Where did the current qualified enthusiasm for socialism in the US Democratic Party come from? What changed, and can the rest of the electorate be persuaded they might benefit too?

David J & Janice L Frent · Corbis · Getty

Bill Gates thinks that the enthusiastic response to Democratic Party senator Bernie Sanders or representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shouldn’t particularly worry business elites; their ‘socialism’ just shows that some Americans want to increase taxes but not to abolish capitalism. Gates, being interviewed on CNBC on 6 May, said that even he, as the second richest American, favours a more progressive income tax and an increase in inheritance tax (which President Donald Trump has reduced to next to nothing).

Warren Buffet, the third richest American, has repeatedly criticised the inequality of the fiscal system in US, under which he pays proportionally less tax than his housekeeper or receptionist. The troubled consciences of the affluent may not be new, but the current mix of anxiety and philanthropy among the US super-rich is, in the secular immediacy of its preoccupations, qualitatively different from the theological concerns of wealthy Roman citizens in the time of St Augustine, attracted to the afterlife promised by Christianity and hoping through conversion to protect their souls in an extramundane future.

Yet recent statements by Gates and others reveal not only a profession of good intentions, but also a more radical political context. Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and their political allies, who consider themselves ‘democratic socialists’. are not demanding the nationalisation of the key sectors of the US economy. The excitement around Sanders’s campaign in the Democratic primaries in 2016 had much to do with his criticism of extravagant tuition fees at US universities and astronomical healthcare costs. If tuition fees are a regular source of middle to upper middle-class anxiety, the prohibitive cost of healthcare affects all except the wealthiest.

Democratic voices

These themes do not hark back to the socialism of yesteryear, associated with factory workers on industrial assembly lines. To this extent, ‘socialism’ has (...)