As we head toward the midterms, the Republican attack on Democratic candidates is familiar: they are socialists. The line has been used for decades, often with success. What is different now is that the label is not aimed solely at Bernie Sanders. A meaningful portion of the Democratic left is comfortable describing itself as socialist, or at least as sympathetic to the tradition.
Their concerns are not mysterious. They see widening economic inequality. They see college becoming unaffordable, retirement increasingly out of reach, and rents and mortgages rising faster than many incomes. They wonder why one of the wealthiest countries in the world cannot provide healthcare, education and retirement security comparable to what citizens of other wealthy democracies enjoy.
Republicans have traditionally called much of this socialism.
But most Western European countries are not socialist in the traditional sense. They have private property, corporations, wealthy entrepreneurs, stock markets and competitive market economies. What many have chosen is a more expansive social-democratic bargain: capitalism accompanied by greater government responsibility for healthcare, education, retirement, family support and economic security.
If that is socialism, as Republicans have spent generations telling us, it is hardly surprising that some Americans might decide they like parts of socialism.
But there is another irony.
For all the Republican rhetoric about socialism, Trumpism increasingly embraces many of the practices Americans were once taught to fear when they imagined an overbearing state.
The federal government takes ownership interests in private companies and asserts influence over corporate decisions. Tariffs are imposed according to the preferences of one president. Businesses can find themselves rewarded or punished according to their relationship with the government. Cronies and loyalists are elevated to positions of extraordinary power. Cabinet meetings become exercises in public praise of the leader. Monuments, celebrations and government imagery increasingly revolve around a single man. Foreign policy includes demands for resources, influence and even territory.
None of those things makes Donald Trump a Marxist. Personality cults, cronyism, territorial ambition and centralized power have existed under monarchies, fascist governments, military dictatorships and authoritarian capitalist states as well.
But that distinction exposes the silliness of the word as it is used in American politics.
If government interference in private enterprise is socialism when Democrats propose it, what is it when Republicans practice it?
If an expansive healthcare system is socialism, why is government ownership of part of a corporation not socialism?
If excessive government power is what Americans were supposed to fear about socialism, why should that power become less frightening when exercised by a Republican president?
The answer, increasingly, seems to be that socialism is whatever Democrats do.
Government intervention in healthcare is socialism. Government intervention in business under Trump is economic nationalism. Government assistance to poor families is socialism. Government favors for preferred industries are industrial policy. Government regulation of markets is socialism, unless the regulation comes through tariffs imposed by the president. Centralized government power is dangerous until the person exercising it is someone you support.
The word has ceased to describe a coherent philosophy. It has become a political accusation.
And that is what makes the attack particularly strange now.
Democrats are proposing policies that, in many cases, resemble those already operating in successful capitalist democracies: broader healthcare coverage, more affordable education, stronger retirement protections and a larger social safety net. Republicans may oppose those policies. There are legitimate arguments about their cost, effectiveness and proper scope.
But calling them socialist tells us almost nothing.
Meanwhile, Trumpism has embraced something considerably more consequential than a larger welfare state: the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of the national government and, increasingly, in the hands of one president.
That was supposed to be part of what frightened us.
Perhaps the dumbest thing about American socialism is therefore the argument over the word.
If affordable healthcare is socialist, voters are entitled to want some socialism. If government ownership of private companies is socialist, Republicans are practicing some of it themselves. And if authoritarianism is socialism, then we have confused an economic system with a form of government.
Better to ask the questions that actually matter.
What should government provide? What should markets provide? How much economic inequality can a democracy tolerate? And, most importantly, how much power should any government — or any president — possess?
Those questions are difficult enough without pretending one word answers all of them.