expanded public education.

The lesson of the Attlee episode was clear. Socialist parties could provide or enlarge government benefits. These were popular and, once established, rarely challenged by conservative parties. But they could not successfully change the underlying basis of the economy by replacing private enterprise. Over the next 20 years, Labour and Tories alternated in power, but a consensus seemed to have been reached. It was called Butskellism, an elision of the names of successive chancellors of the exchequer from counterposed parties, Conservative Rab Butler and Labourite Hugh Gaitskell. The Tories would at most nibble at the margins of the welfare state, while Labour would no longer threaten the capitalist goose that laid the golden eggs that paid for it.

British Labour’s experience was not unique. A generation later, it was reprised in France when the Socialist party led by François Mitterrand secured unprecedented domination of parliament as well as the executive. It promised “la rupture,” a clean break with capitalism in order, as the party platform put it, to “free the workers from age-old oppression and to provide all those who are exploited . . . with the instruments for their own self-emancipation.” Upon taking office, the Mitterrand government nationalized industries, expanded public hiring, and hiked wages, pensions, and welfare. Within a year, with output stagnating, inflation raging, and the trade balance collapsing, Mitterrand reversed course. “The aim is to bring about a real reconciliation between the left and the economy,” explained Socialist party general secretary Lionel Jospin.

The story has been similar wherever socialist parties have operated within democratic systems, even in Sweden, which is often imagined as a socialist exemplar. In truth, while erecting perhaps the world’s lushest welfare state, Sweden’s long-ruling Social Democrats long ago abandoned any notion of replacing capitalism.

In short, democratic socialism turns out to be a contradiction in terms—not in the sense some free enterprise dogmatists believe, namely, that constraining property rights necessarily means destroying political rights, but rather in an empirical sense. Democratic polities never adopt socialism.

Likewise, democratic polities never adopt the libertarian dream of pure free markets infringed upon only by a “night watchman” state. Apart from Mitterrand, apostles of capitalism like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, rather than socialists, have mounted the most substantial challenges to Butskellism. They trimmed the welfare state, but they did not attempt to uproot it. The Iron Lady sold off public housing, but she left the National Health Service in place. Reagan slowed the growth of government but did not reverse it.

Thus, everywhere there is democracy we find a mixed economy. Wealth is created mostly in the private sector, and some share of it is taken in taxes for public purposes. Looking at the size of the public sector in democratic countries as a portion of the total economy, we find a surprisingly narrow range. Nowhere does it get much smaller than one-third, as in the United States, Australia, and Japan. Nor does it get much larger than one-half, as in Sweden, Italy, and France.

Mostly, it seems, publics want maximum services and benefits from government but limits on taxes. Democratic countries settle into a level of government with which they grow comfortable and then opt for only slight variations from one administration to the next. The socialist economist Thomas Piketty in his bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century mused about enlarging the “social state,” that is, the public sector, in European countries. He pictured growing it from one-half of national income to three-quarters and concluded, perhaps in disappointment: “A drastic increase in the size of the social state is neither realistic nor desirable, at least for the foreseeable future.”

The universal absence of democratic socialism has presented a dilemma to democratic socialists. Much as they don’t want to, they find themselves forced to choose. Which do they value more, democracy or socialism? That is, which do they prefer, democratic capitalism or undemocratic socialism?

Recognition of this choice made a cold warrior of me and some of my democratic socialist comrades in the 1960s and 1970s. Still nurturing our dream of democratic socialism, we realized that Communism posed a more malicious threat to all we held dear than did democratic capitalism, and a great part of our energy was directed to fighting it. We not only despised all Communist regimes and movements, we regarded attitudes toward Communism as a litmus test for others. We wanted no truck with anyone who supported dictators and hangmen. Hence we were irretrievably at odds with our peers in the New Left, who almost all idolized the likes of Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh.

Our intransigence caused a division within the Socialist party and YPSL. The other side of the debate was led by the famous writer Michael Harrington, who objected to our stance because it distanced our party from the mass of New Left activists. Not that Harrington himself countenanced the likes of Che and Ho, but he was eager to collaborate with the legions of young radicals who did.

A formal split ensued. Our side became Social Democrats USA (from which I drifted away in the 1980s and which is today mostly defunct), while Harrington led his group into a merger with a New Left offshoot called the New American Movement, which was radical and eclectically pro-Communist. Historian Ronald Radosh, who was a leader in the NAM, recalls being wooed by Harrington with the words: “We can accept . . . people like yourself even though you might have a different estimate of the Soviet Union.” (Radosh had long since left behind his youthful Communist allegiance, but Harrington apparently had not caught up.)

While Harrington never joined his new comrades from NAM in lionizing this or that Communist regime, he, too, nonetheless began to relax his democratic standards. He dedicated a book he wrote about the Third World to Tanzanian dictator Julius Nyerere, who imposed a stifling socialism on his country, in pursuit of which villages were put to the torch in order to drive their inhabitants onto collective farms.

The Harrington/NAM organization was christened Democratic Socialists of America, the group to which Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib belong and which is at the center of much of the current excitement about “democratic socialism.” The label notwithstanding, it is a mélange of socialists, some of them democratic in conviction and some not. The equivocation is manifest not only in attitudes toward undemocratic socialists abroad, for example in DSA’s proclamation of “solidarity” with Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela, but also in some of its activities. The group boasts that it mixes electoral campaigns with “direct action,” which sometimes means interfering with the political activities of others. One Los Angeles member told the Washington Post that he and his comrades had “mess[ed] up [Mayor] Eric Garcetti’s inauguration party because he refuses to designate L.A. as a sanctuary city, and . . . block[ed] his car from leaving.”

Bernie Sanders, who put the term “democratic socialism” into current use, has his own equivocal record on the subject. According to his extremely sympathetic biographer Harry Jaffe, Sanders started out as a Bolshevik, then joined the YPSL back when I did in 1963, and later sought the vice presidential nomination of the Socialist Workers party, a Trotskyite outfit that held the Soviet Union to be flawed but preferable to the United States. In other words, his fealty to groups that even used the lingo of democracy was at best intermittent. Today, although he breathes fire about America’s shortcomings—“a handful of multibillionaire families,” he says, is “succeeding” in “mov[ing] our country toward an oligarchic form of society”—his criticisms of socialist rulers are attenuated, when he criticizes them at all.

As mayor of Burlington, Vermont, in the 1980s, Sanders established sister-city relationships with Yaroslavl in the Soviet Union, where he also chose to honeymoon, and Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, traveling to that country in 1985 for the celebration of the sixth anniversary of the seizure of power by the Sandinista Liberation Front. “No one denies they are making great progress . . . giving power to the poor people, to the working people,” he said of the Sandinistas upon his return. In reality, by this time the Sandinistas’ record was decried not only by conservative Nicaraguans but also by all the non-Communist liberals and leftists who had allied with the Sandinistas in overthrowing the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza.

While this was back in the 1980s, Sanders never recanted, even after the Sandinistas were voted from power, having been forced into an election by the loss of their superpower patron in Moscow. And in more recent years, Sanders has offered similar praise for the Cuban Communist government, which he applauded for having done “a lot of positive things.”

Another anomaly about the putatively democratic convictions of both Sanders and the DSA is that both are antagonistic to Israel. The only foreign policy subject on which the DSA staked out a formal position at its last convention was in endorsing the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement against Israel. Sanders has not endorsed BDS, but of 20 candidates in the 2016 presidential primaries, he took a position more critical of Israel than any other. And during this year’s confrontations at Israel’s Gaza border, in which the terror group Hamas led thousands of Palestinians, some of them armed, in trying to swarm into Israel, Sanders posted a series of videos on social media blaming only Israel.

The irony is that Israel is not only the sole democracy in its region but stands as history’s most successful experiment in democratic socialism. For its first 30 years it was ruled by the Labor party, which created a far-reaching welfare state and imposed rigid controls on private enterprise and hefty luxury taxes for the purpose of social leveling. It also boasted perhaps the world’s most powerful labor union, the Histadrut. To top it off, Israel was in part built and its borders staked out by kibbutzim, utopian communes devoid of private property whose members were regarded as the country’s elite and apotheosis.

All of this apparently is trumped in the eyes of today’s democratic socialists by their devotion to the practice of “intersectionality,” a modern-day construction in which Palestinians have claimed an honored place as a victim group alongside blacks, Latinos, women, gays, and others, all bonded by their opposition to the oppressors, straight white males. This is a derivative of Marxism, the cardinal innovation of which was to hold that progress depended on “class struggle” in which a sanctified group, the proletariat, would vanquish a retrograde group, the bourgeoisie. In this new version, ethnic and biological categories have supplanted economic classes, an innovation first pioneered by Mussolini. With DSA member Tlaib about to become the first Palestinian-American member of Congress, the DSA is bound to become an increasingly vocal advocate against Israel.

The democratic socialism that captured my imagination when I was 15 was a thing of beauty—a voluntary system in which people would come to see that they could live more happily by cooperating and sharing than by competing. There would be no rich and no poor, no invidious distinctions, no dog-eat-dog. One day after school, our young socialist club met to draw up a blueprint of this new society, but we got nowhere. It should not have made us feel bad; Marx and Engels also failed at this.

They, too, as Michael Harrington wrote books to emphasize, often spoke as democrats, but they never explained how a socialist society would function; nor did they use the term “democratic socialism.” That term became important after the murderous example of Communism made socialism repugnant to many. But alas, “democratic” has been used promiscuously by many undemocratic socialists. The Communists have used it themselves, as in the name of the world’s most repressive regime, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. With the fall of the Soviet empire, some of the former East Bloc parties changed their names to add the word. Thus the onetime Communist rulers of East Germany became the Party of Democratic Socialism, those of Poland became the Democratic Left Alliance, those of Slovakia, the Party of the Democratic Left.

In the United States today, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib, like Harrington before them, are no doubt sincere in imagining a socialism that is democratic. But that has never existed, and in its absence they open their arms to socialism without democracy, because the shimmering goal of socialism cannot be given up. Therein lies the final irony. Just as democratic socialism is an illusion, so too is socialism itself the pipe dream that never dies. It promises harmony and abundance; it has always instead produced strife and penury. Little wonder, then, that free people have never chosen it.