What Is Liberal in Liberal Socialism

You put the sign in your yard and you meant what it said. Black lives do matter. No human is illegal. Diversity is strength. Love is love. We should trust science. You see ICE terrorizing your neighbors, drug-addled billionaires gutting essential services and life-saving aid, and a far-right government assaulting democracy at every level, down to its foundations. You volunteer and donate to causes. And you vote. You vote and vote and vote—blue no matter who, because you know the alternative is fascism. But you see a gerontocratic and cowardly Democratic leadership missing the point and proving themselves entirely unequal to the existential crisis confronting us all. 

You are Evelyn Normielib and you’re mad as hell.

You know the Matt Bors comic: a white man shaves his head, gets a Nazi tattoo, and dons white supremacist apparel, all while insisting that he is being forced by social justice warriors, or woke liberals and leftists, to make this transformation. The comic is funny because it surfs on the common notion that the popular media regards right-wingers as having no agency, that they act only in response to the excesses of the left.

Flip the script. What if the excesses of the right—the corruption, the lawlessness, the violent rhetoric, and actual political violence—are pushing some otherwise normie liberals into radical politics? And what if the inability of liberal and centrist parties to adapt to the shifting political terrain are pushing these radicalizing liberals into the arms of once-fringe political movements?

I’d like to suggest that this is at least part of the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and the growing openness of Democrats to democratic socialism. Indeed, a new Gallup poll finds the DSA has higher net approval among Democratic voters and Democratic leaners than elected Democrats in Congress. The same poll finds support for socialism among this group increased from 50% in 2010 to 66% in 2025. 

Socialism is what socialists do

What it means to be a socialist in the Trump era has less to do with Marxist theory, revolutionary vanguardism, seizing the means of production, or even worker cooperatives, and much more to do with a series of ethical commitments that remain largely unwelcome within mainstream liberal politics even as they continue to sharpen in salience.

One of the most animating causes among the DSA set is abolishing ICE and DHS. The hashtag #AbolishICE gained prominence with AOC’s insurgent campaign in 2018, long before abolishing ICE gained mainstream popularity amid murderous invasions of American cities by masked agents in Donald Trump’s second term. Elected Democrats have finally become open to the idea of abolishing these agencies, and have begun to find the stomach to play hardball by withholding their funding.

Yet it’s clear the elected Democrats have been dragged unwillingly to this position, with some still hedging against abolition with locutions like “reform” and “abolishing Trump’s ICE,” as if ICE was tolerable when it was formed in 2003, or when “Deporter-in-chief” Barack Obama set new records for removals, or when Trump implemented concentration camps and family separation in his first term, or when Joe Biden abused Title 42 deportation powers and humiliated Democrats by trying and failing to pass a Trump-style immigration restriction bill, or when Kamala Harris used fentanyl as a synonym for immigrants in her campaign platform. In contrast to all this is the straightforward solidarity with immigrants and refugees we see with DSA. Despite Bernie Sanders’s rightwing views on immigration, the natural position for a socialist today is open borders, or something very close to it.

Basic liberal values of a presumption of freedom, a respect for diversity, and a welcoming attitude toward immigrants point to open borders, or at the very least a radically more open immigration regime. This is what all those yard signs are saying in their polychromatic earnestness. Where the bulk of Democratic electeds dig their heels against this, socialists say it proudly.

Another cause that animates socialists today is Palestinian solidarity. Long before the brutal Hamas attacks and Israel’s devastating response, Palestinians in Israeli controlled territory lived in a state of apartheid. History did not begin on October 7, 2023. The status quo ante for Palestinians was a life of unequal treatment under the law, political unfreedom, segregation, dispossession and displacement, economic and social unfreedom, and subjection to military checkpoints and harassment.

The genocide in Gaza has forced a confrontation with these uncomfortable facts. So too has the increasingly flagrant manipulation of our politics by the Israel lobby. It is neither conspiratorial nor antisemitic to note that AIPAC has thrown its weight against Democrats in primaries who are even mildly critical of AIPAC and Israeli actions, Benjamin Netanyahu has betrayed clear preferences for Trump and the Republican Party (despite Trump’s dalliances with overt antisemites) over Democrats, and reporting has even revealed that Netanyahu has tried to pressure previous presidents into the predictably disastrous attack on Iran before finally finding one stupid enough to go along in Trump.

Like the slow, grudging movement by establishment Democrats against ICE, we are finally seeing some acknowledgment that our relationship with Israel has to change. But this has come after decades of unquestioning loyalty and military support to Israel, including a year where Biden refused to stop funding the Gazan genocide and Harris wouldn’t even allow a Palestinian lawmaker to speak at the Democratic National Convention. Apartheid and genocide are anathema to liberal values. This is why American liberals define themselves against the evils of the Jim Crow apartheid regime. But where nominal liberals have sidelined such principles in favor of (perceived) political expediency, socialists have simply always advocated for Palestinian liberation.

When socialists advocate wealth taxes, they are often portrayed by economists and centrist liberals as unserious and driven by an illiberal “zero-sum mentality.” I’ve discussed the zero-sumness charge at length already, but briefly, it isn’t zero-sum thinking to see that the billionaire class represents a profound threat to the liberal democratic order. The world’s first trillionaire—a distinction achieved through documented chicanery—is an antiliberal, nazi-saluting ideologue who committed nearly 300 million dollars to reelecting Trump and is even now fomenting racist pogroms in Europe on the social media platform he purchased in order to spread white supremacist ideas. But Elon Musk is just the worst of a set of billionaire oligarchs who have committed their resources to MAGA and other far right causes, either by “traditional” superpac campaign spending or by the even more sinister hoovering up of legacy and social media platforms. Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Larry Ellison and son, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Alex Karp are just scratching the surface of an antiliberal oligarch vanguard committed to disciplining not just the working class, but democracy itself.

Liberals today have every reason to heed the warnings of the ancients and early liberals alike: concentrated wealth is concentrated power, and power corrupts. While reactionary centrists and moderate liberals have forgotten this wisdom, it forms the core of socialist identity. The billionaires hate liberals and socialists both, so why does it seem like only socialists have the self-respect to return the sentiment? We would do well to embrace the great liberal Franklin Roosevelt’s approach to the oligarchs of his day. “They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred!”

The problem of an unaccountable ultrawealthy class is tied to the material demands that socialists advance. Key to the “zero-sum mentality” narrative is the idea that while the rich are indeed getting richer, everyone else is benefitting from rising wages and new opportunities and innovations. And the left puts this cornucopia at risk out of economic ignorance and envy. Yet our ballooning inequality is accompanied not by unambiguous gains among other classes, but by precarity in housing, healthcare, childcare, climate change, and a turbulent labor market, all pervaded by a vibe of declining social mobility.

The positive policy vision of today’s socialists is oriented around building universal welfare-enhancing institutions: universal healthcare so that no one is financially crippled for falling ill; universal childcare so that every adult—especially every woman—enjoys opportunities outside the home; a housing-first approach to ending homelessness; affordable higher education; and usually some universal entitlement to wealth or income, by some mix of a universal basic income, a jobs guarantee, or a universal asset grant. Most conceptions of a Green New Deal combine these institutions with an industrial policy aimed at expanding a green economy and reversing climate change. Far from a zero-sum—or “me-first,” as the Economist bizarrely calls it—worldview, the purpose of these institutions is to ensure that every individual has a genuine chance to flourish, and no person is left alone and exposed to the caprices of fortune and an evolving climate.

Most of these policy ideas enjoy majority support within the Democratic party, and many, like universal healthcare and a jobs guarantee, enjoy outright majority support. Yet these ideas are all treated as radical by most Democratic politicians. Is it any wonder that democratic socialists are growing in appeal and winning elections at a time when increasing economic precarity and malaise move these institutions from fantasy to necessity? 

What is liberal in liberal socialism?

Everything I discussed above can be grounded in liberal values. Even classical liberals can get behind ending apartheid, ending genocide, abolishing a secret police force of kidnappers, and cutting a cadre of antiliberal tycoons down to size. The more ambitious policies are well within the philosophy and practice of liberal egalitarianism.

It’s worth recalling what was illiberal about socialism in the twentieth century. For most of the twentieth century, socialism was associated with the antidemocratic and totalitarian governments of the Soviet Union and Maoist China. These governments crushed dissent and freedom of thought as a matter of political course. In economics, they enacted central planning that both stifled human creativity and caused poverty, famine, and mass death. Individual flourishing was suppressed in theory—individual lives were inconsequential next to the transcendent collective—and in practice, as human rights were sacrificed to the all-too-human corruption of one-party rule and cults of personality. These were the governments of the gulag and borders militarized against escape.

But this was not true of nineteenth century socialism, which existed in a variety of forms that little resembled Marxist-Leninist authoritarianism, and included pivotal contributions to the greatest emancipation in history. This portrait of socialism wasn’t even fully accurate in the twentieth century, where alternatives like Milwaukee sewer socialism and nordic social democracy thrived in genuine democracies, and social justice-oriented forms of socialism like the Johnson-Forest Tendency condemned Soviet authoritarianism. As the Cold War recedes ever further into the rearview mirror, the identification of socialism with illiberalism becomes more and more anachronistic. 

There are illiberal ideas on the left. You will find the occasional glazing of communist regimes among DSA members, or even post-communist reactionary regimes like Russia. Rhetoric about revolution and seizing the means of production aren’t uncommon, and markets as such are sometimes derided even apart from the more normatively laden term, capitalism. Some factions of the DSA oppose electoral politics altogether, or favor a Green style spoiler approach. If such factions come to dominate the DSA, they will ruin all good will from liberals. Degrowth is a program with illiberal implications that has gained traction in recent years.

But it should be noted that degrowth is in direct opposition to the much more influential Green New Deal framework. The democratic socialism of Bernie Sanders, AOC, Zohran Mamdani, and a growing set of socialist thinkers and politicians are far more like European social democrats than Leninist or Maoist revolutionaries. They campaign and govern with a pragmatic eye toward achieving real gains for human freedom and well-being. As demonstrated above, they focus on policies that fall well within liberal bounds.

Liberals yearn for a party that reflects our values and has the nerve to really fight the right. Many liberals see those values reflected more in democratic socialists than in the likes of Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer. The DSA is not a threat to the Democratic party or to liberalism. It may just be its salvation. 

Featured image is Fist and Rose, by No Por Mucho Madrugar