When Bernie Sanders entered the presidential race in 2015, his candidacy seemed like a joke. He was an independent senator from Vermont running as a “democratic socialist.” With his mad-scientist white hair, he looked like just another crank.
But then a funny thing happened: Campaigning almost entirely on the issues, Sanders nearly won the Democratic nomination. While some of his support came from liberal opposition to the Clinton sleaze machine, his rants against corporate power and calls to raise the minimum wage, make college tuition free, and implement universal health care resonated.
Nobody’s laughing now. Democrats nationwide largely support Sanders’s hard-left agenda. And more and more people, particularly young people, tell pollsters they’re open to the idea of voting for a socialist. In a poll this summer, Democrats by a 10-point margin said they prefer socialism to capitalism. For decades, the Marxists in our universities have been salivating over the impending arrival of “late-stage capitalism,” in which the inequalities of free enterprise awaken the masses to our own oppression and leave us clamoring for an enlightened government to step in, take control, and fix everything.
The tide has certainly shifted against free enterprise, an economic system that has lifted countless masses out of abject poverty, and toward socialism, whose track record is far worse, to put it charitably. There are plenty of potential explanations, from the hostility of university professors toward free enterprise to the villainous portrayal of business leaders in entertainment to anger at the lack of comeuppance for the banking system after the 2008 crash. The younger generation also seems curiously unwilling to credit capitalism with the creation of modern conveniences they hold so dear. There’s a reason text messaging and Netflix didn’t emerge from Cuba or North Korea.
Socialism is traditionally defined as the government owning the means of production, and it just as traditionally leads to authoritarianism. Maybe it’s cool to think of oneself as a socialist now that we are decades away from Stalin’s Great Terror and Mao’s Great Leap Forward. With a body count in the millions, you’d think “socialism” would be hard to rebrand. But thanks to Bernie, being a socialist is in vogue.
One of the ironies of the Trump presidency is that his political opponents, while decrying his impetuousness and authoritarian tendencies, happen to favor modifying our political and economic system into one that invests more power in Washington and its leaders—who could very well turn out to be impetuous and have authoritarian tendencies. Decentralized government power, in the parlance of today’s politics, is a norm that shouldn’t be broken.
The Sandernistas say that “democratic socialism” is a more benign variant, akin to what is practiced in Scandinavia. Yes, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark are clean, prosperous, and beautiful countries with robust social safety nets. They are also small and not particularly socialist. Their tax rates may be high, but they have thriving private sectors and no minimum wage laws. Their economies rank as “mostly free,” the same category as the United States, in the Heritage Foundation’s annual index of economic freedom. As the Danish prime minister noted in a speech at Harvard in 2015: “Some people in the U.S. associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore, I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”
If there’s any good news about the increasing allure of socialism in the United States, it is that the problem stems less from a failure to consider the dangers of centralized power than from basic ignorance. In September, Gallup asked Americans to define “socialism.” The most popular response was “equality” (23 percent). In second place was the traditional definition, “government ownership or control” (17 percent). Providing enhanced benefits and services came in third at 10 percent. Six percent defined socialism as “talking to people” or “being social,” which means 4 out of 10 Americans think socialism is just some form of making nice. That’s a big switch from 1949, when Gallup found that respondents identified socialism as state control of the economy over “equality” by a three-to-one margin.
Eugene V. Debs ran for president five times on the Socialist ticket a century ago. He preached the overthrow of the capitalist system and returning the means of production to workers (and was jailed for sedition in 1918). Harry Truman nationalized the country’s steel mills in 1952, which was a clear example of government taking control of the means of production. (The Supreme Court declared Truman’s move illegal.) We’re not approaching such extremes.
Capitalism will always result in some people having more than others. But those who have the least have still far higher standards of living than they used to. Large majorities of those living in poverty in the United States own cellphones, computers, televisions, cars, washers and dryers. Breaking out of poverty might not be easy, but it’s possible in our free-enterprise system. The glory of capitalism: opportunity. It sure beats all the alternatives.
