Every so often the discourse gives us a new guy who announces that the way we’ve been talking about “socialism” is insufficiently inclusive, particularly for progressive capitalist Democrats who want to think of themselves as socialists. Today, it’s Paul Crider from Liberal Currents:
I invite liberals everywhere to retire this antiquated definition of socialism. Liberalism & socialism have plural & overlapping origins. Socialism needn't mean anti-market, though many socialisms are. At minimum socialism means a strong value of economic equality and robustly empowered workers. Note, this isn't inconsistent with many forms of liberalism, which *can*—though often do not—embrace egalitarianism on both normative and instrumental (destabilize entrenched and concentrated power) grounds. See Adam Smith, Tom Paine, antebellum black liberals, Ira Katznelson, Liz Anderson, etc.
This water is so muddy I’m not going to try to wade through it — but instead, let’s walk through some remedial facts:
Liberalism emerged from the Enlightenment as a generally egalitarian and libertarian movement against the hierarchies of the church and the remants of feudalism.
In the economic sphere liberalism was expressed in the rights of private property, which served as a hedge against the power of the aristocracy and a manifestation of man’s natural and individual rights (see Locke, etc). This was the emergence of capitalism.
In direct contrast to this tendency, early socialists (like Mably) argued that liberty could only be attained through the collective sovereignty of the people. These arguments eventually found their most famous expression in Marx, who attacked capitalism’s institution of private property directly and argued for collective control of the means of production.
In recent years, it has become fashionable in so-called progressive media to argue that this timeline actually makes socialism a species of liberalism since they are both concerned with egalitarianism and liberty. One problem with this argument is that it makes about as much sense as saying that socialism is a species of monarchism since one followed the other and since both value good governance. You can almost always find points of descent and commonality between various ideologies, but the reason we don’t just call socialism “liberalism” is that it stands directly at odds with various core liberal ideas and institutions. Most importantly, liberalism sees capitalism as potentially consistent with egalitarianism and liberty while socialism absolutely does not.
The second problem, of course, is that in both international and historical use liberalism and socialism have always been understood as rival ideologies. Even today this is not a point that needs to be made in the rest of the world where everyone still refers to the transformation of economies into capitalist economies as liberalization. Outside of some of these strange US-based online spaces you just aren’t going to find many people arguing that socialism “isn’t inconsistent with…Adam Smith”.
Again, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen liberals attempt to co-opt the word “socialism”; just a few years ago, for example, Elizabeth Warren staffer Max Berger tried to insist that Warren’s good-government liberalism and Bernie Sanders socialism weren’t all that different. Today it’s not heard to see why he did that. Say what you will about socialism, but the political status quo in the United States is enormously unpopular, which is why liberals and conservatives alike are always looking for ways to distance themselves from it. Republicans do it by sending out fascist dog-whistles while mostly advancing their usual bigoted capitalist agenda; Democrats do it by trying to reposition themselves as “progressives” or “social democrats” or, in this case, actual socialists.