Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is deep background the show where we explored the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. Tonight we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country. That's President Donald Trump to a huge round of applause at the State of the Union address, And that got me thinking, in a world where Bernie Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist, and so does Alexandriocazio Cortez, and so to a whole raft of young and active new progressives, what is socialism? What's a socialist? Doesn't matter? Is there any really good reason that we can't have socialism in the United States? Or is it truly the case that we can never have a socialist country? And maybe above all, how close is today's brand of socialism to the real thing. To discuss socialism and what it means today, we have with us probably the person in best position to talk about that in the entire United States, and that's Professor Sean Willance of Princeton, who's thought incredibly deeply and written extremely broadly about the history of labor, of unionism, of politics, and if the terms that talk about those things in the United States from the very dawn of the American Republic right up until the present. Sean, I'm thrilled that you're able to join us. Thank you for coming, well, thank you not for that lovely introduction. So let me start with the question that is frankly plaguing me in the aftermath of Donald Trump's proclamation and the new Democratic Socialists in their rise, and that is, at the most basic level, what is socialism? Well, in America, there have been a lot of different answers to that question, actually, because I've been different strains of socialism. Very importantly, for the first thing to do is to talk about what is socialism? What is it not? It is not communism. Let's just get that from the very start. You know, it's not just the narcissism of just noticeable differences that socialists and communists despise each other, very different views on how you go about building a socialist you know, future completely at odds with each other. So let's just take away all of the Stalinists and all of the trots Kits and all of them, they're off to the side. Was that true right from the start? I mean, if you had Karl Marx in the chair here. Oh, Karl Marx is dead by the time of all of this is happening, or pretty much so. No, No, the history of American socialism begins in around the eighteen eighties eighteen nineties. There's a prehistory to that. The first great socialist figure is Eugene Debs, and Eugene Debs founds a tradition that goes through the Socialist Party. Socialist Party runs basically from Debs to Norman Thomas in the thirties, finally to Michael Harrington. So the first takeaway then, if I to try to sum it up, would be that when we talk about socialism in America, we're talking about American socialism correct, which is its own thing, and that may be very important for our conversation. Absolutely absolutely. Then there's another tradition which is more of an immigrant tradition. I mean, Debs was from the Midwest and Norman Thomas went to Princeton. After all, Michael's different. We can get to Michael in a sect, but that was a tradition that was very all American. That's all American socialism. So what's the definition of all American socialism for the socialists? It comes out of basically all American political traditions, very Christian. And then this Michael shared it because he was Catholic, was a Catholic Protestant. Yeah, but it has that kind of social gospel aspect to it. It's not exactly the same, but it comes out of that. The other stream is very different. The other stream is immigrant, much more Jewish. It's the New York tradians, people like David Dabinski, Sidney Hillman. They are a very important part of the socialist tradition, and if you're talking about the connection between socialism and the Democratic Party, they're absolutely crucial. So before we get into them, let's go back to the mainstream American socialism of Debs and of Norman Thomas. Yes, how did they think of socialism definitionally, Well, basically it meant it meant that there would be a social revolution in which the working class would take power in effect. And now what that means is complicated, but nevertheless, and own the mean and socialize the means of production. So let's clarify that too. Socialize the means of production means the government, such as it would be, would own anything that was a money making enterprise. Basically. I mean there would be different sectors agriculture, industry, et cetera, finance importantly, but yes, that it would be that socialism means a society that is run by society that is run by the class of society that is the universal class according to Marx, which is they say, the proletariat. So the workers own the means of production that is there, that is their It's all about without the thing that Donald Trump is terrified by, correct, I mean, without the mesa production, Socialism in that form doesn't mean anything. So that is that. Now how democratic was this version of socialism? Did they think that it should come to power by people voting for it or were they open to the other kind of revolutions? Well, there were other kinds of you know, there were socialists and socialists. But you know Debs. Debs is running for president does a socialist party. He's getting getting votes. I mean, he's going out in campaigning it's democratic socialism. From the beginning. He didn't pretty a couple of times, didn't he. They did well once in nineteen twelve he got six percent of the vote, the highest, but it's a lot, you know. So these are socialists who believe that the people will rise up, but they won't do it violently. Correct. They will run for office, correct, and they will democratically pass laws. Correct. The takeover ownership of the businesses of America and agriculture and so forth. It's very very simply yes, um, you know. But but coming off of that, there are lots of other ways in which socialism developed. That is to say, there's a there's a ranch of socialism called sewer socialism. This is very big in the Midwest, in places like Milwaukee. German socialists for the most part associated with debs, but distinct and they got very interested in municipal It was about all about cities and municipal services, trying to socialize, you know, socialism in one city if you will, so literally the sewers of the city should be owned by the city rather than a private exactly exactly. You taken out of the prime hands of the private exploitters, and you put in the hands of a just government, and you'll get things done better. And that seems to have worked pretty well. I mean, depending on what you think of your sewers. In most of America today, isn't it the case that municipalities they may not run the sewers on a daily basis, but they own them, don't they better or worse? Yeah, so sewer socialism kind of work. Well, I mean though, I mean I pay my I don't pay the city for my electric bill. I don't pay the city for a lot of utilities. I mean, there's a lot of things that are not the case. But the MTA, for better or worse, is run by the government, run by elected officials, with a public private aspect to it. It's never completely outside of it. But that comes in part out of the socialist tradition. Yes, you can see that very clearly. So why did sewer socialism do as well as it did do when other forms of socialism ran into problem Well because, I mean, look at the local level, you can organize and in the Midwest, in western cities, it was very powerful. It has a political base. I mean, you can get somewhere at that local level. It's much harder to do that at the state level at the national level. So these municipalities, they would elect people to Congress. Victor Berger was a socialist in Congress for a while. You see this repeatedly, in fact, you see it today. In fact, what do you see with the Kazio Cortez, for example, Congressman Kazio Cortez, you know she has a following in a particular district, they can elect you to Congress. That's locally based. Socialism can get pretty far politically. So let's talk about Alexandreo Kazio Cortez and Bernie Sanders and the new Democratic socialist and let's focus on a specific thing. And I want to ask you if it's a kind of stewart socialism, and that is the policy they're pushing of medicare for all. Right, many of the Democratic candidates in the primary are either opting for that or saying that they think it's a good idea in principlescuarly being pushed from that direction. And President Trump says Medicare for all sounds like socialized medicine to sounds like socialized medicine. To me, that is a form of socialism. And presumably the Democrats who aren't self identified as democratic socialists would say, come on, there's nothing socialist about that at all. It's just an opportunity for a healthcare to be paid for. So let me sort of ask you the point blank question, is socializing medicine sort of like socializing the sewers. Is its socialism? No? Why not? Well, look, the idea of universal healthcare is at the center of the Democratic Party since Harry Truman, since nineteen forty six forty seven. So this has been a traditional idea that healthcare is indeed a right amount of privilege and the government ought to be able to provide or help provide healthcare to everybody. That's not a particularly position. There are many ways to get there, however, and that's where I think the Democrats will divide and medicare for role as a single payer system, as you know, which is very distinct from the kind of system we have now. It gets rid of a private insurance company. Right. That's one version of how you get there, But there are other versions as well. It's not so much that we have a socialist versus non socialist version of this. There are different versions of a democratic what has been a Democratic Party position forever. There are different versions of how to get there. So I'm now trying to channel Donald Trump running for office against this policy. And let's imagine a Donald Trump, if it's possible to imagine such a person who's taken your course and has learned about Sewer socialism yes, and says, well, yeah, there are different kinds of programs. Some involve the private sector, but some say the government should take it over completely. Correct, Medicare for all, it's a single payer system. It really implies, perhaps that the government should take over healthcare completely, as opposed to universal healthcare of the Obamacare type where the government repays private Insuran and he says, I think I get an A on the test. President likes to get on tests, or it likes to believe he's gotten a on tests, because I call this genuinely a social system. Well, I mean, you know he get a C from the course. I mean it's it's it's not completely wrong in all of that, but the image that's given of of of of a government run healthcare system is maybe closer to the NHS, where the NHS could be in Britain, the National Health System, the National Health System Britain UM and people's fears that the government's going to tell you you know, who your doctor is going to have to be, and when you can get the so called death panels that Sarah Palin was talking about. You know, all of these things out there that I have nothing to do with the system per se. So the image of it being socialist is not actually the reality. The reality, however, does in part come out of Yeah, I mean socialism is a part of what has been American liberalism for a very long time. I mean socialist characters. And I was mentioning before people like Sidney Hillman, and to basically was a certain example. Hilman above all had a lot to do with the New Deal. A little bit about him, Well, Hillman's the head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union in the United States, and um, he actually started off with a little closer to the communists, but then he very very very much you denounces them and gets rid of the communists in the labor movement as best he can. But he is very tight with Roosevelt. I'm sorry, he's very tight with Franklin Roosevelt. And you know, he has a lot to do with putting together and not just Roosevelt, but all of the New Deal people, so people like Senator Robert Wagner in New York, people like Francis Perkins, Secretary of Labor. He's very close to all these people. And Hillman had a great deal to do with getting the you know, the Wagner Act, the nineteen thirty five of the landmark act of collective bargaining in American history. Hillman had a lot to do with shaping that um the Fair Labor Labor Standards Act from nineteen thirty eight. Again, Hillman had a lot to do with all of that. So then, in that view, the core accomplishments of FDR's New Deal owed something to conversation and interaction with leading labor unions, labor unionists like Hillman, who were avowedly socialist, and that was normal at the time. So that leads me to the following question about FDR himself and about the New Deal. Broadly, critics of the New Deal at the time. You've pointed this out called it socialist. Yes, FDR said politely, hell no. So what was FDR's response to the charge that he was a socialist? No, he said he was a liberal. He said he was a Christian, a Democrat, and a liberal, I think in that order. And what did liberal mean in the Roosevelt era? It meant coming out of the progressive era, from the earlier part of FDR's life, from when his cousin was president. It meant seeing the federal government as having a very very large role to play in improving social welfare, taking the constitutions, you know, preamble very seriously, that the in a very positive way. So, borrowing a phrase from Bill Clinton, could we say that liberalism meant capitalism mend it, don't end it. Yeah, you could put it that way. Yes, I mean it does not believe in the socialization of the means of production, that's for sure. It understands that capitalism has been the greatest wealth generating system the world has ever known. It takes all of that into account. But the point is capitalism has to be protected from the capitalists. Left to their own devices, the capitalists will rain down, rack and ruin not just on the working people of America, but on the entire system, as we saw, for example in nineteen twenty nine, nineteen thirty two. So then the New Deal's version of liberalism says, let's redistribute some wealth so that the poorest people have a safety net, and let's put some restrictions on what owners and employers can do in the context of blocking labor unions. That gives you the National Labor Relations laws. Yeah, and then last, but not least, let's have a Securities and Exchange Commission and laws that regulate the financial markets so that they don't play dirty. And in the process of at the same time, all of these things are meant to shore up, to prop up capitalism, yes, so that it doesn't collapse in the wake of the Great Depression. It's one of the reasons why Norman Thomas, the great socialist leader of the nineteen thirties, when asked if FDR he carried out the socialist program, he said, yeah, he carried it out. He carried out on a stretcher because he took all of those ideas and took them away from the socialist essentials, means of production, all of that, and save capitalism with some ideas of socialism. So in that sense you could imagine the view that liberalism is almost the enemy of socialism because it takes the best ideas that socialists have, it implements them, and then it has the effect of preserving capitalism rather than allowing people to become so miserable and unhappy that they say capitalism is fundamentally broken. We want to take over the government, we want to do things differently, and we want to have socialism. You can look at it that way if you were a sectarian socialist, but people like Hillman and others, and above all maybe the greatest labor leader of the twentieth century, you know, is Walter Ruther in Detroit. I mean what they saw is, look, we're not going to have a revolution, but if we can get enough of our stuff through, who cares whether it's socialist, liberal, what have you. We're making life better for ordinary people. We're making we're expanding the social welfare. That's what we're here to do. What they saw their role as being is not an antagonism to the liberals, not trying to overthrow the liberals, not saying the liberals a role running dog imperialists, et cetera. No, they said we can see a role for ourselves in trying to push and pull from within. So that brings us to the current democratic socialists. And the first question I have about them is are they really socialists? Well, it depends. I mean, when I hear, you know, Senator Sanders, for example, talk about define socialism, as he did at some point during the campaign at Georgetown, effect, he says he's an FDR liberal right, So I don't know if that's socialism, then socialism has changed. I mean, even they calling them some socialists. I've been doing a little informal poll of twenty some things. I know, yeah, and I have a hypothesis. I'd like to hear it because I have no idea. I wonder what your students think about this too. So my very informal, unscientific poll was that people said, of course that the Democratic Socialists do not favor nationalizing the means of production in the country. They don't want the businesses to be taken over by the government. But they're sick and tired of the term liberal right. They're sick and tired of the term progressive right. They think, and you've written this that Hillary Clinton took the term progressive and you know, muddied it essentially by being not left enough. And the word socialism sounds cool. Yeah, it sounds like I want to change things, I want to do things differently. And that's a big part of Bernie Sanders appeal a cooint to this theory. And then when you take away Bernie Sanders and you put in Alexandro Alexandro Ocasio Cortez, now it's younger, it's hipper, it's more with it. So what do you think about that? Well, I think that's right. I mean, I think that that liberalism had a crisis in the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies. Democratic Party out of crisis as well, coming out of Vietnam and all the rest of it, and um, the Reagan Revolution put the Democratic liberals on the defensive and they had to figure out of political strategy for themselves. And the Democrats had done themselves no good either by changing their party around into a kind of conjuries of special interests. They took away the party bosses, they ceased to be a party in the traditional sense. So coming out of all of that, yeah, the Democrats had a bob and weave and triangulate, if you will, in order to just survive. Now, coming out of that, the Clintons were trying, i think, to give the Democratic Party a substance again, you know, seeing them as very much as liberals, pushing forward, trying to expand you know, social welfare, all the rest of it, the kinds of things with some socialism sort of in there. People don't realize all of that, but it was the people they were talking about, you see. But they always do that they'll call anything socialism because they know it's a scare tactic. That's a scare word. But you know, maybe it was sca It's interesting, we'll come back to that about whether it's blood he had to tag politically. It was about politics. That's what pople don't understand about what the Clintons were about and where things were going. Now, things changed after that, change changed dramatically, particularly after two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine, after the economic collapse, which I think has a lot to do with the students young people you're talking about, So people who grew up in the who have no memory of Ronald Reagan, who have no memory of what politics used to be, like what Reagan did to politics, and then who came of age in the aftermath of two thousand and eight two thousand and nine. I've gone of a very different view of all of these words and what they mean than the likes of me who grew up in the nineteen sixties. So let's talk about words then. Yes, you've written in Democracy Journal very powerfully. I would say that we should call things what they really are. Yes, and that the Democrats made a big mistake when they stopped calling themselves liberals and started calling themselves progressive. And it's really the Clinton era where that happened. Yes, why what was wrong with that? Well, liberal had been demonized successfully by the right wing Republicans. You remember in nineteen eighty eight, when George H. W. Bush was running for president, he talked about the L word. He made it sound, you know, like manure. He made it sound like something, you know, so execrable that it was really excrement. That was before the TV show the L word made it sound somewhat better. But well that's another story. But you know, but this is way back in nineteen eighty eight, ancient history. But the word liberal was demonized. Nobody wanted to be known as the liberal right, and so the Democrats, chow happened on the word progressive as a subside for all of that. Now, progressive had been a left wing word that was very very anti liberal, if you will. That was where the left kind of gravitated to after the Communists had been you know, disgraced and so forth, in the aftermath of McCarthy, in the mathmath of fifty six, full of that um so. But the Democrats took this all left wing word and made it into a kind of euphemism for liberal. They repurposed it yet exactly now you know, that's okay. But what happened was that when by the time you got to say, the twenty sixteen election, here was Hillary Clinton, who had this background of having to you know, having to fight through the nineties and having to go through all of those politics, but it understood that times had changed. So she comes up with a very liberal, that is to say, leftish liberal platform. If you read her platform, it's it's much to the left of where she was in two thousand and eight, for sure, But she was presumably pushed there very hard by Bernie Sanders in the prime No, I disagree it was that was true before the primaries ever began. He then began to push her, not so much with anything dramatically different. But you know, if she came out for a twelve dollar minimum wage, he would come out for a fifteen dollars minimum wage. He would rail against the billionaire class. That's not her politics. He brought up all of this old you know stuff, and she looked she had no way to argue against it, and she ran calling herself a progressive. He's going to progressive her any day. And so you think the mistake was where was the excuse me, He's going to do that rhetorically. You know, whether he's going to be able to deliver on it's another matter. So the mistake, I think is that, Look, the idea of liberalism, which was when I was growing up, is a very powerful one. It means up, meant Walter Ruther, it meant people like that God de Nature got lost. Um. It's a word which I think is an honorable one. It's an honorable tradition. Now what I like to go back to the word using the word liberal, No, because I don't think that it's going to um, you know, on its own, it's going to matter. But I do think that people calling themselves liberal progressives, for example, as opposed to the socialist progressives who want to hold on to that word, there could be a fruitful, you know, exchange about all of that. Something tells me that Kamala Harris is not going to say the difference between me and Bernie Sanders is that he's a socialist and I'm a liberal. She's gonna say something else. Maybe she's gonna chase he's a progressive liberal doesn't seem quite ripe yet, Okay, brought to life. That may be true. And I'm not a political you know, putnent or neither am I an operative, So I don't really know these things. I'm sure it pulls terrible So it's not a great idea. But let's not talk about let's just started what we're saying in public or on the stump. Let's think about our own thoughts about all of this, how we conceive all of this. And I think there is a difference between people who understand what the liberal tradition, it's richness, what it was about. Don't trash it as just you know, neoliberal corporate blah blah. No, that's not what it is. That was the way that people referred to Hillary Clinton. She is not that she's not Margaret Thatcher to try and reown that, but to do so in a spirit that, you know, these things don't have to be in conflict. So if that's the case, then how do you feel about the democratic socialists doing their own bit of repurposing right. If we're right that they don't believe in the old version of right, even the classic deb's version of socialists, then they're using shows lists simply to say, well, we're to the left of people who call themselves progressive. What do you make of that? Do you think that's good? Do you think it's harmless? Do you think it's desirable? I think it's vaguely demogogic. I mean, I don't think it means a whole lot um, you know, I mean, why is the demogogic? To me? Just to be provocative, What seems demogogic is Donald Trump saying well, we will never be a socialist country. I mean, they may be walking into the demogogue, but they're being demogrague. There's there's more than one way to be demogogic, you know that. Look, And so let's take the case of another person on the left of the Democratic Party, Elizabeth Warren. Elizabeth Warren says that she's capitalist to her marrow or something, but she's also talking about the kinds of things that Walter Ruther was talking about. If anybody comes close interest in the middle class, no putting workers on boards of corporations. I mean, this is a very Rutherian socialist idea. Now she's not calling herself a socialist, but you know, the proof of the pudding. It's in the program, is what she's talking about. She's thinking more imaginatively, I think than any of the other candidates along the kinds of lines that I think of as new deal liberalism. So if that's the case, then I don't know if you would agree with this, But maybe the takeaway should be that the terms don't matter that much. Yeah, I think that's probably right. That it's all the policies and it's all very well and good to try to figure out where they come from. And we could try to figure out this one comes from here, and this one comes from there, and Stewards are a little bit socialist and putting members of companies on boards a little bit socialist, but in the end they're not genuine socialism. So, you know, if someone says, who cares about this terminology? Why are you guys even talking about it? What would you tell them? I would say that you have to be careful though, because it can very easily get weaponized. And let's talk about weaponizing that should I think what happened in twenty sixteen. I mean, you know Bernie Sanders, who is not a Democrat, who comes out of a you know, the left wing of Vermont politics that he helped invent. Right, attacked at Hillary Clinton as a goon of Wall Street, attacked her in sectarian terms, which damaged her terribly going to the election. Many of the things that he said about her, Trump's said about her, Yes, making her out to be a slave of Wall Street. That's weaponizing socialism. That's turning socialism into a weapon that's trying to destroy That's another idea. It's actually from the perspective of a Clintonite liberal, and I think that's a perfectly fine perspective to hold. Right. You can see how that's weaponizing in a bad way, yes, But from the perspective of a critic of Clintonite liberalism, it would be weaponizing in a good sense. Right. I mean, that's if you want to destroy liberalism. But if the point, if the point of socialisms destroy liberalism, then I think we're going down a very dangerous road, a very dangerous because socialism might succeed in destroying liberalism because because socialism is not going to be just supplanned liberalism as the alternative to the Donald Trump. So then the danger, so I understand correctly, is sort of what happened in your interpretation between Sanders and Clinton. By criticizing Hillary Clinton from the left, by weaponizing socialism, as you put it, Sanders weakened Clinton, yes, helping Trump to win. Correct, that's the account. And on that view, the Democratic socialists can do that again. They can defeat whoever is the Democratic candidate in twenty twenty by weakening that person, and then that can actually plan to Trump's head exactly. Now, look, criticizing from the left is perfectly legitimate. I don't have any problems with people saying that Hillary Clinton is not was not. You know, she should have pointed to her program more. Actually, I think then she would have shown people that she was not the neoliberal hobgoblin that she was being made out to be. That was a tactical mistake, indeed a strategic mistake on her part. But that's put that to the side. Criticism on the left is healthy, it's great. We want that. When you weaponize it, however, you're being destructive. So how do we draw the line. We're entering a presidential season. We've got umpteen number of presidential candidates who've already declared right. None thus far is running to the right of where Hillary Clinton ran the last time around. I guess that's right. Yeah, I mean, maybe there will be someone who emerges that way. Right. Mike Bloomberg has said he's not running, and that's partly, I think because he's a rational person and he could only have run for the right of where Hilly Clinton was and he doesn't see a path to the presidency through that, correct. So let's talk in practical terms. Yes, what would it mean for Bernie Sanders for the other Democratic Socialists to criticize legitimately from the left, in your view, and what would it mean for them to dangerously weaponize in very practical terms, what's what's kosher according to a lens and what's not kosher? Yeah, I mean, it's like pornography. I know when I see it. You know what, when you see it, when you're calling someone a name, a Wall Street goon or whatever whatever the language was, that's a polemic, that's that's an attack, that's destructive. If you say, Mike, my my advers my opponent, and I disagree. I would like to see this happen rather than that happen for this reason. But I think that. But I think they're gonna be a lot of listeners or I hope. There are a lot of listeners who instinctively respond to that by saying, but wait a minute, Hillary Clinton was cheek by jowl in close relationship, absolutely with plenty of liberals. To be fair, yes, on Wall Street. Yeah, there really were lots of Goldman Sachs partners making donations. Because it's perfectly reasonable, and if you could have a reasonable conversation about that, I believe that she could actually convince many of the people who opposed her for why that's not a terrible thing. But you could not have that conversation. She couldn't have that conversation. It was terribly embarrassing. It was terribly difficult given the political setting, which in fact, in part the left help set up. Why can't the radical vision just when? I mean, we have had moments in American history where radical visions of conservatism have come very close to winning definitively. Think about the Reagan era, where there were some significant pushbacks. Why and maybe you could argue, well known, actually more pragmatized, that did what did he do? He didn't get rid of Social Security, he didn't get rid of all of the New Deal. I mean, Laala Reagan was an interesting character but he was a pragmatist on the right, you know, as par excellence. I mean, look at what we've got today. Now, okay, you want to see you want to see the radicals taking over. There's the Republican Party. It's become a movement, not a party. Okay, so good. So you have a radical movement that claims to have a chance of taking over. And after all, Republicans do control the Senator, and they control the Presidency. And as you say, Republican conservatism is a movement, not just a political party, and many of its leading figures are not pragmatists. So just to push the question, why can't the same thing happen on the left, you have to recognize first of all, that all America is not Brooklyn. All America is not Cambridge. All America is not Berkeley. That's number one. I mean, my daughter, I love her, she's great, she lives in Brooklyn. You know, you'd think that you're in the people's Republic of Brooklyn. Now it's great, but it's not the rest of the world. That's number one. So whereas I think a person on the right could you would have a lot more to go on in terms of what America is like America is a much more conservative country. Thank you very much, great to be here, very good. Sewer socialism. That's a phrase I admit I had never heard before Sean Willens described it to us, and it's really remarkable to me because it seems to capture in the most fundamental way something about socialism that has never come up in the course of our big debate about whether America could ever be a socialist country and whether the Democratic Socialists or onto something brand new. It's the idea that socialism has always, in fact been with us here in the United States, every time we make a choice about whether something should be done by the government or whether that thing should be done by the private sector. So maybe it is socialist to say that we should have medicare for all, But so what, maybe that's just as socialist as saying that the sewers should be run by the government instead of buy a private, for profit company. Going deep into the history of socialism in America and into the question of the terms that we use taught me to realize that there's more to our tradition than meets the eye. Deep background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia Genecott, with engineering by Jason Gambrel and Jason Roskowski. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis Gera special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. You can follow me on Twitter at Noah R Feldman. This is deep background

Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is deep background the show where we explored the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. Tonight we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country. That's President Donald Trump to a huge round of applause at the State of the Union address, And that got me thinking, in a world where Bernie Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist, and so does Alexandriocazio Cortez, and so to a whole raft of young and active new progressives, what is socialism? What's a socialist? Doesn't matter? Is there any really good reason that we can't have socialism in the United States? Or is it truly the case that we can never have a socialist country? And maybe above all, how close is today's brand of socialism to the real thing. To discuss socialism and what it means today, we have with us probably the person in best position to talk about that in the entire United States, and that's Professor Sean Willance of Princeton, who's thought incredibly deeply and written extremely broadly about the history of labor, of unionism, of politics, and if the terms that talk about those things in the United States from the very dawn of the American Republic right up until the present. Sean, I'm thrilled that you're able to join us. Thank you for coming, well, thank you not for that lovely introduction. So let me start with the question that is frankly plaguing me in the aftermath of Donald Trump's proclamation and the new Democratic Socialists in their rise, and that is, at the most basic level, what is socialism? Well, in America, there have been a lot of different answers to that question, actually, because I've been different strains of socialism. Very importantly, for the first thing to do is to talk about what is socialism? What is it not? It is not communism. Let's just get that from the very start. You know, it's not just the narcissism of just noticeable differences that socialists and communists despise each other, very different views on how you go about building a socialist you know, future completely at odds with each other. So let's just take away all of the Stalinists and all of the trots Kits and all of them, they're off to the side. Was that true right from the start? I mean, if you had Karl Marx in the chair here. Oh, Karl Marx is dead by the time of all of this is happening, or pretty much so. No, No, the history of American socialism begins in around the eighteen eighties eighteen nineties. There's a prehistory to that. The first great socialist figure is Eugene Debs, and Eugene Debs founds a tradition that goes through the Socialist Party. Socialist Party runs basically from Debs to Norman Thomas in the thirties, finally to Michael Harrington. So the first takeaway then, if I to try to sum it up, would be that when we talk about socialism in America, we're talking about American socialism correct, which is its own thing, and that may be very important for our conversation. Absolutely absolutely. Then there's another tradition which is more of an immigrant tradition. I mean, Debs was from the Midwest and Norman Thomas went to Princeton. After all, Michael's different. We can get to Michael in a sect, but that was a tradition that was very all American. That's all American socialism. So what's the definition of all American socialism for the socialists? It comes out of basically all American political traditions, very Christian. And then this Michael shared it because he was Catholic, was a Catholic Protestant. Yeah, but it has that kind of social gospel aspect to it. It's not exactly the same, but it comes out of that. The other stream is very different. The other stream is immigrant, much more Jewish. It's the New York tradians, people like David Dabinski, Sidney Hillman. They are a very important part of the socialist tradition, and if you're talking about the connection between socialism and the Democratic Party, they're absolutely crucial. So before we get into them, let's go back to the mainstream American socialism of Debs and of Norman Thomas. Yes, how did they think of socialism definitionally, Well, basically it meant it meant that there would be a social revolution in which the working class would take power in effect. And now what that means is complicated, but nevertheless, and own the mean and socialize the means of production. So let's clarify that too. Socialize the means of production means the government, such as it would be, would own anything that was a money making enterprise. Basically. I mean there would be different sectors agriculture, industry, et cetera, finance importantly, but yes, that it would be that socialism means a society that is run by society that is run by the class of society that is the universal class according to Marx, which is they say, the proletariat. So the workers own the means of production that is there, that is their It's all about without the thing that Donald Trump is terrified by, correct, I mean, without the mesa production, Socialism in that form doesn't mean anything. So that is that. Now how democratic was this version of socialism? Did they think that it should come to power by people voting for it or were they open to the other kind of revolutions? Well, there were other kinds of you know, there were socialists and socialists. But you know Debs. Debs is running for president does a socialist party. He's getting getting votes. I mean, he's going out in campaigning it's democratic socialism. From the beginning. He didn't pretty a couple of times, didn't he. They did well once in nineteen twelve he got six percent of the vote, the highest, but it's a lot, you know. So these are socialists who believe that the people will rise up, but they won't do it violently. Correct. They will run for office, correct, and they will democratically pass laws. Correct. The takeover ownership of the businesses of America and agriculture and so forth. It's very very simply yes, um, you know. But but coming off of that, there are lots of other ways in which socialism developed. That is to say, there's a there's a ranch of socialism called sewer socialism. This is very big in the Midwest, in places like Milwaukee. German socialists for the most part associated with debs, but distinct and they got very interested in municipal It was about all about cities and municipal services, trying to socialize, you know, socialism in one city if you will, so literally the sewers of the city should be owned by the city rather than a private exactly exactly. You taken out of the prime hands of the private exploitters, and you put in the hands of a just government, and you'll get things done better. And that seems to have worked pretty well. I mean, depending on what you think of your sewers. In most of America today, isn't it the case that municipalities they may not run the sewers on a daily basis, but they own them, don't they better or worse? Yeah, so sewer socialism kind of work. Well, I mean though, I mean I pay my I don't pay the city for my electric bill. I don't pay the city for a lot of utilities. I mean, there's a lot of things that are not the case. But the MTA, for better or worse, is run by the government, run by elected officials, with a public private aspect to it. It's never completely outside of it. But that comes in part out of the socialist tradition. Yes, you can see that very clearly. So why did sewer socialism do as well as it did do when other forms of socialism ran into problem Well because, I mean, look at the local level, you can organize and in the Midwest, in western cities, it was very powerful. It has a political base. I mean, you can get somewhere at that local level. It's much harder to do that at the state level at the national level. So these municipalities, they would elect people to Congress. Victor Berger was a socialist in Congress for a while. You see this repeatedly, in fact, you see it today. In fact, what do you see with the Kazio Cortez, for example, Congressman Kazio Cortez, you know she has a following in a particular district, they can elect you to Congress. That's locally based. Socialism can get pretty far politically. So let's talk about Alexandreo Kazio Cortez and Bernie Sanders and the new Democratic socialist and let's focus on a specific thing. And I want to ask you if it's a kind of stewart socialism, and that is the policy they're pushing of medicare for all. Right, many of the Democratic candidates in the primary are either opting for that or saying that they think it's a good idea in principlescuarly being pushed from that direction. And President Trump says Medicare for all sounds like socialized medicine to sounds like socialized medicine. To me, that is a form of socialism. And presumably the Democrats who aren't self identified as democratic socialists would say, come on, there's nothing socialist about that at all. It's just an opportunity for a healthcare to be paid for. So let me sort of ask you the point blank question, is socializing medicine sort of like socializing the sewers. Is its socialism? No? Why not? Well, look, the idea of universal healthcare is at the center of the Democratic Party since Harry Truman, since nineteen forty six forty seven. So this has been a traditional idea that healthcare is indeed a right amount of privilege and the government ought to be able to provide or help provide healthcare to everybody. That's not a particularly position. There are many ways to get there, however, and that's where I think the Democrats will divide and medicare for role as a single payer system, as you know, which is very distinct from the kind of system we have now. It gets rid of a private insurance company. Right. That's one version of how you get there, But there are other versions as well. It's not so much that we have a socialist versus non socialist version of this. There are different versions of a democratic what has been a Democratic Party position forever. There are different versions of how to get there. So I'm now trying to channel Donald Trump running for office against this policy. And let's imagine a Donald Trump, if it's possible to imagine such a person who's taken your course and has learned about Sewer socialism yes, and says, well, yeah, there are different kinds of programs. Some involve the private sector, but some say the government should take it over completely. Correct, Medicare for all, it's a single payer system. It really implies, perhaps that the government should take over healthcare completely, as opposed to universal healthcare of the Obamacare type where the government repays private Insuran and he says, I think I get an A on the test. President likes to get on tests, or it likes to believe he's gotten a on tests, because I call this genuinely a social system. Well, I mean, you know he get a C from the course. I mean it's it's it's not completely wrong in all of that, but the image that's given of of of of a government run healthcare system is maybe closer to the NHS, where the NHS could be in Britain, the National Health System, the National Health System Britain UM and people's fears that the government's going to tell you you know, who your doctor is going to have to be, and when you can get the so called death panels that Sarah Palin was talking about. You know, all of these things out there that I have nothing to do with the system per se. So the image of it being socialist is not actually the reality. The reality, however, does in part come out of Yeah, I mean socialism is a part of what has been American liberalism for a very long time. I mean socialist characters. And I was mentioning before people like Sidney Hillman, and to basically was a certain example. Hilman above all had a lot to do with the New Deal. A little bit about him, Well, Hillman's the head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union in the United States, and um, he actually started off with a little closer to the communists, but then he very very very much you denounces them and gets rid of the communists in the labor movement as best he can. But he is very tight with Roosevelt. I'm sorry, he's very tight with Franklin Roosevelt. And you know, he has a lot to do with putting together and not just Roosevelt, but all of the New Deal people, so people like Senator Robert Wagner in New York, people like Francis Perkins, Secretary of Labor. He's very close to all these people. And Hillman had a great deal to do with getting the you know, the Wagner Act, the nineteen thirty five of the landmark act of collective bargaining in American history. Hillman had a lot to do with shaping that um the Fair Labor Labor Standards Act from nineteen thirty eight. Again, Hillman had a lot to do with all of that. So then, in that view, the core accomplishments of FDR's New Deal owed something to conversation and interaction with leading labor unions, labor unionists like Hillman, who were avowedly socialist, and that was normal at the time. So that leads me to the following question about FDR himself and about the New Deal. Broadly, critics of the New Deal at the time. You've pointed this out called it socialist. Yes, FDR said politely, hell no. So what was FDR's response to the charge that he was a socialist? No, he said he was a liberal. He said he was a Christian, a Democrat, and a liberal, I think in that order. And what did liberal mean in the Roosevelt era? It meant coming out of the progressive era, from the earlier part of FDR's life, from when his cousin was president. It meant seeing the federal government as having a very very large role to play in improving social welfare, taking the constitutions, you know, preamble very seriously, that the in a very positive way. So, borrowing a phrase from Bill Clinton, could we say that liberalism meant capitalism mend it, don't end it. Yeah, you could put it that way. Yes, I mean it does not believe in the socialization of the means of production, that's for sure. It understands that capitalism has been the greatest wealth generating system the world has ever known. It takes all of that into account. But the point is capitalism has to be protected from the capitalists. Left to their own devices, the capitalists will rain down, rack and ruin not just on the working people of America, but on the entire system, as we saw, for example in nineteen twenty nine, nineteen thirty two. So then the New Deal's version of liberalism says, let's redistribute some wealth so that the poorest people have a safety net, and let's put some restrictions on what owners and employers can do in the context of blocking labor unions. That gives you the National Labor Relations laws. Yeah, and then last, but not least, let's have a Securities and Exchange Commission and laws that regulate the financial markets so that they don't play dirty. And in the process of at the same time, all of these things are meant to shore up, to prop up capitalism, yes, so that it doesn't collapse in the wake of the Great Depression. It's one of the reasons why Norman Thomas, the great socialist leader of the nineteen thirties, when asked if FDR he carried out the socialist program, he said, yeah, he carried it out. He carried out on a stretcher because he took all of those ideas and took them away from the socialist essentials, means of production, all of that, and save capitalism with some ideas of socialism. So in that sense you could imagine the view that liberalism is almost the enemy of socialism because it takes the best ideas that socialists have, it implements them, and then it has the effect of preserving capitalism rather than allowing people to become so miserable and unhappy that they say capitalism is fundamentally broken. We want to take over the government, we want to do things differently, and we want to have socialism. You can look at it that way if you were a sectarian socialist, but people like Hillman and others, and above all maybe the greatest labor leader of the twentieth century, you know, is Walter Ruther in Detroit. I mean what they saw is, look, we're not going to have a revolution, but if we can get enough of our stuff through, who cares whether it's socialist, liberal, what have you. We're making life better for ordinary people. We're making we're expanding the social welfare. That's what we're here to do. What they saw their role as being is not an antagonism to the liberals, not trying to overthrow the liberals, not saying the liberals a role running dog imperialists, et cetera. No, they said we can see a role for ourselves in trying to push and pull from within. So that brings us to the current democratic socialists. And the first question I have about them is are they really socialists? Well, it depends. I mean, when I hear, you know, Senator Sanders, for example, talk about define socialism, as he did at some point during the campaign at Georgetown, effect, he says he's an FDR liberal right, So I don't know if that's socialism, then socialism has changed. I mean, even they calling them some socialists. I've been doing a little informal poll of twenty some things. I know, yeah, and I have a hypothesis. I'd like to hear it because I have no idea. I wonder what your students think about this too. So my very informal, unscientific poll was that people said, of course that the Democratic Socialists do not favor nationalizing the means of production in the country. They don't want the businesses to be taken over by the government. But they're sick and tired of the term liberal right. They're sick and tired of the term progressive right. They think, and you've written this that Hillary Clinton took the term progressive and you know, muddied it essentially by being not left enough. And the word socialism sounds cool. Yeah, it sounds like I want to change things, I want to do things differently. And that's a big part of Bernie Sanders appeal a cooint to this theory. And then when you take away Bernie Sanders and you put in Alexandro Alexandro Ocasio Cortez, now it's younger, it's hipper, it's more with it. So what do you think about that? Well, I think that's right. I mean, I think that that liberalism had a crisis in the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies. Democratic Party out of crisis as well, coming out of Vietnam and all the rest of it, and um, the Reagan Revolution put the Democratic liberals on the defensive and they had to figure out of political strategy for themselves. And the Democrats had done themselves no good either by changing their party around into a kind of conjuries of special interests. They took away the party bosses, they ceased to be a party in the traditional sense. So coming out of all of that, yeah, the Democrats had a bob and weave and triangulate, if you will, in order to just survive. Now, coming out of that, the Clintons were trying, i think, to give the Democratic Party a substance again, you know, seeing them as very much as liberals, pushing forward, trying to expand you know, social welfare, all the rest of it, the kinds of things with some socialism sort of in there. People don't realize all of that, but it was the people they were talking about, you see. But they always do that they'll call anything socialism because they know it's a scare tactic. That's a scare word. But you know, maybe it was sca It's interesting, we'll come back to that about whether it's blood he had to tag politically. It was about politics. That's what pople don't understand about what the Clintons were about and where things were going. Now, things changed after that, change changed dramatically, particularly after two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine, after the economic collapse, which I think has a lot to do with the students young people you're talking about, So people who grew up in the who have no memory of Ronald Reagan, who have no memory of what politics used to be, like what Reagan did to politics, and then who came of age in the aftermath of two thousand and eight two thousand and nine. I've gone of a very different view of all of these words and what they mean than the likes of me who grew up in the nineteen sixties. So let's talk about words then. Yes, you've written in Democracy Journal very powerfully. I would say that we should call things what they really are. Yes, and that the Democrats made a big mistake when they stopped calling themselves liberals and started calling themselves progressive. And it's really the Clinton era where that happened. Yes, why what was wrong with that? Well, liberal had been demonized successfully by the right wing Republicans. You remember in nineteen eighty eight, when George H. W. Bush was running for president, he talked about the L word. He made it sound, you know, like manure. He made it sound like something, you know, so execrable that it was really excrement. That was before the TV show the L word made it sound somewhat better. But well that's another story. But you know, but this is way back in nineteen eighty eight, ancient history. But the word liberal was demonized. Nobody wanted to be known as the liberal right, and so the Democrats, chow happened on the word progressive as a subside for all of that. Now, progressive had been a left wing word that was very very anti liberal, if you will. That was where the left kind of gravitated to after the Communists had been you know, disgraced and so forth, in the aftermath of McCarthy, in the mathmath of fifty six, full of that um so. But the Democrats took this all left wing word and made it into a kind of euphemism for liberal. They repurposed it yet exactly now you know, that's okay. But what happened was that when by the time you got to say, the twenty sixteen election, here was Hillary Clinton, who had this background of having to you know, having to fight through the nineties and having to go through all of those politics, but it understood that times had changed. So she comes up with a very liberal, that is to say, leftish liberal platform. If you read her platform, it's it's much to the left of where she was in two thousand and eight, for sure, But she was presumably pushed there very hard by Bernie Sanders in the prime No, I disagree it was that was true before the primaries ever began. He then began to push her, not so much with anything dramatically different. But you know, if she came out for a twelve dollar minimum wage, he would come out for a fifteen dollars minimum wage. He would rail against the billionaire class. That's not her politics. He brought up all of this old you know stuff, and she looked she had no way to argue against it, and she ran calling herself a progressive. He's going to progressive her any day. And so you think the mistake was where was the excuse me, He's going to do that rhetorically. You know, whether he's going to be able to deliver on it's another matter. So the mistake, I think is that, Look, the idea of liberalism, which was when I was growing up, is a very powerful one. It means up, meant Walter Ruther, it meant people like that God de Nature got lost. Um. It's a word which I think is an honorable one. It's an honorable tradition. Now what I like to go back to the word using the word liberal, No, because I don't think that it's going to um, you know, on its own, it's going to matter. But I do think that people calling themselves liberal progressives, for example, as opposed to the socialist progressives who want to hold on to that word, there could be a fruitful, you know, exchange about all of that. Something tells me that Kamala Harris is not going to say the difference between me and Bernie Sanders is that he's a socialist and I'm a liberal. She's gonna say something else. Maybe she's gonna chase he's a progressive liberal doesn't seem quite ripe yet, Okay, brought to life. That may be true. And I'm not a political you know, putnent or neither am I an operative, So I don't really know these things. I'm sure it pulls terrible So it's not a great idea. But let's not talk about let's just started what we're saying in public or on the stump. Let's think about our own thoughts about all of this, how we conceive all of this. And I think there is a difference between people who understand what the liberal tradition, it's richness, what it was about. Don't trash it as just you know, neoliberal corporate blah blah. No, that's not what it is. That was the way that people referred to Hillary Clinton. She is not that she's not Margaret Thatcher to try and reown that, but to do so in a spirit that, you know, these things don't have to be in conflict. So if that's the case, then how do you feel about the democratic socialists doing their own bit of repurposing right. If we're right that they don't believe in the old version of right, even the classic deb's version of socialists, then they're using shows lists simply to say, well, we're to the left of people who call themselves progressive. What do you make of that? Do you think that's good? Do you think it's harmless? Do you think it's desirable? I think it's vaguely demogogic. I mean, I don't think it means a whole lot um, you know, I mean, why is the demogogic? To me? Just to be provocative, What seems demogogic is Donald Trump saying well, we will never be a socialist country. I mean, they may be walking into the demogogue, but they're being demogrague. There's there's more than one way to be demogogic, you know that. Look, And so let's take the case of another person on the left of the Democratic Party, Elizabeth Warren. Elizabeth Warren says that she's capitalist to her marrow or something, but she's also talking about the kinds of things that Walter Ruther was talking about. If anybody comes close interest in the middle class, no putting workers on boards of corporations. I mean, this is a very Rutherian socialist idea. Now she's not calling herself a socialist, but you know, the proof of the pudding. It's in the program, is what she's talking about. She's thinking more imaginatively, I think than any of the other candidates along the kinds of lines that I think of as new deal liberalism. So if that's the case, then I don't know if you would agree with this, But maybe the takeaway should be that the terms don't matter that much. Yeah, I think that's probably right. That it's all the policies and it's all very well and good to try to figure out where they come from. And we could try to figure out this one comes from here, and this one comes from there, and Stewards are a little bit socialist and putting members of companies on boards a little bit socialist, but in the end they're not genuine socialism. So, you know, if someone says, who cares about this terminology? Why are you guys even talking about it? What would you tell them? I would say that you have to be careful though, because it can very easily get weaponized. And let's talk about weaponizing that should I think what happened in twenty sixteen. I mean, you know Bernie Sanders, who is not a Democrat, who comes out of a you know, the left wing of Vermont politics that he helped invent. Right, attacked at Hillary Clinton as a goon of Wall Street, attacked her in sectarian terms, which damaged her terribly going to the election. Many of the things that he said about her, Trump's said about her, Yes, making her out to be a slave of Wall Street. That's weaponizing socialism. That's turning socialism into a weapon that's trying to destroy That's another idea. It's actually from the perspective of a Clintonite liberal, and I think that's a perfectly fine perspective to hold. Right. You can see how that's weaponizing in a bad way, yes, But from the perspective of a critic of Clintonite liberalism, it would be weaponizing in a good sense. Right. I mean, that's if you want to destroy liberalism. But if the point, if the point of socialisms destroy liberalism, then I think we're going down a very dangerous road, a very dangerous because socialism might succeed in destroying liberalism because because socialism is not going to be just supplanned liberalism as the alternative to the Donald Trump. So then the danger, so I understand correctly, is sort of what happened in your interpretation between Sanders and Clinton. By criticizing Hillary Clinton from the left, by weaponizing socialism, as you put it, Sanders weakened Clinton, yes, helping Trump to win. Correct, that's the account. And on that view, the Democratic socialists can do that again. They can defeat whoever is the Democratic candidate in twenty twenty by weakening that person, and then that can actually plan to Trump's head exactly. Now, look, criticizing from the left is perfectly legitimate. I don't have any problems with people saying that Hillary Clinton is not was not. You know, she should have pointed to her program more. Actually, I think then she would have shown people that she was not the neoliberal hobgoblin that she was being made out to be. That was a tactical mistake, indeed a strategic mistake on her part. But that's put that to the side. Criticism on the left is healthy, it's great. We want that. When you weaponize it, however, you're being destructive. So how do we draw the line. We're entering a presidential season. We've got umpteen number of presidential candidates who've already declared right. None thus far is running to the right of where Hillary Clinton ran the last time around. I guess that's right. Yeah, I mean, maybe there will be someone who emerges that way. Right. Mike Bloomberg has said he's not running, and that's partly, I think because he's a rational person and he could only have run for the right of where Hilly Clinton was and he doesn't see a path to the presidency through that, correct. So let's talk in practical terms. Yes, what would it mean for Bernie Sanders for the other Democratic Socialists to criticize legitimately from the left, in your view, and what would it mean for them to dangerously weaponize in very practical terms, what's what's kosher according to a lens and what's not kosher? Yeah, I mean, it's like pornography. I know when I see it. You know what, when you see it, when you're calling someone a name, a Wall Street goon or whatever whatever the language was, that's a polemic, that's that's an attack, that's destructive. If you say, Mike, my my advers my opponent, and I disagree. I would like to see this happen rather than that happen for this reason. But I think that. But I think they're gonna be a lot of listeners or I hope. There are a lot of listeners who instinctively respond to that by saying, but wait a minute, Hillary Clinton was cheek by jowl in close relationship, absolutely with plenty of liberals. To be fair, yes, on Wall Street. Yeah, there really were lots of Goldman Sachs partners making donations. Because it's perfectly reasonable, and if you could have a reasonable conversation about that, I believe that she could actually convince many of the people who opposed her for why that's not a terrible thing. But you could not have that conversation. She couldn't have that conversation. It was terribly embarrassing. It was terribly difficult given the political setting, which in fact, in part the left help set up. Why can't the radical vision just when? I mean, we have had moments in American history where radical visions of conservatism have come very close to winning definitively. Think about the Reagan era, where there were some significant pushbacks. Why and maybe you could argue, well known, actually more pragmatized, that did what did he do? He didn't get rid of Social Security, he didn't get rid of all of the New Deal. I mean, Laala Reagan was an interesting character but he was a pragmatist on the right, you know, as par excellence. I mean, look at what we've got today. Now, okay, you want to see you want to see the radicals taking over. There's the Republican Party. It's become a movement, not a party. Okay, so good. So you have a radical movement that claims to have a chance of taking over. And after all, Republicans do control the Senator, and they control the Presidency. And as you say, Republican conservatism is a movement, not just a political party, and many of its leading figures are not pragmatists. So just to push the question, why can't the same thing happen on the left, you have to recognize first of all, that all America is not Brooklyn. All America is not Cambridge. All America is not Berkeley. That's number one. I mean, my daughter, I love her, she's great, she lives in Brooklyn. You know, you'd think that you're in the people's Republic of Brooklyn. Now it's great, but it's not the rest of the world. That's number one. So whereas I think a person on the right could you would have a lot more to go on in terms of what America is like America is a much more conservative country. Thank you very much, great to be here, very good. Sewer socialism. That's a phrase I admit I had never heard before Sean Willens described it to us, and it's really remarkable to me because it seems to capture in the most fundamental way something about socialism that has never come up in the course of our big debate about whether America could ever be a socialist country and whether the Democratic Socialists or onto something brand new. It's the idea that socialism has always, in fact been with us here in the United States, every time we make a choice about whether something should be done by the government or whether that thing should be done by the private sector. So maybe it is socialist to say that we should have medicare for all, But so what, maybe that's just as socialist as saying that the sewers should be run by the government instead of buy a private, for profit company. Going deep into the history of socialism in America and into the question of the terms that we use taught me to realize that there's more to our tradition than meets the eye. Deep background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia Genecott, with engineering by Jason Gambrel and Jason Roskowski. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis Gera special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. You can follow me on Twitter at Noah R Feldman. This is deep background