What is Democratic Socialism? I read considerable talk about “the democratic” as applying to the process of getting socialism; damn little about it as an adjective applying to socialism when you get it. — John Dewey to James T. Farrell, 8 November, 1948

Socialism, the political economy that for a century dared not speak its name in American domestic politics, is enjoying a return to prominence it hasn’t experienced since the early twentieth century. On the one hand, self-identified “democratic socialists” such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have won considerable public approval and support, particularly from younger people. On the other hand, nervous defenders of plutocracy like President Trump have gone out of their way to renew warnings of a socialist threat to American freedom not heard much since the end of the Cold War. “America will never be a socialist country,” Trump vowed during this year’s State of the Union address, as though the new Democratic House majority were about to make Kim Jong Un the honorary chair of the Democratic National Committee. Right-wing pundits from Sean Hannity to Dinesh D’Souza issued their own alarmist variations on the theme, which will only continue to metastasize on the right as the unpopular incumbent president gears up for the 2020 general election.

Beneath all the pundit-driven sound and fury here, it’s possible to discern a much older and far more serious debate, concerning just what kind of society, and political economy, should sustain the American democratic republic. In this long-running controversy, strictly economic considerations have been a dependent variable; its lead partisans and theorists have instead put political democracy and egalitarian citizenship first and asked what sort of economy best advances and supports these public virtues.

Given the centrality of these ideals in the American political tradition, it may be that the fate of socialism in our politics will depend now, as it has before, on how well socialists fare in convincing Americans of their commitment to them. Or, to state it a bit differently, contemporary democratic socialists will likely succeed in direct proportion to their ability to persuade their fellow Americans that “democratic socialism” is not an oxymoron, and that it means, as Ocasio-Cortez has said, “putting democracy and society first.”

The ink had barely dried on the U.S. Constitution before Americans began to address the question of the sort of political economy that the decidedly democratized republic they had launched required if it was securely to prosper. This history provides an essential backdrop to any consideration of the prospects of an American socialism today. As the eye-opening work of legal historians Joseph Fishkin, Ganesh Sitaraman, and especially William Forbath has established, the “basic foundation” upon which the American constitutional order was built was, as Sitaraman puts it, “the prerequisite of relative economic equality.” This was an essential conviction of James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and the many proponents in a “distributive tradition” of constitutional law and politics who followed them in the nineteenth century and beyond into the twentieth century. A partial honor roll of others aligned with this project would include Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Henry George, Henry Demarest Lloyd, Louis Brandeis, Herbert Croly, John Dewey, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and John Rawls.

This tradition has been often strongly inflected with the centuries-old civic republican understanding of liberty as “non-domination,” independence, or autonomy—that is, freedom from the exercise, actual or potential, of arbitrary or uncontrolled power by one person over another. The civic republican commitment to egalitarian politics is grounded in the firm belief that all citizens should have equal access to political institutions that empower them to contest threats to their liberty by exercising control over those who would dominate them. The audacity of the American republican experiment lies in its democratization of full citizenship—i.e., its gradual (if often bitterly fought) extension of the full rights of citizenship necessary for such self-protection to more and more of those who live within its borders. The franchise is, of course, among the most important of these rights, and regular elections among the most significant of these institutions, but few if any republicans contend that, however necessary, voting and elections are a sufficient safeguard of liberty.