Read: As Bernie Sanders leans into socialism, his rivals laugh

Anybody who has studied the history of Europe—or, for that matter, Latin America—should know that some socialists crafted systems that left virtually no space to private enterprise and crushed the political freedoms of dissenters, while others combined government benefits with a robust market economy and the rule of law. What mattered was not whether a party or movement called itself socialist, but whether it recognized the danger of autocracy, and carefully formulated limiting principles that would stop it from going down the same path as the Soviet Union. So activists who hope to mainstream socialism in American politics must, at the very least, make clear what, exactly, they mean by the term.

This is why I was very hopeful when Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign announced that the candidate would hold a major speech on “How Democratic Socialism Is the Only Way to Defeat Oligarchy and Authoritarianism.” After years of using the term about as imprecisely as many of his followers, I hoped that Sanders would finally set out why it holds such importance to him, what role the market would play in the socialist system he promises to build, and how he can protect his political project against the Soviet risk.

I can’t say he met my expectations.

In the most poignant passages of his speech, Sanders rightly argued that a robust welfare state need not be in tension with personal liberty. On the contrary, access to basic social and economic goods is a precondition for being able to make real choices:

Are you truly free if you are unable to go to a doctor when you are sick, or face financial bankruptcy when you leave the hospital?



Are you truly free if you cannot afford the prescription drug you need to stay alive?



Are you truly free when you spend half of your limited income on housing, and are forced to borrow money from a payday lender at 200 percent interest rates? Are you truly free if you are 70 years old and forced to work because you lack a pension or enough money to retire?

This is a classic leftist critique of unbridled capitalism, and it retains much of the force it had back in the days of Karl Marx. Sanders made a strong case for the universal provision of affordable health care, the regulation of the financial industry, and generous old-age pensions. But he didn’t acknowledge—in this section or elsewhere—the ways in which the suppression of free markets has repeatedly fostered a different kind of oppression over the past century.

Virtually all socialist movements have claimed to embrace democracy, as Sanders did with a perfunctory reference to the Bill of Rights. What separated, say, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who ended up crushing political opponents, from the French Socialists, who respected the right to dissent, was in good part their attitude toward markets. Socialists who nationalized large parts of the economy, and severely restricted the functioning of the market, crushed freedom in two ways: First, they made it impossible for citizens to engage in private economic initiative. And second, they quickly started to abuse the power to take away the livelihood of political opponents.