According to the WSJ, socialism is on the rise. Sort of. Depends on what you mean by socialism.

As I wrote several years ago, the word socialism needs to be retired. To summarize my earlier argument, it means one thing on the left (the Scandanavian model) and another on the right (the Cuban or Venezuelan model). It conveys no information beyond the speaker’s disdain for whatever’s being discussed (when used by the right) or the speaker’s disdain for our current economic system (when used by the left). It does nothing but sow confusion. The word is a victim of what C.S. Lewis called verbicide; it’s dead and needs to be buried.

Mandani, AOC, Sanders, and the others are not helping themselves (or progressivism) by touting themselves as socialists. No doubt our current economic system is deeply flawed and we could perhaps learn from the social democracies of western Europe but when most people hear the word socialist, they think, not of Sweden, but of Cuba or North Korea. These “democratic socialists” should be pushing their ideas on pragmatic grounds, i.e., the benefits outweigh the costs and they improve on what we currently have. Mandani seems poised to win his election but he could hurt progressives elsewhere with his “socialism.”

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