Forget Labels -- Which Socialist Policies Are the Problem?
It's not public libraries
The debate over the meaning of the word “socialist” is almost certainly causing more confusion than clarity. We’re thoroughly spinning our pants and peeing our wheels in a pointless semantic discussion, and that discussion seems to have reached a new low this week for perhaps the 10,000th week in a row. Here are Zohran Mamdani and John Leguizamo — yes, Luigi from the Mario Brothers movie where everyone was drunk all the time — road testing the newest definition of “socialism”.
I don’t freak out over the word “socialism”; I know that when many people say “socialism”, they just mean “public spending”. And if John Leguizamo is a socialist because he loves fire departments, then fine, Roger that, I will reiterate my position that we should never ask actors about their political opinions, but sure: I agree that fire departments are good! And Mamdani is right that libraries are public goods, and I’ll be a mensch and not point out that many US libraries were gifts from literal Gilded Age oligarchs. If socialism means support for well-functioning social services, then sign me up: I’ll do everything except attend meetings, because Oscar Wilde was right when he said that the problem with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings.
But I have a follow-up question: If socialism is defined by support for run-of-the-mill public services like schools, fire departments, and libraries, then why does the DSA exist? Because basically everybody supports those things — why do we need the DSA or the word “socialism” at all? Why did the DSA to create a party within a party that presents itself as a pure alternative to a corrupted “establishment”, and why is that faction determined to take over a party whose support for public services has been an ideological lodestone for at least a hundred years? If this is about libraries and schools, then great news: The battle was won during the van Buren administration! But everyone knows that the fight is about other policies, so let’s talk about those.
