The Case for Democratic Socialism
The United States has long been one of the most antisocialist nations in the developed world. Socialist parties have been elected to power in many countries over the course of the last century. This happened several times even in the United Kingdom, a nation linked to the U.S. by history, cultural affinity, and a diplomatic special relationship. While the UK’s Labour Party has long since drifted to the political center, when it first became one of the country’s major parties, Clause IV of its constitution, drafted by Sidney and Beatrice Webb in November 1917 and adopted by the party in 1918, committed the party to:
Secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.1
No political force with similar goals has ever been a major part of American politics.
In 2025 though, that might be finally starting to change. The two U.S. politicians most associated with democratic socialism, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), have been drawing giant crowds in cities all around the country during their Fighting Oligarchy tour, where they’ve combined condemnation of the Trump administration with a broader critique of economic inequality. In early polls, AOC has emerged as one of the top contenders for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination.2
It’s too soon to say if this is a flash in the pan or the beginning of an upswing in support for democratic socialism. If we are witnessing a sea change in the ideology’s fortunes, though, should that be welcomed or feared?
It’s often alleged that redistribution of wealth is incompatible with economic liberty, and that socialism is undesirable because we need free markets to have a flourishing economy. In what follows, I’ll both make a positive case for democratic socialism, as well as respond to both of these objections.
Socialism Within and Beyond Capitalism
Like liberalism, conservatism, and other political labels, socialism has been used to mean multiple and sometimes conflicting things. The core belief behind what politicians such as Bernie Sanders and AOC mean when they call themselves democratic socialists is that they support socialist policies that could be implemented even within a fundamentally capitalist economic framework, such as replacing private health insurance with a single socialized plan that would cover everyone (Medicare for All). They’ve also called for reforms such as tuition-free public higher education, increasing the minimum wage to a meaningful living wage, expanding the postal service to provide basic banking services, and making it far easier for workers to organize unions.3, 4, 5 Countries such as Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, which have adopted a number of such measures, are often called social democracies.6
This is part of what I mean when I say I consider myself to be a socialist. It should, for example, be a source of deep national shame that, as Bernie Sanders often says, the United States is the only major country that doesn’t guarantee healthcare as a right. Our system of for-profit insurance leaves tens of millions of people uninsured, and that leads to the degrading spectacle of medical fundraisers like GoFundMe for people in dire conditions having to rely on the charity of strangers by crafting the most attention-grabbing stories, and diabetics dying from having to ration out their insulin.7 Even those who have insurance are often denied care by companies whose business model relies on paying out as little as possible.
Nor does the case for socialized medicine stop at the humanitarian consequences for those who don’t get the care they need. Even when the system is functioning as advertised, and everyone is getting reasonable and appropriate medical interventions, it’s objectionable for much deeper reasons, which also ground a much broader case for social democracy. Finnish journalist Anu Partanen has written vividly about her experience of moving to the United States and being shocked by what she saw as almost premodern relations of dependence created by our form of capitalism between bosses and workers, parents and children, and even husbands and wives.8 Children who’d left home and gone to college had to anxiously track their parents’ reactions to their decisions because, lacking the free public higher education Partanen was familiar with in her native Finland, young middle-class Americans have to rely on their parents to write tuition checks (or join the military). Even more disturbingly, Americans often stay in jobs they hate, or sometimes even bad or abusive marriages, out of fear of losing employer or spousal health insurance.
Social democracy provides far more freedom to ordinary people than libertarian policies ever could.
This is an underappreciated part of the case for social democracy. While libertarians argue that any coercive redistribution of wealth to pay for social programs violates the liberty of the better off (more on that argument later), in practice social democracy provides far more freedom to ordinary people than libertarian policies ever could. If everyone is on a single national healthcare plan, you’ve lost the right to choose between Aetna and Blue Cross Blue Shield, but you’ve gained the right to quit and live off your savings for a few months while you look for a new job, without worrying about what will happen if a medical emergency strikes. If labor laws make it harder for employers to arbitrarily fire people and easier for workers to unionize, people have far less reason to worry that their boss will disapprove of their tattoo, their social media posts, or their political opinions, and that is a type of freedom worth having. When young couples considering having children can rely on paid parental leave or even direct child allowance from the state, they’re that much more able to make the family planning decisions that are right for them without being pushed around by economic pressures. Evidence for the salubrious effects of democratic socialism in this sense may be found in the Nordic countries that, despite long cold dark winters, lead the planet in rankings of nations by the happiness of their populations.9
When I say I’m a socialist, though, I don’t just mean that I’m a social democrat. Making the United States more like Finland with measures such as tuition-free public higher education and socialized health insurance would be a solid step in the right direction. These reforms would make our society more humane and civilized (and free), just as public libraries, public fire departments, and tuition-free public education from K–12 make our society better. I would go further. I’d like the Left to revive the far more ambitious long-term goals that were once embodied in the UK Labour Party’s Clause IV. Social democratic reforms that have long been in place in any given society tend to be relatively uncontroversial. Many politically moderate Finns (including Anu Partanen) would adamantly insist that there’s nothing socialist about the reforms previous generations of Finnish socialists fought to achieve. In countries like Canada and the UK, even conservative parties have to tell voters that they want to preserve those countries’ nationalized healthcare systems. If they didn’t say so, they’d never win another election. Even in America, liberals, centrists, and mainstream conservatives are all fine with public libraries, along with public parks, public schools, and public fire and police departments. Even a proposal as ambitious as Medicare for All would, in some sense, just be more of the same, taking us one step closer to the Nordic model. The larger question is whether Nordic-style social democracy represents the outermost limit of what can be achieved.10
Americans often stay in jobs they hate, or sometimes even bad or abusive marriages, out of fear of losing employer or spousal health insurance.
When it comes to Sweden-style reforms like Medicare for All, even temperamentally incrementalist policy wonks like Ezra Klein are often reduced to arguing not that such things wouldn’t be desirable but merely that it would be too politically difficult to achieve it. But when we start thinking about moving from social democracy (or socialism within capitalism) to the Clause IV vision of socialism beyond capitalism, the political consensus of the contemporary West holds that this wouldn’t just be politically difficult to achieve, it’s not even a desirable long-term goal.
Capitalism Isn’t Eternal
Under capitalism, the means of production, distribution and exchange can be bought and sold by private business owners (capitalists). The majority of the population doesn’t have the resources to start or purchase their own businesses, though, so they have no realistic choice but to sell their working hours to people with the money to pay. We are so accustomed to this arrangement that complaining about it can feel like raging against the existence of the common cold or the weather. Isn’t needing a job just an inevitable part of human existence?
There’s a sense, to be sure, in which it is. Perhaps one day technology will progress to the point that nearly all of the work that humans currently do can be done by machines, and it would thus be possible for us all to live in luxury without any need to work for our daily bread. Even then, it’s worth noting, everything depends on who owns the machines. If they’re collectively owned, we can collectively enjoy the results. If they’re privately owned, their owners will have little incentive to pay the rest of us not to work. I’d note that the work week, set to 40 hours by the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, hasn’t gone down a single minute in the last 87 years, despite a dizzying amount of technological progress between then and now. At any rate, until such time as robots can relieve us of the burden, it’s true enough that the requirement that we all work to support ourselves is imposed by material reality itself and not by our economic institutions. Yet the requirement that we submit to the rule of those with enough money to own their own means of production, spending half of our waking lives taking orders from unelected bosses is a requirement imposed by our economic institutions.
Nor is there anything merely natural about the resulting distribution of wealth, whereby many workers in Amazon warehouses have to work second jobs, while the company’s founder Jeff Bezos owns his own spaceship and can afford to send his fiancé and her celebrity friends into space for a joy ride. Even worker-owned cooperatives don’t necessarily have completely flat wage scales. Some people may have to be enticed with higher salaries to take on high-level jobs involving lots of stress and responsibility, or conversely to take on particularly dirty and dangerous jobs that no one wants to do. Unlike CEOs in conventional capitalist firms, however, no one in cooperatives or, for example, municipally owned enterprises, makes hundreds of times the salary of average workers.
There was a time, though, when even defenders of capitalism were embarrassed by the domination of workers by capitalists. In an 1861 speech defending the North’s system of free wage labor, Abraham Lincoln granted that there is no “such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer.” That line makes him sound like a socialist, but the rest of his speech makes it clear that he was not. He acknowledged that the capitalist system would not be a system of deep and genuine freedom if workers had to spend their whole lives as workers, but he insisted that this would not happen. “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.”11
I deeply admire Lincoln but, even in 1861, the idea that everyone could rise through the class hierarchy in this way was wishful thinking. And I hope it’s obvious that, in the twenty-first century, a society where most people are self-employed or have so few employees that it’s possible to imagine all of those workers one day rising to become capitalists themselves is hopelessly unrealistic. In a high-tech modern economy, most work is necessarily going to be done by groups of people working together. The only question is whether they’ll have to work for private owners, or whether there’s a way for everyone to collectively and democratically run the means of collective economic activity, whether through cooperatives, ownership by a democratic state, or some combination of these elements.
Certainly, the Soviet Union’s model of top-down, authoritarian state socialism was disastrous. In the last decade before the collapse, even those who did believe in it gave up on it. Few socialists in the twenty-first century have the slightest desire to revive that model. The question is whether this means that capitalism is the only alternative, or whether we should continue to experiment with alternate ways of organizing society. Capitalism has only existed for a few hundred years. Perhaps there’s a better way.
Why Not Socialism?
In his short and lively book Why Not Socialism?, the late Canadian political philosopher Gerald A. Cohen began by asking his readers to imagine two camping trips.12 The first one would be a normal camping trip of a kind groups of friends go on all the time in real life. In this version, without anyone thinking about things in these terms, the mini-society of the camping trip is organized in a socialist way, with everyone treating fishing poles, soccer balls, and so on as temporarily communal property. Some people may go hiking while others stay behind to pitch the tents, gather wood and build a fire, and still others go fishing for trout and perch. When it comes time to fry the fish over the fire, though, everyone gets the same as a matter of course.
Where we have the most power to decide what our social environment looks like, we prefer socialism-like ground rules.
Next, Cohen asks us to imagine a version of the camping trip where some of the campers start asserting the miniature equivalent of property rights to the means of production. For example, he imagines one of the campers (Sylvia) discovering an apple tree. When she comes back to tell the others, they’re excited that they’ll all be able to enjoy apple sauces, apple pie, and apple strudel. Sure they can, Sylvia affirms, “provided, of course … that you reduce my labor burden, and/or provide me with more room in the tent, and/or with more bacon at breakfast.” She’s the discoverer of the tree, after all, so she has special rights to it.
Pretty clearly, few would tolerate that kind of behavior in this sort of small-scale context. Where we have the most power to decide what our social environment looks like, we prefer socialism-like ground rules. So, Cohen asks, why shouldn’t we at least try to find ways to reorganize our larger society along the same lines?
Antisocialists typically respond to this challenge in one of two ways. The first is to argue that the socialism of a group of friends going camping is fine because it’s voluntary, but if a future socialist government tried, for example, to nationalize Amazon and turn it over to worker self-management, this would be an unacceptable violation of the economic liberty of Jeff Bezos, who, after all, took the risk to found the company and toiled for years in debt and with risk of bankruptcy before finally achieving spectacular success. It’s fine to voluntarily decide not to go on camping trips with Sylvia because she’s a bit of a weirdo, but it’s not acceptable, libertarians especially emphasize, to aggress against the property of other people. Carrying this logic further, many libertarians would also rule out public ownership of schools and libraries.
Some socialists and social democrats would respond that freedom is only one important value, and that it has to be weighed against competing values. Others would argue that this narrow conception of freedom as freedom from state interference should give way to a broader conception of freedom that actually gives us a reason to support socialism. The points made above about capitalist domination of workers, and even the ways that social democratic programs can make working-class people more, rather than less, free to live their lives as they please, imply the need for a much broader concept of freedom.
The real debate has always been about what distribution of wealth is morally just.
I regard either or both of these responses as sufficient, but a more decisive objection to the economic liberty argument against socialism is that the relevance concept of freedom from economic aggression is vacuously circular. If I say that I have a right to my property, what does that mean? It can’t mean that I have a right to whatever property legally belongs to me, or else this point wouldn’t ground objections to redistributive taxation or even nationalization of companies. If a socialist government passes the Nationalizing Amazon Act, then Amazon is no longer the legal property of Jeff Bezos. It can’t even mean that I have a right to whatever property currently happens to be in my possession, or else nonaggression would rule out recovering stolen property.
It can only mean that people have a right to whatever property to which they’re morally entitled. At this point, though, the antisocialist is arguing in a circle, and their principle about nonaggression amounts to the claim that people have a moral right to whichever things they have a moral right to have. The real debate has always been about what distribution of wealth is morally just. Should we decide which resources each of us is entitled to on the basis of, for example, John Locke’s labor theory of property rights, or John Rawls’s position that a just distribution of resources is one you would endorse even if you thought you’d end up holding the short end of the stick?
A better objection to trying to organize the national or world economy like the miniature economy of a camping trip is that we simply don’t know how to do without market mechanisms entirely. The Soviet Union, for example, represented an undesirable model of how to organize a society not just because of its political authoritarianism (which democratic socialists have harshly criticized) but because of its economic dysfunction. As Cohen himself concedes in Why Not Socialism?, at this point in history we might not know yet how to “turn the wheel of the economy” without mechanisms like price signals (so producers know to adjust which products, and how many of them to produce) and firm failure (to weed out inefficient producers). To connect this to my earlier example of nationalizing Amazon, thousands of tech startups go bust or barely survive. An economically flourishing form of socialism couldn’t just let a thousand inefficient flowers bloom or set wages and prices with no regard to expected revenue. There would still be a role for markets.
Perhaps someday, as AI develops, economic planning algorithms and nonhuman production will solve at least some of these problems. That’s an empirical question that has yet to be answered by actual history. Meanwhile, though, as Cohen also points out, it doesn’t follow from the premise that we don’t know how to do without markets entirely that we have to accept capitalist ownership of the means of production. We can, at least, experiment with forms of market socialism that go beyond social democracy (even if they stop short of perfectly embodying the ideals of a camping trip).
This may sound like wild-eyed radicalism. Then again, there was a time when women’s suffrage and the abolition of slavery sounded the same way.
I’m cowriting a book with Jacobin founding editor Bhaskar Sunkara and economic professor Mike Beggs in which we outline one possible model of what that might look like.13 We build on the achievements of social democracy, which have empirically demonstrated that it’s possible to take important sectors such as healthcare and education outside of the market entirely and get good results. When it comes to sectors where we think giving up on the efficiency of price signals and firm failure would be too high a price to pay, we think we can at least transition to an economy where the dominant form of private sector organization would be internally democratic worker cooperatives.14
This may sound like wild-eyed radicalism. Then again, there was a time when women’s suffrage and the abolition of slavery sounded the same way. Nearly everyone alive today would acknowledge that these advances toward a more perfect realization of equal dignity for every human being were steps in the right direction. My view is that we need to keep going.