I Read the DSA's Platform. They're Socialists.

**Andrew Heaton** (0:00)
The Democratic Socialists of America are gaining steam and picking up seats, prompting a good deal of speculation about what exactly they mean by socialist. Does socialist mean a diet version of totalitarian communism or alternately? Are they just folks who want to fund public libraries and fire departments?
Is it this?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:23)
And as you saw with the communists elected in New York City recently, they're communists, they're not social democrats. They want to completely destroy the traditional American way of life.

**Andrew Heaton** (0:33)
Or this?

**SPEAKER_3** (0:34)
Look, socialist programs are important, like the post office, like the police department, like the fire department, like your social security, like public education. These are socialist programs.

**Andrew Heaton** (0:47)
Is the DSA a blue-haired Trojan horse the Soviets left outside of the gates of Congress?
Or just European moderates who want to tax plutocrats to fund what is totally uncontroversial public health care in every other developed nation? That's what we're going to find out today, right here on The Political Orphanage.
Hello, and welcome to The Political Orphanage, a respite for friendly, thinky people. I am your host, Andrew Heaton, and I'm going to try to give you a good faith representation of what the DSA thinks today. Now, I am not objective. I have a fairly strong editorial position opposed to the economic agenda of the DSA, but I am even-handed, and I am going to do my best to articulate the DSA's official position using their words, rather than engaging in any conspiratorial thinking. So we're not going to do any of that, ah, but what they really think kind of analysis. No secret plans or conspiracies or talk of when the mask comes off type assessments. We are not here to fight straw men. So while I wouldn't put the DSA in charge of anything larger than an improv troupe, I am going to thoughtfully and respectfully engage with what I consider their main ideas, what distinguishes them from other political blocks within the American system. If the DSA were to listen to today's episode, they would no doubt disagree with my analysis and my conclusions, but I would like to think they would agree that I have fairly communicated their positions to you. And if not, if I really am misrepresenting something, I openly invite somebody from the DSA to come on the program and explain their real position. We will do a follow-up episode. I will be a very polite and genial host. I do not want to fight straw men. To that end, we are going to focus today on just two elements of their platform, the socialist part and the democratic part. There are lots of interesting ideas in the Democratic Socialists of America's platform policy document, from abolishing prisons to reparations. But I want to focus on its main thrusts, democracy and socialism. Let's get started.
The word socialist is doing the heavy lifting in Democratic Socialists of America. And it's likewise the locus of ambiguity. Socialist as in public libraries, or socialist as in Ministry of Shoe Production. Here's a quick primer, so we're all on the same page. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines socialism as a form of government in which most forms of property, including at least the major means of production and natural resources, are owned or controlled by the state.
In socialism, the government owns and controls the factory. That's in contrast to capitalism, where the private sector owns and controls the means of production. Stockholders own and control the factory. In fascism or corporatism, the private sector owns, but the government controls the means of production. So you own the factory, and you get the profits, but the government tells you what the factory will be making and how much you can charge for it. That is what the Nazis were up to in terms of their economic agenda. If you take capitalism and you tax the profits generated from the private factory to redistribute through social services, you get what we call social democracy, or what we might more aptly call welfare capitalism. Our friends in Scandinavia are, like us, capitalists. They're just capitalists who pay higher taxes to publicly fund more expansive safety nets. And that is where the confusion over the word socialist comes from. Social democracy sounds an awful lot like democratic socialism, even though they're completely different systems. Nordic social democracy is capitalism with airbags. Democratic socialism is the government owns and controls the means of production.
But because we're democratic, we get to vote for who's in the government. So a lot of the time, when Americans say they want more socialism, what they really mean is they want Nordic welfare capitalism, higher taxes and more government services, public funding for libraries and health care, which may or may not be a good idea, but still fundamentally relying on a market economy. It's just that we're moving the tax and spend notch on our capitalist slide rule a little further up. Conversely, if someone says they want more socialism and they know what the term actually means, they are calling for seizing the means of production, nationalizing computer chip companies, government-run airlines, state-run housing, government grocery stores. This may or may not be a good idea, but it is a fundamental departure from a market economy. It's not capitalism with more welfare, it's replacing capitalism with socialism, a different economic system.