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Why does Bernie Sanders call himself a socialist?

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Paul Krugman asked this question a couple of days ago, and it’s a good one.

There’s no one canonical definition of “socialism,” but Sanders doesn’t advocate anything like socialism by any of the standard understandings of the term. Tacking the word “democratic” in front of socialist doesn’t change this fact, especially that, for reasons that are too obvious to explain, the concept of a democratic socialist is an oxymoron in contemporary American politics (There’s almost certainly more support among American voters for installing a literal theocracy than for ending capitalism).

Sanders’s policy prescriptions are those of a standard issue social democrat. Social democrats aren’t socialists, any more than FDR was a socialist: they want to ameliorate capitalism’s excesses and injustices, rather than eliminating capitalism itself.

Calling yourself a socialist when what you are actually a social democrat seems like a perverse electoral strategy, given that socialism is very unpopular among American voters, while social democracy is very popular. As Krugman suggests, Sanders may be engaging in some sort of ideologically empty branding exercise (“Socialism” may just be an almost meaningless word as Sanders uses it, signaling no more than a vaguely left-wing anti-establishmentarianism).

I suspect that if Bernie gets the Democratic nomination, Republicans are going to take him at his word. They’ll no doubt claim that Sanders really is a socialist, and doesn’t openly advocate actual socialism because he’s secretly with the Russians Chinese North Koreans too. (Of course Republicans have a long history of calling everything from a progressive income tax to Medicare “socialism,” so it may make very little practical difference that Sanders actually embraces the term).

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