Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political columnist.
[T]here’s a dirty little secret haunting Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign.
OK, maybe it’s a clean little secret. Still, it’s one that Sanders seems intent on keeping hidden in the early days of his campaign.
No wonder. He’s doing pretty well, edging up in the polls, drawing big crowds and getting some favorable coverage despite his obvious disadvantages: He’s an underdog, he’s being outspent, he’s charismatically challenged, and worst of all, he accepts – no, he boasts – of being what no successful American politician can be: a socialist.
A democratic socialist, to be sure, but a socialist nonetheless.
Here’s the secret. He isn’t.
A socialist, that is.
Because what he advocates is not socialism. It’s social democracy. Sanders may be the most robust social democrat in captivity. But social democracy is not the same thing as democratic socialism.
That’s why there are two different terms. If they were identical, only one would be necessary.
Unlike liberalism or conservatism, socialism is precisely defined in dictionaries. It’s an economic system, says the American Heritage Dictionary (Third Edition) in which most “means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively.”
This collective need not be the government. Perhaps the closest the world ever came to democratic socialism was Israel in its first 40 years or so. It was not complete socialism – there was private business – and while the government owned some enterprises (it still owns most of the land), so did other nonprofit entities. The labor federation, for instance, owned many businesses, including the country’s largest bank, Bank Leumi (now in private hands).
Just think of the AFL-CIO owning Citicorp.
Neither as senator nor as presidential candidate has Bernie Sanders suggested that the AFL-CIO buy a bank, even though it would not be all that radical a proposal. There are nonprofit, collectively-owned banks in the United States. Most of them are called credit unions. Then there’s the state-owned Bank of North Dakota and several banks owned by Indian tribes.
But Sanders has not proposed a Vermont state bank. When Sen. Anthony Pollina and some allies floated the idea last year (19 town meetings passed supporting resolutions), Sanders remained silent.
He is in favor of breaking up the big banks. That’s because he’s a social democrat who favors using government to protect (as he sees it) the interests of average people threatened (as he sees it) by – in this case – the danger of having to bail out a “too big to fail” bank that goes belly-up.
At the end of that process, though, the banks would still be private, for-profit, companies. They’d be smaller, perhaps more strictly regulated. But they would remain capitalist institutions, part of a larger capitalist economy in which most goods and services are produced by for-profit firms and individuals.
A system Sanders does not propose to abolish. If he so proposed, he’d be a socialist. He is not.
Sanders himself perpetuates the confusion. Interviewed by George Stephanopoulos on ABC News last month, Sanders likened his “democratic socialism” to the systems in “Denmark, Norway and Sweden.”
But those are not socialist countries. They are capitalist economies with more social democracy than most others. If Sweden did not have a healthy capitalist economy it could not be home to such large and innovative companies as Ikea, Electrolux and Spotify.
Were you to fly to Stockholm and rent a car at Arlanda Airport, you could rent from Hertz, Avis, Enterprise or Europcar, all private, for-profit corporations. Drive 37 kilometers (about 23 miles) south to downtown Stockholm to check in to a private, for-profit hotel before walking to a private, for-profit restaurant. In fact, almost everything you buy in Sweden, from an automobile to a quart of milk, would be bought through the private sector.
That’s not socialism.
(OK, it would be a liter of milk, and the dairy farmer is probably government subsidized. And ours are not?)
No doubt, some find this hair-splitting. From their point of view, the degree of social democracy Sanders supports is so objectionable that it might as well be socialism.
Politically, that’s a reasonable outlook. Intellectually, for at least two reasons, it is flawed.
The first reason is that social democracy is universal in the modern, democratic world. Just as no democracy does not have a market economy – capitalism – no democratic capitalism is not also a social democracy, a regulated welfare state. The generosity of the welfare and the extent of the regulation are matters about which reasonable people can disagree. That’s why some social democracies are as extensive as Sweden’s, some as limited as the USA’s.
But were this ever to become a world in which the public conversation was dominated by grown-ups (a persistent if unlikely dream), no one would seriously propose jettisoning the market system (which works), and no one would seriously call for abolishing democratic controls over it (which also work). The fact that every modern democracy is both a market economy and a social democracy is proof that there are no reasonable alternatives. If there were, somebody would try one.
This does not mean that every proposal to reduce spending or loosen regulations are wrong; some of them make sense. Nor does it mean it is foolish to envision – and even to establish mechanisms to ease – a process in which the market economy evolves into … well, into something else, as one day it probably will. Human creations (and capitalism is a human creation) are rarely if ever eternal.
But that’s not the same as proposing to yank it out root and branch and replace it with a new system devised in some academic office or the corner saloon.
The second reason concerns language. Words matter. They mean what the dictionary says they mean, not what any individual thinks they should mean according to his or her prejudices and proclivities. Language ought to be used with as much precision, specificity and nuance as possible.
Socialism is a real, elaborate, serious (if perhaps unworkable and anachronistic, but that’s part of the political debate) social and economic system. Social democracy is just as real, elaborate and serious, and it dominates the world. They are not the same thing.
Those who care about language should not confuse the two. That could begin with Bernie Sanders.
