Do Democrats want to win this year’s midterm elections? Or would they prefer to indulge in self-involved arguments over the relative merits of capitalism and socialism that are irrelevant to the choices they’ll face if they win power?
It’s hardly surprising that Republicans, including President Trump, have seized upon the victory of democratic socialists in a few high-profile primaries to cast their partisan adversaries as a bunch of reds. But Democrats have no business allowing themselves to be baited into a debate that is both useless and misleading.
It’s not easy being a big-tent party that must unite the center and the left if it’s to create a durable majority. Democrats will make their task far harder if they pretend that the choice before them is captured by two abstract words. Coalition building is hard. Cold War-style, “the reds are coming” politics won’t do it. Neither will “leftier than thou” entreaties.
Their problem is aggravated because Republicans took down their own once reasonably roomy tent.
The G.O.P. used to include a significant contingent of moderates and even a hardy band of liberals. Now the party is best characterized by Ronald Reagan’s 1981 quip that, in his administration, “the right hand doesn’t know what the far-right hand is doing.” That wisecrack has become even more apt as the party of Lincoln has shed all its progressives and most of its middle-of-the-roaders.
As a result, what had once been moderate Republican bastions, particularly in the suburbs, are now typically represented by Democrats, many of whom tilt toward the center — figures such as Representatives Jim Himes in Fairfield County, Connecticut; Tom Suozzi, from Long Island; and Mary Gay Scanlon in southeastern Pennsylvania. The party can’t win a congressional majority without prevailing in such places, with such candidates.
At the same time, the party overall has drifted leftward in reaction to the discrediting of unbridled capitalism by the financial crash of 2008 and the steady rise in inequality since 1980. The high cost of living in big cities and precarious employment prospects have pushed many younger voters in a progressive direction.
Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign captured this mood and sent a wave of young energy into the Democratic Socialists of America. The arrival of the new-generation left was heralded by the victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, then 28 years old, in a 2018 New York City congressional primary.
The D.S.A. had fewer than 10,000 members before Mr. Sanders ran. It grew to 45,000 by 2018 and then doubled its membership over the next four years. Between 2013 and 2017, the median age of its membership dropped from 68 to 33.
The triumph of Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s mayoral election last year and recent primary victories by D.S.A.-backed congressional candidates in New York and Colorado unleashed a wave of elation on the Democratic left and cries of alarm among some of the party’s moderates. Mr. Suozzi organized a statement signed by 10 Democratic House members asserting, “We are capitalist, not socialist.”
What’s wrong with Democrats arguing about the relative merits of capitalism and socialism?
Such polemics clearly distract from their need to stay focused on economic discontent and Mr. Trump’s corrupt abuses of power, but there is a larger problem. The capitalist-versus-socialist debate obscures broad agreement among Democrats on all sorts of things. Suozzi Democrats and A.O.C. Democrats alike want more progressive taxation; universal access to affordable health insurance, child care and housing; enhanced worker rights; climate action; and civil rights and voting rights.
The two sides still have a lot to argue about over the forms these initiatives should take — for example, how to enforce antimonopoly laws, what tax fairness should look like and whether to establish a single-payer health care system or build on Obamacare. But these are hardly world-historical questions of the sort implied by a grand battle between capitalism and socialism.
Within the party, moreover, there is no such thing as a pure capitalist or a pure socialist. Each camp uses the qualifier “democratic” to describe their respective brands, pointing to a shared acceptance of limits on both state power and the power exercised by wealthy corporate interests.
None of this should mean dismissing the left insurgency, which reflects frustrations that span the party’s philosophical barricades. Virtually all Democrats this year are running as populist critics of a system in which the share of the gross domestic product going to wages has declined from 64 percent in 2001 to 53.8 percent in 2025. We shouldn’t be shocked that more attention is being paid to struggles between labor and capital.
There’s a particular challenge with the word “socialism,” because most contemporary politicians who use it, here and abroad, are advocating greater social justice, not the wholesale dismantling of market capitalism.
You don’t have to believe me on this. “The next time you hear me attacked as a socialist, remember this,” Bernie Sanders declared in 2015. “I don’t believe government should own the means of production, but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal.”
At the time, I could not resist observing: “Honestly, Bernie, you’re really a social democrat.” (In fact, the politician who has moved aggressively to take government ownership shares in private companies — at times, it should be said, with Mr. Sanders’s support — is Mr. Trump.) Most self-described democratic socialists are social democrats — think Norway and Denmark — who seek to balance state and market, public provision and private ownership, the creation of wealth and its just distribution.
Socialists in capitalist democracies regularly seek formulations that square these circles. One of the more creative ones was offered recently by the British Labour Party’s Andy Burnham, who is set to become his country’s prime minister. Mr. Burnham champions “business-friendly socialism.”
An oxymoron? No, argues the British economics writer Will Hutton. “Rather than an intellectual pantomime horse,” Mr. Hutton wrote recently, “it is a concept with a long pedigree trying to capture the necessary complementarity of the private and public sectors.”
In any event, it’s absurd to claim that socialists are about to take over the Democratic Party. Despite the D.S.A.’s victories, a careful study by the Cook Political Report’s Erin Covey found that in 22 primaries in the Republican-held House seats Democrats hope to flip, 14 were won by centrist or center-left candidates, while the other eight nominees are largely seen as viable by party leaders. Ms. Covey noted that establishment picks are likely to prevail in the vast majority of the remaining 15 target-seat primaries.
When November’s choices are set, the overwhelming majority of Democratic candidates will not call themselves socialists. The debate that will matter to voters won’t be over idealized economic systems but about which party is more likely to deliver relief and opportunity to those who feel left out. Shame on Democrats if they lose this argument because they allow feuds over abstractions to substitute for the shared work that social and economic reconstruction will require.
E.J. Dionne Jr. is the author of “Why Americans Hate Politics,” “Our Divided Political Heart,” “Why the Right Went Wrong” and, most recently, “100% Democracy,” with Miles Rapoport.
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