A Vision of a ‘Society Without Capitalism’

24:09You're using unions to create, in effect, stronger market pressures. Exactly. It's still, I think, part of the logic behind even crude measures like the minimum wage, part of that logic, let's not just sweat out labor. Let's figure out a way to make companies more productive. I think those are all sorts of mechanisms. I'm just using those as examples that aren't just regulatory. It isn't just ex post redistribution. I'm also for smart, common sense regulations. And of course, obviously for redistribution, socialism needs a tax base for a welfare state.

24:43Ross Douthat:But just pulling back, I feel like we've danced around this a little bit, so let me just ask it directly. Is democratic socialism compatible with capitalism? In the long term, no, we're anti-capitalist. We want a world beyond capitalism. But in the short term, while we're within a capitalist economy, of course, we need firms that are profitable, that are providing employment, that are providing taxation. So I think to govern in the short term as social democrats, we need profitable firms. But in the long term, you know, I don't hide my desire that I think the economy should be socialized, even if I think in this socialized economy, there needs to be a role for markets and also a role for worker-controlled firms to be able to meet people's needs and provide new goods and services.

25:32What's the distinction you make between

25:34Ross Douthat:capitalism and markets then? Well, I think markets existed before capitalism. Capitalism is a regime of property ownership that says that as an individual capitalist or as a corporation, we own this private property and we use this private property to employ people and to produce goods and services. And in my vision of a just society, of a socialist society, that private property would be controlled by ordinary workers who would get their financing from public banks, who would still operate with hard budgets. They would still need to meet goods and services and meet their payroll obligations and things like that.

26:21But you don't have a class of people who, as individuals, control investment decisions.

26:36Ross Douthat:This is Maurice Shema, host of The Last 12 Weeks, a new podcast from Serial Productions, The Marshall Project, and The New York Times. A couple of years back, I got an email from a defense lawyer who wanted me to write about his client. The client, David Wood, was on death row in Texas. Had been there for more than 30 years. The lawyer was writing because David Wood had lost all of his appeals. He was set to be executed. The lawyer's plan to stop the execution was to try and prove something that nobody had successfully done in three decades. That one of Texas' most notorious serial killers was actually innocent.

27:14Ross Douthat:It wasn't that the lawyers didn't have a case to make. I know two people fabricated testimony to get a guy executed. It's just that they had so little time to make it. The last 12 weeks. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

27:39Ross Douthat:So I want to pivot now for a minute and talk about how socialism relates to other visions on the left that have had a lot of influence in the last five years, like what gets described as anti-racism, identity politics, wokeness by its critics. Because it seems like to me, right, as an outsider, on the one hand, you get socialism sometimes offered as this kind of alternative to identity politics, right, where you say we need to just be focused on class and money. And that's, you know, that's that's what we need to do. But then at the same time, actual socialists, actual socialist politicians tend to have very progressive views on social and cultural issues.

28:23Ross Douthat:Right. So tell me, how is the socialism that is having a moment now, had a moment with Bernie, how is it related to progressive cultural politics? Well, I've been identified as being a member of the anti-identitarian left, but I myself do believe that if people are facing oppression, if they're facing some type of discrimination, then of course they shouldn't be discriminated against and they have the right to organize as their own groups and lobby for change and redress and I'll be fighting alongside them. I just am fundamentally not so pessimistic about the United States at a social and cultural level.

29:09There's been plenty of studies, including one by the Center for Working Class Politics, that makes the argument that U.S. workers are indeed moving leftward on cultural and social issues. They're just moving leftward at a less rapid pace than professionals. So to me, if you have a group of people who say, you know what, I think that it's a complicated issue, but I believe in a woman's right to choose. and then you tell them, well, what about late-term abortions? What about this? What about that? It's almost like the left is trying to, through this Overton window theory of politics, is trying to just take, they're taking a yes and they're demanding a much harder position than they deserve.

29:55Same thing, obviously, with immigration and a host of issues. My parents came to this country for a reason. The year before I was born, the United States has been an incredibly welcoming home. I still think it's the best or one of the best places for immigrants on the planet.

30:12Ross Douthat:So to some extent, it does sound like you think that the left took a wrong turn in sort of peak woke early 2020s culture war. And maybe the wrong turn was partially just talking about America like it was the most racist country in the history of the world. Like what's what's is is basically was there a turn that the left took in that period that socialism can help correct? Well, I should blame more of the center and the central left for a lot of these things. And I think that it was Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016 that tried to draw these extreme contrasts. I remember Bernie Sanders was killed because he had an ad with a Simon and Garfunkel song on it, America.

31:07Because he ran this ad right before the caucus in Iowa and the primary in New Hampshire, and they said, there's too many white people and it's too rural. Is this your vision of America as socialists?

31:16Ross Douthat:I'm Bernie Sanders, and I approve this message. So I think a lot of this came from those directions. I also think that... Just so people are aware of this, it is a really interesting part of what happened in democratic politics, right? The Hillary Clinton campaign, which was the centrist, the more centrist campaign or perceived that way, really did sort of try and use identity politics issues against Sanders. It's true that the center sort of tried to weaponize identity politics against the left. But the left didn't necessarily resist, did it? I think in by the time he ran in 2020, Bernie did try to frame more things.

31:58His old universal demands he kept, but he would explain why they were good often in terms of closing disparities. Right. Racial. We need Medicare for all. Medicare for all is anti-racist because disproportionately it's going to help uninsured people who are black and brown. And, you know, at a certain level, obviously, that's that's right. But it seems like a weird way to pitch a universal program is talking about, you know, disparity. But I would push back on just one thing you said, which is America was the most racist country in the history of the world. And I think the left actually does a great discredit to its own history when it pretends like it still is.

32:39Because we're a country that fought a revolution led by the left, in my opinion, that abolished slavery by force of arms, not slow and gradual emancipation. And we fought against Jim Crow. And we got rid of that also with socialists largely, you know, at the helm or at least playing major roles. And then we got to the point where we elected a black president and that black president won even the state of Indiana in 2008. And it just seems so strange that it was in part the election of Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton that convinced so many Americans, so many liberals particularly, but even some leftists, that America was irredeemably racist when those same voters had just voted for a black president twice.

33:27So in a way, I think I want to recover some of the optimism about the U.S. we felt during the Obama years. And also for what it's worth, that my parents still feel about the U.S. is so many immigrants, Latino and other immigrants feel about the U.S., which is they came here for a reason. This is a good place. This is a good country filled with, by and large, good people. Yeah.

33:49Ross Douthat:So it's a story where it is maybe as critical of the American past as peak woke was, but has a much more heroic narrative about what's happened since. Is that fair to say? How much room in that narrative is there for actual cultural moderation? Like, is there a world where you can be a socialist or socialist friendly politician and, let's say, not be in favor of abolishing ICE or not be in favor of transgender girls in girls locker rooms or you can pick whatever issue you want. Right. But like, is there a world where socialists can get away from cultural litmus tests or not? Well, first of all, it has to be on an issue that you actually believe in.

34:40So on immigration, I am actually a very orthodox leftist and I want to abolish ICE. Obviously, we still need some sort of border enforcement and customs, but at least go back to the norm before ICE. This is that radical demand, but that's the demand I'll make. But then I look at a figure who's not a socialist, but a left populist like Dan Osborne, and And he'll talk to an audience with Trump voters and he'll have two lines. And the first will make every socialist in America gasp. And he'll say, I agree with Donald Trump. We need a strong border. But then his second line will be, but I can't tolerate what ICE is doing, separating mothers from their children.

35:20You know, this is this is a problem. And everyone in the room will clap and applaud. And I ask you, what is more progressive? Me saying what I say about ICE and I truly believe about ICE in New York City or Dan Osborne saying those two sentences in Nebraska. And I think that on a host of these issues, as we have candidates that are running viable campaigns, as they're running in different districts, including in semi-rural and rural districts or Democrats themselves, liberalism is totally wiped out as a brand. I imagine socialists will adopt different rhetoric on different things. They obviously have to adopt rhetoric that they believe in because authenticity Authenticity is a big part of our brand.

36:01People, when they talk to Azor and Mabdani, a common response when we were canvassing was something like, you know, he says what he means, even if I disagree with him. And obviously, Trump has some of that factor, too. And I think authenticity is the opposite of focus group politics. We have to, you know, balance the two. Yeah. No, no.

36:21Ross Douthat:I think that makes sense. I though also think that there so far, the pattern I've seen is that there's a lot of people in the Democratic Party who say we can move to the left on economics as a way to avoid talking about cultural issues. And the trans sports issue is a good example, right? You heard this from Plattner before his flame out, right? He would say, people who want to talk about this issue just want to distract you from inequality and class. And that's, you know, that can be an effective argument, but it still leaves the voter who doesn't agree with your party on the issue feeling like they're not being heard, right?

37:00So go ahead. I think to moderate, we also need to articulate a vision of the good life that's compelling. And my vision of a good life is, I think, quite similar to a lot of ordinary Americans, right? I want basic security for a family. I want to raise a family. And when we talk about, let's say, why we support gay marriage and full civil liberties for LGBT people, it's about giving them this opportunity to live normal, normal lives. Right. Not forcing them into the margins of society. I think a lot of, you know, what it means to be to be normal is to articulate commonly held beliefs that I think most socialists do.

37:49Ross Douthat:It does, though, still seem like like to take your Osborne example. Right. So it's one thing to be a Democrat and say, I believe in a secure border because that's a generality. It's harder to be a Democrat and say, because I want to win Nebraska or Oklahoma or whatever state I'm going to say, I support Trump's border wall. Right. Like there's just a I feel like there's a desire. just not to get that concrete in your moderation. That's all. Gaza. It seems like one unusual thing about this socialist moment is that it has a foreign policy issue at the center of a lot of its energy. Is that fair? And if so, how does that fit together with a push for redistribution in the United States, if people are drawn to democratic socialism because it seems like the most anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian perspective.

38:52The immediate forerunner to the Democratic Socialists of America, the Democratic Socialists Organizing Committee, we're not very original in how we name these organizations. They're very, yeah, it can be confusing sometimes. It was founded in the early 1970s and had a very different view on Israel, Palestine. It was pro-peace, two-state, but it was in an era when there was relative parity between the strength of the Arab states and Israel. If anything, before the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War, it actually seemed like the Arab states with all the Soviet support were actually stronger. There was very recent memories of the mass exodus of Jews from the Arab world itself into Israel.

39:39And of course, more recent memories of the Holocaust and so on. And also there was a center left and a left in Israel and also in the Palestinian Liberation Organization that we as democratic socialists could relate to. And I think that led to certain balance, rightly or wrongly, and how that conflict was interpreted with lots of complications. I think what's really changed is how extreme, one, the parity is gone. Israel is a dominant power. It could inflict violence at any term. Internally, Israel has become quite right wing and driven by a deeper and more violent forms of religious nationalism.

40:25And also, you know, tens of thousands of people have just been killed in Gaza. And I think that that's just, you know, I don't think there's a broader philosophical shift so much as the environment has changed.

40:35Ross Douthat:I don't think any of that is surprising. I just think it's an interesting question for socialists if this particular issue ends up being central to the movement, right? Right. Like, let's say let's say I was starting a movement that was a, you know, a movement of religious conservatives. And we said, we're you know, we're here. We're here to revolutionize the United States of America, revolutionize family life. We're going to put the Ten Commandments back in, you know, here and, you know, we're going to bring back blue laws. And, you know, you could make some long list. Right. And then it turned out that lots of young people were joining our movement.

41:16Ross Douthat:but they were mostly there because they were concerned about China and Taiwan. And we had like a pro Taiwanese position. That would be kind of weird, wouldn't it? Like it would, it would raise some questions about what, what is the reality of the movement? Like, is this really a movement for redistribution or is this kind of a vehicle for changing the Democratic Party's position on Israel? That's what I'm asking. Well, you know, speaking of your conservative platform, by the way, I am in favor of Utah style liquor laws. So there's a host of issues where I'm maybe right of center. I think it's clear that we can find some common ground.

41:52But I think on this issue that the key difference is the U.S. socialist movement has always had anti-imperialism and anti-militarism as a core part of its platform. It's one reason why we were marginalized during the First World War and we dealt with the first Red Scare because we were one of the few parties, the the Socialist Party that in the U.S. opposed entry into the war in such extreme forms that we even launched an abortive armed rebellion in the state of Oklahoma to protest against U.S. entry into the war and conscription. um so that's it's been a long part of our history and socialists throughout um have opposed things during the cold war opposed the vietnam war opposed in the the 80s the the the dirty war in central america opposed support for you know groups like the argentine junta so in my mind israel flows out of that and when i think about causes that i care about in the world palestinian self-determination is there with self-determination with Western Sahara, with...

42:59Ross Douthat:Western Sahara does get slightly less attention, I've noticed. Yeah. Right? I mean... But I think in part it's because of the scale, but also because of how directly the U.S. is involved. If the U.S. was sending more arms to Turkey that was being used in the occupation and their statelet in northern Cyprus, then I would be talking about that as well. I actually talk probably more about Cuba than I do about Israel-Palestine because I'm a socialist, concerned about the blockade. That's been a very traditional part of socialist thought. But I do think there is the differences. Anti-imperialism, anti-militarism has always been a part of the socialist movement as a programmatic level.

43:41But I would say among young people, Israel, Palestine has been a symbol and has become this, I think, in not just the hard left, but across Gen Z and millennials, including people who otherwise are not super politicized or down with the rest of the socialist program. it has become this popular issue. But because of our credibility talking about U.S. involvement in the region, U.S. involvement in the world, and many different other facets, I think it has benefited the left. But I don't think it's as unusual as you would put it.

44:22Ross Douthat:I guess, yeah, I didn't mean to suggest that it was necessarily completely unusual. And I certainly agree that there's a profound continuity between left wing views on foreign policy going back generations and what you see right now. I think it's more that, you know, like if it's more that we've been talking in this conversation about whether socialism can become a concrete policy agenda. Right. And, you know, when socialists opposed U.S. involvement in Central America, that mobilized a lot of energy in the 1980s, but it didn't have any effect on, like, debates about the welfare state, right? And the Vietnam War led to the crack up of the Democratic coalition.

45:06Ross Douthat:It's more that I'm sort of curious, like, can you take energy that you've mobilized around Gaza and use it to pass Medicare for all? Well, I think it's being used. I don't think it's completely cynical, but I think it's being used to separate Democrats who are committed to an old political establishment, including the foreign policy establishment and Democrats who are better. So DSA members love Brad Lander in New York, New York City. Brad Lander talked a lot about Israel, Palestine. Democrats are painfully divided by our differences over the U.S. relationship to Israel and Palestine. And we have to face up to it squarely.

45:46Ross Douthat:Our party needs to admit that Joe Biden's hug BB strategy was a catastrophic failure. In part because it's this battle, you know, beyond the moral stakes of what's at issue in Gaza. It's a battle within the Jewish community that's in part a generational battle that he's been a part of. But also, I think all of us are very skeptical of Goldman's commitment to things like Medicare for all. and how he would vote on a proposal if it came out. Dan Goldman, who just lost to Brad Lander in the primary. So I think in that case, the two go hand in hand. I think it would be a more complicated situation and harder to imagine if there was less of a direct correlation between stances on progressive economic issues and stances on Israel.

46:38In that case, I would guess...

46:42Ross Douthat:But that's okay. No, in practice, I see what you're saying. In practice, it is a, if you get someone who is pro-Palestine in this particular way, or you are more likely to think of them as a reliable vote for restructuring the Democratic Party overall. Absolutely.

47:10Ross Douthat:I'm Dani Blum, a journalist at The New York Times. I spend a lot of my time reporting on GLP-1 medications. People call them weight loss drugs. They are doing so much more in the body, and there's a lot of hope pinned on them. I am spending part of truly every single workday making sure that I am up to date on the latest science. I really want to make sure that I am talking to the leading researchers, keeping an eye on trial results, and that I'm talking to people who are on these medications to learn more from them, to translate the really messy and murky and shifting science into a way that people can understand, it's really important to have evidence-based answers to some of the questions that people have, especially about something as vital as a medication they're taking.

47:56Ross Douthat:That's what you get when you subscribe to The New York Times. If you already subscribe, thanks. If you'd like to, go to mytimes.com slash subscribe.

48:08Ross Douthat:All right, let's do two extremely skeptical questions to end with, in case I haven't been skeptical enough, right? About two reasons why this sort of socialist moment might be stillborn. And the first just has to do with its political consequences for the Democrats, like winning elections before you get to governing, winning elections in 2026 and 2028. And you talked earlier about the idea that socialists in the United States have made their peace with liberalism. They're not enthusiasts for whatever Mao wanted to do, anything like that. That sort of what we see as socialism is operating under the tent of certain liberal norms.

49:01Ross Douthat:I don't know if I think that that is completely true. I don't think it's really true of the personnel who are most involved in the DSA. I think that if you look at like sort of data on people who are deeply involved and sort of occupying important offices in the DSA itself, you do have a lot of people who I would describe as communists, not merely as socialists who are quite radical. I think you also have in sort of online culture on the left a certain kind of illiberalism that, you know, it's favorable to someone like Luigi Mangione, right? Like it sort of likes to flirt and play around with violence.

49:40Ross Douthat:And so my question is, one, isn't that sort of a problem, period, like a moral problem, I guess you could say, for socialism that wants to be part of mainstream America in the way you've described? And second, isn't it a political problem if the association of socialism taking over the Democratic Party is with people who are sort of Luigi Mangione curious? Well, to begin with, I think in youth culture as a whole, there was this obsession with Luigi Mangione that I found deeply disturbing. And I think it's very fair to say that's illiberal. And that's also the creation of a horrible environment for anyone to do politics of any type or even just to live in a civil society.

50:23And I think as Americans, we've been lucky enough to live in a period where we could have disagreements without mass violence. But between Luigi Mangione, between the assassination attempts on Donald Trump, between the killing of Democratic state legislators. You know, I think you've seen little baby steps in the wrong direction that we should condemn, though I think that was more of a broad sentiment and almost like a diffuse populist sentiment. I would say there are people who self-describe as communists in the DSA, But what they're doing, this handful of people, they're invoking a tradition that in other contexts we would just call anarchism.

51:06You know, my tradition on the American left is very aware of Stalinism, of authoritarianism, of its threat. I don't think those currents exist in even the smallest margin in DSA. I think you have a lot of youthful, ultra leftist, you know, people who think a lot about, like the word because it's more transgressive. but nobody is looking to the to the soviet union or anything like that and i think it is useful to to see that as the evolution and the liberalization in a good way um of uh the american left over the years and through the experience of the collapse of the the soviet union like aren't there people

51:44Ross Douthat:though who would say that you know if it wasn't for the u.s being so vicious and imperialist that Cuba and Venezuela could be models. I feel like you'd get that. Definitely. You would get that in a minority, for what it's worth. My view on Cuba is that if not for the U.S. blockade, Cuba would have liberalized and they wanted to pursue Sino-Vietnamese reforms. They would have liberalized in a lot of different ways. But yeah, I think you definitely see see that in portions. And also, it's an organization at this point that has around 121 ,000 members. So I'm sure you could find divergent views. But it becomes a political problem insofar as then it manifests in the positions that have been staked out by candidates.

52:35Ross Douthat:And so even if you don't get a lot of House candidates who have endorsed, you know, the Stalinist purges. I don't think you will get that. You will get lots of them who've endorsed things like you've just described, right? Like, you know, police abolition, things that were sort of briefly popular in 2020 and are not very popular right now. I think a lot of these ideas came from the groups, though. It came from liberal NGOs that might have had a lot of left-wing influence, but came from parts of the Democratic Party that were quite mainstream. I completely agree with that. I think it's a problem across the left.

53:14But in practice, Zoran Mabdani right now is administrating a police department with over 30 ,000 armed men and women. And he's administrating it by many accounts well. And I think in practice, the experience of governance, of competing in elections is a moderating force on a lot of these issues. And in my mind, the biggest danger for DSA is actually that it transforms itself over time through excessive moderation into something like the new version of the Congressional Progressive Caucus or what the Black Caucus was in the 1980s that it eventually becomes more social democratic and less interested like I am in the old questions of power and redistribution and the means of production.

54:03Ross Douthat:So let's end with power and redistribution then and practicality, right? So you're saying, you know, the proof of the non-radical effectiveness of socialism could be in Mamdani's governance of New York City. It could also be in the governance of the United States of America by a democratic candidate for president who won an election and wanted to govern, not maybe as an avowed socialist, but in line with some of these ideas. We just went through an experiment in the Biden presidency where Joe Biden came in. He had people around him who were not as far left as Jacobin, but were further left than people around Barack Obama had been.

54:45Ross Douthat:They were influenced, I think, by some of the economic ideas that you referenced earlier and kind of had a belief that there were a bunch of things that you could do in short order to spend money, create new programs, that these would be very popular, that these would yield more growth, and that these would be the foundation for a durable majority. That didn't happen. In practice, the new spending yielded inflation and backlash. What prevents that from happening again? Like what is, to put a finer point on it, the new socialism enters into a political landscape where Medicare for all may pull well, but taxes are still very unpopular.

55:31Ross Douthat:Lots of Democrats are running away from the idea of taxing the upper middle class. How do you actually govern in this environment in anything but a defensive way? Well, I hate to defend Biden. I do disagree with assessment in terms of the Biden administration was a time when we recovered an economic level from COVID in a way that created hundreds of thousands of new manufacturing jobs at a time that across the rest of the capitalist world, they were shedding manufacturing jobs. Like compare the manufacturing job loss in Germany, obviously they had less job loss in the 90s, but compare that to the fruits of Biden's industrial policy, which obviously doesn't happen without Trump, you know, bringing up the specter of industrial policy and tariffs in 2016.

56:16But Biden, I think, did it right. I think his failures were fundamentally the failure to communicate to the American people. And we don't need to kind of get into that aspect of the Biden administration. Also, I do think there was...

56:31Ross Douthat:Well, but no, it's relevant, right? So you think, but in that sense, this is where someone like Mamdani is relevant, right? Like if the left thinks that its core problem under Biden was just salesmanship. Mamdani is clearly an example of someone who can do salesmanship in a way that an aging, decrepit Joe Biden couldn't. So is that the theory? Also, I would say that I think that's at least part of it. I mean, there was many I'm just defending the economic some of the economic record. I think there was a lot rotten else in the the the administration. But also when it comes to a Jacobin being to the left of the Biden administration, the people around it.

57:05Yeah, of course, programmatically, we're way, way, way to the left of the Biden administration. But to your wider question, of course, there's going to be difficulties that emerge in administration. And of course, the welfare state in particular, as it's constructed now, will be harder and harder to sustain with its current kind of dependency ratio with aging populations. And of course, the left will often get into power and administer poorly or have a run of bad luck and lose elections. And I think that's why we need to combine this sort of desire to find the right sort of immediate social democratic governance that works with the longer term egalitarian vision of creating a society with less hierarchy, with less division between people.

57:54And my vision of a good society might take centuries to enact. And I'm perfectly comfortable to sit by and wait in my hyperbolic chamber or whatever it's called.

58:11Ross Douthat:That was a great peroration on which to end. But I just, in the practical, in the here and now, right? Isn't the problem just you have to figure out how to raise people's taxes? I think that any welfare state will require greater degrees of taxes that won't just come from taxing billionaires. There's not enough money there. We need to convince people that if we are raising taxes, they're going to get a larger social wage back than they're giving up and taxes. So yes, taxes will have to go up on middle class people, but also at the same time, we need to look for efficiency in the existing American welfare state, which is an expensive welfare state.

58:59Okay. But just so we agree, there is a functioning socialism as a governing ideology

59:09Ross Douthat:in America needs to win an argument about taxes that the left has lost for a while. Sure. I think everything in life involves trade-offs. I can choose to have two drinks tonight or I could choose to read a book. It depends how you feel this podcast. Yeah, everything in life requires trade-offs. Everything in government in an economy requires a trade-off. Obviously, the economy itself is not zero-sum, but money has to come from somewhere. There needs to be more taxation on, I would say, professional class people over a certain income threshold. I think we can win that argument. we should start with something like Medicare for All, where I think there are significant efficiency gains to be found from having a single payer or two, which will offset some of the extra expenses.

1:00:05And I think there's a host of other issues where simplification of the welfare state by making things universal will yield some of the savings, but not all of it. Okay, good.

1:00:15Ross Douthat:I'm sorry to end on practicalities rather than eloquence, but Bhaskar Sunkara, Thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me.