On Monday, during a visit to New Hampshire, California Senator Kamala Harris was asked by a reporter if she considered herself a democratic socialist—just as Bernie Sanders, an independent who won the Granite State’s last Democratic primary, does. “The people of New Hampshire will tell me what’s required to compete in New Hampshire, but I will tell you I am not a democratic socialist,” Harris said. A day later, MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt pressed Harris on whether Medicare for All, which she supports, was socialism. Once again, Harris rejected the term. “No, no,” she said. “It’s about providing health care to all people.”

Over the past three weeks—beginning with his State of the Union address—President Trump has attempted to turn the 2020 primary into a binary choice between his (corrupt) presidency and Venezuela-style socialism. Many in the media have followed his lead, pressing Democrats on whether or not they are socialists, despite the fact that none describe themselves as such. This pseudo-story not only has rendered the term “socialism” meaningless—conflating national health insurance and graduated tax systems with a government takeover of the entire economy—but it is erasing important distinctions in Democratic candidates’ policies that ought to be the focus of debate.



Understood for much of the twentieth century as a “halfway house between capitalism and communism,” in the words of The Atlantic’s Marian Tupy, socialism has always involved ownership of key industries by the state. None of the major candidates running for the Democratic nomination, including Sanders, are advocating for such an economic model in America. But the term has returned to political prominence nonetheless—first as a rhetorical shorthand on the left, then as ammunition for political attacks from the right, and finally as interview bait from lazy journalists.

Few would dispute that Sanders’s surprisingly popular campaign in 2016, when he ran on policies including Medicare for All and tuition-free college, was the most important catalyst for America’s renewed fascination with socialism. It’s also partly the source of the confusion in our discourse about the word’s meaning. As Thor Benson noted in The New Republic back in 2015, Sanders was “loose with his terminology,” usually making clear that he was a democratic socialist but sometimes simply calling himself a socialist. But the policies he embraced then, as now, largely fall under the tradition of democratic socialism. He’s not pushing for statist control of industry and capital, but more government spending and redistributive policies to drastically reduce—but not eliminate—economic inequality. He advocates for greater worker control over business, but stops short of calling for workers to control the means of production.



“When push comes to shove, he is a supporter of a social democratic Scandinavian-style welfare state in the form of better education, healthcare and social service provisions for the general population rather than the confiscation of companies from the private sector,” wrote Larry Liu in a prescient post in 2015 about the re-emergence of red-baiting.

