The most crucial test of the real-world viability of socialism ended in dismal failure when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Nearly a quarter-century later, the candidate stirring up the most excitement in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination is Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed socialist.
For much of the 19th Century, socialism was but a hypothetical alternative to the harshness of the emerging industrial capitalist order. Early socialist dreamers like Henri de Saint-Simon and Ludwig Feuerbach envisioned a classless utopia through the replacement of private property by public ownership of the means of production.
It awaited Karl Marx to put some theoretical rigor into the socialist enterprise, including a full-fledged theory of history (dialectical materialism), a plausible (if ultimately mistaken) diagnosis of how capitalism worked, and a vision of what would happen after the revolution (a hazy two-step transition from socialism to full communism, as the end of history itself).
In part because of its parsimony and scientific certitude, what became known as Marxism eventually displaced other strains of socialist thought; if you were serious about your socialism, you became a Marxist. It was out of this secular religion that many of the worst calamities of the 20th Century emerged, from the Bolshevik Revolution and totalitarianism in Russia to the 40 million dead from the Great Leap Forward in China and Pol Pot's killing fields in Cambodia. The sectarian disputes that developed also gave us a dizzying array of theoretical permutations--Leninism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, Maoism, and Josip Tito's "national communism," among others. There was even that especially noxious brew of racism and militarism called "national socialism" in Germany.
But for the internal politics of Western democracies, the crucial schismatic development was the split at the time of the Great War between socialists who were pursuing socialism incrementally at the ballot box and came to accept elements of capitalism, and communists who embraced Lenin and later Stalin and maintained the goal of a "dictatorship of the proletariat" through violent revolution.
Although even Marx had used the terms interchangeably, "socialist" and "communist" eventually came to mean different things, with the socialists (the British Labor Party, the German Social Democratic Party, etc.) invariably larger and more electorally successful than their communist (Stalinist) counterparts.
As they were co-opted by their respective democratic orders, the socialists discarded their Marxist theoretical baggage and became "social democratic" parties, embracing a form of lukewarm socialism sans Marx defined by unionism, the welfare state, income redistribution, greater regulatory fettering of capitalism, and the occasional nationalization of key industries.
This is also one of the many historical differences that make America "exceptional"--as political scientists have long noted, often in frustration, we have never really had a powerful socialist/communist movement, at least not one openly expressed in a party organizational structure.
The electoral peak of the Socialist Party of America was in 1912, when Eugene Debs got 6 percent of the vote for president. The Communist Party USA couldn't attract more than 0.2 percent of the vote even during the alleged heyday of American communism in the 1930s, and only got to 2 percent in 1948 by hijacking the third-party candidacy of oblivious fellow traveler Henry Wallace.
As a nation formed upon a classical liberal/bourgeois foundation, without an entrenched feudal aristocracy, and where most people still see themselves as "middle class" (even when they're not), socialism as socialism never stood much of a chance here, and eventually became a powerful political pejorative.
But that doesn't mean we've never had a significant socialist strain in our politics, only that the ideological space and role occupied by the British Labor Party or the French Socialist Party in those countries has been filled in ours by the Democratic Party.
Beginning with the Progressive Movement and Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" all the way through LBJ's "Great Society" and the presidency of Barack Obama, we have had a social democratic party without the disadvantageous labeling. And that party has shared the same programmatic agenda as its European counterparts.
The American Democratic Party thus arrived at socialism without having to go through Marx or the doctrinal disputes that produced European social democracy. But socialism in America has also only advanced surreptitiously, when pursued under labels other than socialist.
Thus, the beauty of the Sanders campaign lies in its honesty--as the first major Democrat to embrace the socialist label, and thereby reveal his party's longstanding ideological underpinnings, he has enhanced our political debate by enhancing its ideological clarity. The enthusiasm he has elicited also tells us how liberating it can be to finally come out of the ideological closet.
Yes, Sanders is pushing the race to the socialist left, but it isn't a long journey for most Democrats, merely a matter of a few degrees of ideological shift.
When Obama promised to fundamentally transform America, what he had in mind was an America that resembled social democratic paradises like Norway and Sweden.
That's what Bernie has in mind, too. And so, too, do Hillary Clinton, Martin O'Malley, and Elizabeth Warren. The difference is that he admits it.
Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 08/03/2015