Daron Acemoglu says Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed “democratic socialist,” has improved his standing in national polls since his victory in the New Hampshire primary, raising the possibility that he could amass a commanding delegate lead on Super Tuesday in two weeks. Sanders’s “momentum reflects a yearning for radical solutions to serious structural economic problems.” But the question is whether the US “should embrace” the change.

The author believes democratic socialism will not “offer a cure” for the grievances the US is grappling with. Its adherents see “market economy as inherently unfair, un-equalizing, and incorrigible,” and seek to “cut that system’s most important lifeline: private ownership of the means of production.” They reject the idea that “firms and all of their equipment and machinery rest in the hands of a small group of owners,” and would “prefer ‘economic democracy,’ whereby companies would be controlled either by their workers or by an administrative structure operated by the state.”

Instead of adopting the “Soviet-style brand,” democratic socialists have “their envisioned system,” which can be “achieved wholly by democratic means.” The author says, “the most recent attempts to socialize production (in Latin America) have relied on anti-democratic arrangements. And that points to another problem with the current debate in the US: democratic socialism has been conflated with social democracy. And, unfortunately, Sanders has contributed to this confusion.”

In the 1970s, Bernie Sanders advocated for the nationalisation of most major industries, including energy companies, factories, and banks, when he was a leading member of a self-described "radical political party". In 1988, as newly-married, he made a 10-day visit to the Soviet Union during his honeymoon. He had kind words for left-wing dictatorships when he was young. In February 2019, he refused to describe Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro as a “dictator.”

Sanders’s supporters are anxious to downgrade his self-described socialism into something more politically palatable — like Great Society liberalism, or perhaps, at most, a Nordic-style welfare state. But he, like his British soulmate, the – still ruling – Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, are seen as the left of Europe’s moderate social democrats.

Critics say Sanders’s platform is more radical than the Labour Party’s 2019 election manifesto. He wants government to absorb a much higher share of GDP, intervene even more heavily in sectors such as health care, and attack capital more aggressively than Labour would do under Corbyn. It is noteworthy that the Labour agenda was broadly recognised as a “leftward leap” in a country whose politics are already well to the left than in the US.

Sanders’s claim that he just wants the US to be more like Denmark or Sweden earned scorn from former Swedish prime minister, Carl Bildt, who in February 2019 took to Twitter and warned that his brand of socialism is not the key to creating a great society as Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seem to think.

Sweden once tried a version of what Sanders proposed – to transfer a sizable chunk of corporate ownership and managerial control to workers. In the late 1960s, “Swedish and Danish trade unions, under the influence of more radical left-wing forces, embraced democratic socialism and started demanding economic democracy and direct control of profits.” This “workplace democracy” they advocated, was eventually abandoned, and the Swedes returned to their tradition of social democracy.

Between 1991-1994 while in office as prime minister, Bildt cut capital gains taxes to 30 % and corporate taxes to 28 %. He also privatised several state-owned industries, deregulated multiple sectors of the economy, which allowed people to invest portions of their pension, and introduced school choice policies, improving the country’s education system.

After Bildt, Sweden, which had completely lost its host of entrepreneurs due to business taxes that sometimes exceeded the 100 % mark, once again flourished. Even his Social Democrat successor, Ingvar Carlsson took over his agenda, because the old model – the one that Sanders embraces – poisoned labour relations, and depressed both investment and productivity growth.

According to the author, “when intellectual and political currents deviated from the market-based social-democratic compact, things generally didn’t work out too well.” The other way round, “when free-market intellectual currents led to rightward deviations from the social-democratic compact, the results were just as bad. Inequality widened amid equally tepid productivity performance, while social safety nets were left in tatters.”

It is always wise to find a middle way, which is “not market fundamentalism or democratic socialism, but social democracy.” It requires “effective regulation to rein in concentrated market power” and to give workers “a greater voice.” Moreover public services and the safety net “need to be strengthened.” Most of all the US needs a new technology policy to ensure that the trajectory of economic development is in everyone’s interest.”

The question is whether Bernie Sanders can explain the American public the difference between social democracy and "democratic socialism," because with the latter, he will have no chance of beating Trump.