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

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An interesting counterpoint, I thought, by an historian of the Gilded Age.

Quote

 

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.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/opinion/bernie-sanders-socialism.html

 

(Yes, I know it's opinion, but plenty of other people post opinion pieces. )