Socialism and the Liberal Imagination

What is "democratic socialism" in contemporary America? Sanders argued in 2015 it's what Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal did. Now, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has vaulted onto the national political scene on a platform that sounds unmistakably familiar to students of American liberalism. This appropriation of liberal reform under the banner of socialism has inspired a number of writers to accuse Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and their aspiring democratic-socialist counterparts of muddying the waters by conflating theoretically distinct concepts. These critiques rest on a set of uncontestable historical facts. But look from another angle, and the picture appears different—and perhaps more useful in thinking through our own political moment. The New Deal was not "socialist." But to end the story there is to miss the role of socialists in crafting the intellectual world within which the New Deal unfolded. Look not at what socialism was, but at what socialists did, and one sees that the New Deal's progressive achievements do bear a significant historical relationship to reform socialism.