The Scrapbook is old enough to remember when socialism was popular the first time. It went out of fashion when even liberal intellectuals noticed that it produced only misery wherever it was tried, but now it’s popular again. An avowed socialist captured the hearts of young voters in 2016 (and nearly captured the nomination, too); the phrase “late capitalism” is everywhere in our political and academic writing; and liberals now routinely use the language and concepts of Marxism as though these were the latest insights rather than the vestiges of a world-historical disaster.
Take Elizabeth Bruenig, one of the Washington Post’s young columnists. She recently earned just derision from the right for a column provocatively titled “It’s Time to Give Socialism a Try.” “Not to be confused for a totalitarian nostalgist,” she wrote, “I would support a kind of socialism that would be democratic and aimed primarily at decommodifying labor, reducing the vast inequality brought about by capitalism, and breaking capital’s stranglehold over politics and culture.”
