Socialism's Great Escape

How socialism escaped its past and imprisoned the minds of Americans

Photo by Egor Myznik on Unsplash

One of the oldest advantages in politics is not superior arguments but superior framing. A movement gains an enormous advantage when it can shape not only what people think about, but also how they think about it. If it can obfuscate meaning, elevate aspirations above institutional design, and quietly move inconvenient history to the margins, it has already won much of the public debate before a single policy is discussed.

This is precisely what has happened to socialism in America. Indeed, the remarkable resurgence of socialists in American politics did not occur because most Americans suddenly embraced Karl Marx’s rejection of capitalism or his call to replace private ownership of the means of production with collective ownership or state control. It occurred because the conversation about socialism changed. Its definition gradually became muddled, its promises became increasingly magnificent, and its history became muted.

Those developments did not occur independently. Once the meaning of socialism became less precise, its aspirations increasingly displaced its institutional and systemic character. Once aspirations became the center of public discussion, socialism’s dismal historical record became easier to detach from the promises made in its name. Together, they transformed one of the world’s most controversial political philosophies into moral rhetoric that many Americans now find difficult to resist or even question.

Historically, socialism has not simply meant compassion, generosity, or concern for the poor. Those moral concerns neither originated with socialism nor belong exclusively to it. From Marx onward, socialism has referred to a fundamental reorganization of economic life through the displacement of capitalism and the replacement of private ownership of the means of production with collective, social, or state ownership or control. For many of the socialists on the rise in American politics, this would necessarily require abolishing the nation’s Constitutional order as well as the so-called cult of individualism that sustains it.

Yet today, socialism is often presented less as a distinctive political economy than as an expression of moral concern. The conversation quickly turns to affordable healthcare, dignified housing, economic fairness, student debt, or compassion for the vulnerable. Those are serious concerns that people holding very different socioeconomic and political views may share, but they are not what distinguishes socialism from other political philosophies.

However, once socialism is understood primarily in terms of such aspirations, criticism changes its object. Questions about ownership, markets, incentives, private property, and political power quietly recede into the background, while questions about kindness, justice, and compassion move to the foreground. Critics are no longer asked whether socialism’s institutional arrangements are wise or workable; they are asked whether they oppose sociopolitical goals that virtually everyone considers humane.

That rhetorical transformation has been made possible by three closely related developments.

The first is conceptual confusion. Americans increasingly use the word “socialism” to describe everything from welfare programs and progressive taxation to public education, Medicare, municipal services, and almost any government intervention meant to address a social problem. A word that once described a recognizable economic philosophy has become elastic enough to conceal its most contentious aims.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s rhetoric illustrates the shift. After winning the Democratic primary, he declared that his socialist administration would prove “there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.” The appeal is unmistakably one of compassion, and once the conversation begins there, meaningful disagreement becomes difficult because participants are no longer discussing a historically repressive political regime. Rather, folk’s hearts are averted to the circumscribed policy preferences of a class of high-minded ideologues whose compassionate language hides the fact that they believe expanding government’s coercive and confiscatory control over our lives is the only way to expand its beneficent role in our lives.

The second is the substitution of promise for definition. Socialism’s moral aspirations gradually became its public identity. Equality, justice, dignity, security, and solidarity cease to describe what socialism hopes to achieve and instead become what socialism is. The institutional features that historically distinguished socialism—its critique of capitalism and its commitment to collective ownership or state control of the means of production—have faded from public attention. A political philosophy comes to be identified less by how it proposes to organize society than by the attractiveness of the ends it promises to pursue.

The third development is historical amnesia. Once definitions become elastic and aspirations become definitions, history inevitably becomes negotiable because it no longer functions as a critical and empirical test of political ideas. Instead, socialism is increasingly judged by the nobility of its promises rather than by the recurring consequences of catastrophic attempts to fulfill them.

That omission matters because socialism has never advanced primarily by promising coercion. It has advanced by promising its opposite. Extraordinary concentrations of political and economic power have been defended as the means by which extraordinary human flourishing would finally be achieved. But that is precisely why socialism’s history cannot honestly be separated from its promises—a history in which, in country after country, those promises were followed by chronic shortages, political repression, forced labor, mass imprisonment, concentration camps, famine, terror, and the deaths of millions.

Whatever important differences distinguished the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, Cuba, Venezuela, and other self-described socialist governments, they shared one sobering pattern. They incessantly promised something approaching heaven on earth while creating conditions that millions experienced as hell on earth. That historical record of profound misery, oppression, deprivation, or death is not an incidental footnote to socialism’s story. It is part of the evidence by which socialism must be judged.

Together, these developments have given socialism an extraordinary political advantage. An ideology that is seldom required to define itself precisely, that is permitted to present its highest aspirations as its defining characteristics, and that is increasingly insulated from sustained reflection on the historical consequences of its exercise of power occupies unusually favorable ground in public debate. It is no longer expected to defend the institutional arrangements that historically marred as well as distinguished it, but only to affirm moral aspirations that few decent people would reject.

Socialism’s great escape from its ominous past happened as a result of the terms of the conversation being changed. Its definition became muddled, its promises became increasingly magnificent, and its history became muted.

Those three developments have surrounded socialism with a fog through which ordinary political judgment becomes increasingly difficult. Until that fog begins to lift, Americans will continue debating a version of socialism that bears far less resemblance to the political philosophy developed by Marx and embraced by generations of violent revolutionaries than to the compassionate moral vocabulary through which it is now most often filtered by its politically astute and marketing savvy proponents.