We’ve Been Looking in the Wrong Places to Understand Sanders’s Socialism

We’ve Been Looking in the Wrong Places to Understand Sanders’s Socialism

He shares the conviction of Gilded Age socialists that values, not economic laws, determine the contours of American society.

By Richard White

Mr. White is a professor of American history.

Detractors like to equate Senator Bernie Sanders’s socialism with Soviet and Chinese Communism. This is very 20th century of them. But if critics are looking for a knockout blow, they’re swinging at the wrong century, the wrong country and the wrong socialism.

Mr. Sanders does not disguise his socialism. But the question is: What do Americans mean when they talk about socialism? Pete Buttigieg equated socialism with a “rigid ideology,” but Mr. Sanders fits into a strain of American socialism that has largely eschewed ideology, made few references to Karl Marx, and been more likely to talk about fairness and values than about economic theory.

American socialism has a long history, and Mr. Sanders falls into a particular slice of it. He does not sound like the doctrinaire immigrant socialists of the 19th century, for example. He is somewhat closer to Norman Thomas and the socialists of the 1930s or Eugene Debs and the socialism of the early 20th century. But both men headed a socialist party, which Mr. Sanders does not.

The socialists Mr. Sanders most resembles were Gilded Age intellectuals, reformers, union members and ordinary citizens who self-labeled as socialist. There were immigrants among them, but the leading voices were, like Mr. Sanders, native-born and middle-class advocates of reform within the Democratic and Republican parties, whose bosses they often criticized.

Mr. Sanders sounds like these Gilded Age socialists in part because the issues of their time were similar to ours — immigration, environmental deterioration, declining well-being and growing inequality in a period of rapid technological and economic change. Mr. Sanders — whose socialism, built on fairness, is remarkably nonideological — shares the conviction of these old socialists that values, not economic laws, determine the contours of American society. The Gilded Age socialists admitted what their opponents often did not: Americans did not all share common values.

Like most modern pundits, 19th-century liberals — the equivalent of modern libertarians — believed that Americans always have been and always will be individualists. They imagined society to be a collection of autonomous subjects whose competition achieved the best possible outcomes. To deny this truth, they felt, was to deny reality.