Some left-wing pundits have observed the similarity between the Sanders and Warren campaigns and wondered if Bernie’s embrace of “democratic socialism” really matters. The answer is yes, for three reasons:
- At the most obvious level, elderly voters are turned off by the “socialist” label, so Warren’s chances of winning are much better than Bernie’s.
- Bernie’s Marxist mindset has a big impact on the way he processes information. He views the world through the prism of the class struggle, and sees oligarchs, imperialists, and the exploited masses everywhere. As a result, just to use one example, he lumps Putin, Xi, and MBS together as tools of oligarchy, when they are in fact very different. That would have implications for our foreign policy that I do not care to contemplate.
- Perhaps most importantly, liberals and socialists have different views about the just society and the role of the state. To a liberal, the objective of society is to free the individual to realize his potential to the maximum extent possible. Excessive levels of inequality are inefficient in this respect, and can present a threat to the proper workings of a democratic system, but for the most part, the role of government should be limited. To a socialist, equality is the overriding objective in a just society, not freedom or excellence. Hence the title of this post.
Most socialist systems over the past century have been characterized by economic failure and political oppression. We’ll give Bernie the benefit of the doubt and assume that his model society is not the USSR, but the UK around 1950. No one went hungry, and everyone had health care through the newly-created NHS, but many commodities were rationed, and life was pretty drab. Is that the kind of country to which we should aspire? I don’t think so.