Folks, I got the author of two books, The Socialist Manifesto and The Blueprint, Bhaskar Sunkara. Bhaskar is also the president of Nation magazine, also one of the founders of Jacobin. He hates America and he hates capitalism and he hates freedom and democracy. He's a Leninist, a Marxist, a communist. What else are you, Bhaskar?
I am a Marxist, though, I should say.
He is a Marxist. And he wants to take away your meat and your private property. What else do you want to take away?
Um, I don't know. You cover the meat part. The main thing is I'm a pro-eating cricket, you know, platform.
But Bhaskar has two books. It's an updated version of The Socialist Manifesto, which is a case for radical politics in the era of extreme inequality, and that's out next week. And this week he has something called The Blueprint, and he is making the case for democratic socialism. And specifically in these books he makes several points as to why democratic socialism can actually help save America — or rather, I should say, save Americans from America — and specifically how the system that we have right now, this hyper-capitalist system, is not working, is failing, and will fail. And also he talks about the history of socialism, where it went wrong, where it could go right. So real quick, Bhaskar, why are you so opposed to this capitalist system that has made the United States of America the most powerful, wealthy country on earth?
Well, I think capitalism has a lot going for it in the sense that if you're an ordinary worker today, you enjoy the wealth that both your labor and all the work that capital did convening you in the place that you could get exploited has created. And also being in a system that allows you the power of exit at least is better than being a serf, a peasant, you know, tied to the land. My case for democratic socialism is that from this basis we could take the wealth and prosperity in America and go a little bit further. On the one hand, I think we could distribute wealth in terms of just income better in this country. Two, I think we could create a bedrock of social rights by creating a more expansive welfare state, not unlike what you have in parts of Northern Europe with certain state guarantees. And three, I would say a lot of the things that we like about capitalism are actually just the market. So we might like that we could express our desire for certain goods and services through the market. We might like the fact that we can choose between different vendors and that inefficient firms collapse and more efficient firms expand because they're delivering goods and services better. But that can be done in a system that's built broadly on worker cooperatives. Employee ownership at every single scale, I think, can work and can be just as efficient, if not more efficient, I would argue, than capitalist private ownership. So I'm not proposing we go to some sort of centrally planned system where we just wait in line for toilet paper and, you know, toothbrush. But I do think that this combination of state guarantees and a really expanded welfare state plus sort of worker control — to use the old language of the left, the means of production and exchange at the point of production and exchange — would be something that paradoxically we could actually get probably more Americans behind the idea that they should control their workplaces than the idea that they should pay more tax to get a more expansive welfare state. That's my very counterintuitive argument.
Before we get into socialism, how would you say — well, what is capitalism right now? How would you define or describe capitalism as it operates in 2026 America?
Yeah, I think capitalism is a system in which the means of production and exchange are privately owned by either individuals or, you know, collectively by, you know, corporations and the shareholders of those corporations, and in which the large mass of people, in order to survive, have to enter the labor market and to work for one of those companies or to work for the state. In these workplaces, power and authority is transmitted from the top to the bottom. And often there are limits to how much employers will exploit people because of, one, this power of exit; two, because of the power of collective bargaining and organizing from below; and three, because of state regulations. In my vision of democratic socialism, in this so-called private sector, you can call it, they'd be composed of worker cooperatives in which power and authority goes from bottom up. So ordinary workers vote to elect a board of directors who appoint management, and workers receive not just a wage but also a residual share of profits after expenses. And, you know, when you look at capitalism right now, especially in America, it's going off the Milton Friedman model of capitalism, right? The end goal is to maximize profits for shareholders. That's been put on steroids, and what we're seeing in 2026 now is a record number of profits, but wages have remained flat. Workers in America work harder and longer than Japanese and European workers, that get less vacation days and in fact leave more vacation days on the table than their European counterparts. We don't have guaranteed paid family leave — we're the only industrialized country that doesn't guarantee that. We don't have universal child care. We don't have universal health care. We don't have universal college. We work harder and longer. We're dying younger. Our age has actually dropped compared to other industrialized countries. We're getting sicker. Why, oh why, have American workers put up with it for so long?
Why, oh why, have American workers put up with it for so long?
Well, I would say they tried to build something different for a very long time. American capitalism in the 19th century was the scene of some of the most violent unrest in labor history. There's a whole history of the early working class, especially in the unsettled zone of American capitalism out west, called dynamite. Just because you had all these poor exploited workers who were building railroads and mining, and the employers — there was a lot of them — employers had to give them sticks of dynamite to, you know, clear the West, opportunity being somewhat euphemistic because of course we know about the ethnic cleansing, you know, involved in westward expansion, but these workers brought back for their own interests, sometimes violently. Populism emerged in the US, as you know, of course, as a movement of ordinary workers and farmers. The modern version of populism, of course, came from the left and was distinctly American. Some of the earliest labor unions, the earliest workers' parties, all this came from the US. We were just defeated at various points in history. And the moment where we actually had a period of sustained success in the 1930s, we were able to institutionalize a revolution. Basically, we were able to institutionalize our modern collective bargaining system. We were able to institutionalize gains like Social Security. We were able to do, you know, a hell of a lot in a very limited amount of time with such mass support that the coalition created during that period transformed American politics for the next 40, 50 years. So the American people are certainly receptive to it. But, you know, for many of the same reasons you would guess, American workers had to deal with the most powerful and organized capitalist class in history that was constantly trying to erode gains and trying to, I would say, individualize workers' interests, often through dividing us on the basis of race, often through just selling people, often a myth about upward mobility. As you know, you know, from through through your through your work, I know American upward mobility, social mobility, is worse than most countries in Europe, yet we're told this myth that says, yeah, you know, you don't have the social wage, your life's tougher, but at least you have the chance to make it, make it rich. But even on those own terms, you're still born on the wrong continent.
Yeah, to pull yourself up from the bootstraps. In America, anyone could make it. These myths are so pervasive and so damaging and actually have workers working against their own interests, right? Like, ah, we're not going to be a freeloader. Ah, we don't need universal health care. We don't need universal child care. Ah, you know, I had to work for it, so the next generation has to work for it. And so they're working, working folks. And American workers, contrary to the stereotype, are actually working harder and are more productive and more efficient. The problem is in the past 40 years all that wealth, though, has gone to the top and stayed at the top. I just want to connect the dots so people can understand why we're here at this moment, and then we'll get into the nitty-gritty. But talk to us about Reagan and Reaganism, because I think I can never miss an opportunity to dunk on Reagan, and I can't stand it as people sit there and engage in a type of hagiography and romanticize it. But talk about how this form of capitalism, this attack on workers, this attack on speech, the proliferation of Christian nationalism, these myths got supercharged with Reaganism and can be traced back 45 years ago.
Well, I should say Reagan at every level was more vicious than a lot of modern manifestations of the right even. You could draw an exception saying he was more pragmatic on immigration, but he was more vicious than what came before on a host of issues, including just mobilizing an extremely racialized reaction to the New Left and anti-war movement and struggles for Black liberation. That was sort of his basis. Reagan, though, I would actually go a little bit earlier and say that the true roots of Reaganism actually happened near the end of the Carter administration. The Carter administration was a really momentous chance for the American left in that there was an utter repudiation of Nixonism and there was a mandate for Carter to do things like push for national health insurance, and there was momentum growing in certain demands coming from the left like the Humphrey-Hawkins kind of full employment bill. So a lot of American workers thought in 1976 that stagflation was a blip. The country was divided over social and cultural issues and over the Vietnam War. But now we're going to get our chance to build this sort of expansive welfare state that it seemed like we were going to get in the 1960s. But this period for capitalism was extremely difficult. You had the OPEC oil shocks, you know, lasting effects. You had a slowdown in growth and profitability. And as a result, there was two avenues the US could have gone in, in my opinion: a more leftward sort of rethinking of the economic system, or doing something to get wages and prices under control. And instead, we chose the latter. And Reagan kind of continued along that road saying, I'm going to shock America into a recession, and I'm going to use my own personal charisma and bellicosity towards America's enemies in order to build a coalition. So it's really been a downward slide since then. Though I think it is important just to note the role that certain Democrats played, particularly a figure like Carter, who I think had one of the most admirable — the most admirable post-presidency of anyone that I know, and I think, you know, most people know of his good work in South Africa and Palestine and in general his advocacy.
Habitat for Humanity and so on.
But I think he made a series of mistakes late in his presidency that paved the way to Reagan, and a lot of the gains of Reaganism were again consolidated under the Clinton administration as well.
Yeah. And Roger Stone, Lee Atwater, all these freaks emerged. Christian nationalism gets a boost. But then we get to Clinton, and I don't want to let Democrats off the hook, right? Because with Clinton, you're like, all right, listen, Reaganism failed, there's nothing that trickled down, he crushed labor, but we're going to pivot to neoliberalism. And listen, we're going to have globalization. It'll be great. It'll be great for trade, and it'll be great for our economies. And in the short run, it was. But someone got screwed in neoliberalism. That someone was workers. Talk to us about how we cannot overlook the devastation of neoliberalism and Clintonian economic policies that have led us to this moment as well.
Absolutely. Well, I think a lot of people think about Clinton's 1992 campaign through the lens of his so-called Sister Souljah moment, of saying that Clinton was clearly running to the right and he was clearly distancing himself from the old New Deal Democratic Party.
Shocking, it sounds kind of familiar, doesn't it? Oh, anyway, sorry.
But in the main, in the main, of course, there was Sister Souljah, there was Ricky Ray Rector's execution, and there was lots of heinous stuff in that campaign. But in general, Clinton was running as actually something closer to a New Deal Democrat, pro-union, concerned about manufacturing jobs, concerned about a host of things. In the 1990s, he encountered an economy where — I'm going to give the devil's advocate sort of view for Clinton. And he was looking around and saying, we're slowly losing all these jobs anyway. These jobs are getting automated or they're getting outsourced. So we need to create a framework through the NAFTA framework in which we at least get some benefits from the transformations already under foot. And in general, the best-case center-left sort of economist take on NAFTA is that it was a net benefit for even American workers. But the benefits were spread incredibly thinly. The benefits were, you know, it's 20 cents less to get this consumer good and everybody saves that 20 cents. But the harms were inflicted so dramatically in a few communities that it really provided a fodder for the emergence of someone like Donald Trump later on. And it wasn't just this sort of flight of auto moving from the US to Mexico. It was also the acceleration of competition within the US and the flight of auto from places like Michigan to the South where workers didn't have union protections. And Clinton had this gambit that it doesn't matter. We're going to just make the country wealthier. We're going to support the rise of finance and real estate insurance interests. We're going to make the Democratic Party synonymous not with the interest of ordinary industrial or post-industrial workers, but synonymous with the interest of lawyers. It's no coincidence that basically every leading Democrat running for national office in recent years, you know, from Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Kamala Harris, and so on, have been lawyers. Joe Biden, you know, he just went to Syracuse. He's probably the — besides for Palestine, I was about to say he's maybe the one I have the most sympathy for. You know, of course, he has this legal background too. But his logic was let's let the economy grow, let's fuel finance capital, but we're going to create enough wealth that we can help people through redistribution indirectly through things like the child tax credit, while at the same time appearing tough on welfare abuse by reforming welfare and all these other things. And it was a gamble that worked politically, temporarily. But I think we can very directly draw a connection between what Clinton did and the rise of Trump, who, as bad as Reagan was, I think we could say that Trump is much more of a danger to not just the economy or oppressed people or ordinary workers, but to the foundations of what's actually good in the republic itself.
Yeah. And so you got — okay, what happens is, all right, we think this will help. Instead, these manufacturing jobs don't come back, everything gets outsourced. These same corporations decide to go to China, Bangladesh, Pakistan, pay laborers just pennies on the dollar. So America says, why the f should we pay workers a living wage and even give them insurance when we could just, you know, pay this Bangladeshi 40 cents to make a shirt? This gets ramped up. America starts to produce less and less. Manufacturing jobs keep going away. Also, there's evolution in terms of solar energy and wind energy. So so much for coal. Sorry, Joe Manchin. And then you get George W. Bush. George W. Bush comes in and says, you know what? Let's have a disastrous war on terror, waste billions upon billions of dollars. Oh, look, let's completely ignore climate change. Then there's Katrina, and let these Wall Street sociopaths who do this every 10 years or 15 years f up everything and make money by kind of packaging these shitty home loans and giving them a AAA rating. Oh, look, voila, the bubble has burst. People can't pay their mortgage ever since the interest spikes, right? So now you have like a wave of foreclosures. The banks are merciless. And you get Wall Street saying, oh, we thought this would work, it didn't, we need a bailout. So Obama comes in, and Obama says, all right, this is kind of a fork in the road moment, Bhaskar, because obviously hindsight's 20/20. Obama perhaps, not perhaps, shouldn't have bailed these motherfuckers. There should have been accountability, but instead we get an $880 billion bailout of the same sociopaths who all fail up. Talk to us about 2009 and why that was a kind of critical moment of how we get to Trump.
Yeah, I think at that point, by 2009, the economy is so financialized and everything is so interlinked. By 2008 and 2009, the end of the Bush administration and Obama — I would actually argue, this sounds very counterintuitive from a Marxist, but I would actually argue that a bailout of some type was necessary. But if the state has the leverage and power to do a bailout, it's that moment that the state has the power to restructure the finance system, to put into place not just stronger regulations, but actually say, okay, you know, in addition to their existing system of private finance, we're going to maybe need a stabilizing state bank in every state like we have in North Dakota. We're going to also need these concessions. We're going to also need these protections for homeowners that are getting foreclosed on. There's a host of things that could have went along with that bailout moment. And of course, there should have been at least a thousand bankers, you know, arrested. You know, I'm not super punitive. I'm not the most carceral person in the world. Two to five years for a thousand of them, you know, like for all the chaos they caused. Yeah, eight months. They would have got out in six to eight months, you know. I feel like that moment — that was a moment for structural transformation, and Obama had the mandate, he had the ability to do that. Even on certain things where I really think it was disappointing what we ended up with, like Obamacare is incredibly flawed in many ways, a subsidy for insurance companies, probably better in certain ways than what came before, but you could actually make the case that, you know, Obama was constrained with the public option, with the votes he had, and so on. I'll disagree with him, but you can make that case. That moment in 2009 was a moment where Obama had more than enough political leverage to secure supermajorities for substantial structural changes to the finance system, and he was unable to because of his own personal decisions and also because of how wedded the Democratic Party was with finance, with to some degree real estate and insurance interests as well. The party was really radically different than it was just 20 years prior.
Yeah. And so we get the bailout, you get eight years of Obama, you get Republicans, you get Obama, in my opinion, trying desperately, foolishly to try to win over a party in which Mitch McConnell openly said, my number one goal as Senate minority leader is to make sure Obama is a one-term president. But then he learns, oh wait, no matter what I do, these people hate me and will stymie any and all efforts. Obamacare survived thanks to both John McCain and basically Justice Roberts, who himself is an extremist. Don't be fooled. We get to a point where Donald Trump comes up, right? Because here we have the situation where demographics are destiny, Obama won, we live in a post-racial society. You know, Republicans refused to learn from the 2012 autopsy. Now they're running a rapist and a psychopath in the form of Donald Trump. We have Hillary Clinton. This will be a slam dunk. Trump wins. And Trump wins because, well, white supremacy remains a superpower. Also myths and lies, right? But also he says the system is corrupt. I know because I know all these people. You should get an outsider. You should bring an outsider to be a bulldozer. I'll be that bulldozer. And just enough people said, all right, we like this guy. Another person who was ascendant was Bernie Sanders, Democratic Socialist Independent, who says, I'm also kind of an outsider, even though I caucus with Democrats. The system is completely flawed and we need bold new solutions. And a lot of people who voted for Trump are like, I like this old Jewish guy from Vermont as well, right? Instead, Hillary Clinton is the candidate. She barely loses to Trump. Explain to us why that is, I think, a really remarkable starting point for all these people who remain shocked by the emergence of democratic socialism. That should have given like a warning signal to corporate Democrats, establishment media, and everyone else that the people are done and they're looking for anything to help their life moving forward, even a Donald Trump.
Yeah, I think that Bernie and Donald Trump both had their finger from completely different directions on the pulse of what a lot of Americans were feeling. For a lot of us, the post-2008 recovery was a time of, oh, more white-collar employment, oh, there's more federal jobs because of the stimulus. Certain sectors, certain groups of Americans, including groups of people like ourselves, that the Democratic Party had become more reliant on — white-collar workers, highly educated workers — and others had a pretty good post-2008 experience. But then you had a whole other subset of Americans that they never recovered from 2008, and 2008 just continued that trajectory that started in the 80s and the 90s. And when they heard the narratives of progress that were coming from the Democratic Party, they felt left out from it. Now, Trump was a particularly polarizing candidate. So he both was able to rally and cohere his base, but also he was scary enough for enough Americans that actually Hillary Clinton, you could say, overperformed the fundamentals of that race, a very establishment race.
And she lost in part — I know my analysis over time as I look back at 2016 has gotten less and less structural and more like, why did you not campaign in Michigan? You just lost Michigan. Why didn't you campaign in Michigan? And part of the answer, of course, was, you know, some of these post-campaign autopsy memoirs, is that she wanted to run up the vote totals. So they had extra money on hand. They were just dumping it in, you know, radio and TV spend in California and places like that because they really wanted to run up the total. But that's sort of besides the point. It shouldn't have been that close, right? Because I covered that and I remember I knew there was trouble when I went to Maine and I saw every type of white person under — like the whole diversity of white came out for Donald Trump. And when I asked people who they were going to vote for, Mainers did the classic Mainers thing. It says, we don't discuss this. And I'm like, uh, it's going to be close. And then I remember I gave a speech in Madison and the people in the university were giving me a heads up. They're like, yo, Bill Clinton came here and there weren't that many people and we really think Clinton should come here and she hasn't. And they were kind of giving me the warning signs. This was like two or three months before the election. And then of course you got Comey and so it all adds up, and also just this deep revulsion against Clinton. I was shocked how many white women, Republican, conservative white women, just loathed this woman, right? So you combine it all together, folks, and she loses by a hair's breadth here — 40,000 votes across three states. But it shouldn't have been that close. Nonetheless, Trump wins. People should have realized, okay, people want change. Now, you get a horrific once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, eventually ends up killing more than 1 million Americans. It just devastates the global economy. Biden wins, right? Biden wins and he actually has the most progressive economic agenda that I've seen in my lifetime. I mean, FDR is doing a lot of work there, but you know what I mean, compared to it in the past. And then you get Manchin and Sinema, let's be honest, the centrists who kind of stab him in the back. He can't go bold, right? Nonetheless, he loses. Now, you tell me, let's take 2024. How could the same people who voted Trump out vote for Donald Trump in 2024 and then turn around and vote for AOC and Mamdani? What's the story there?
Yeah, I think part of this — this is going to sound odd as an apologetics for Hillary Clinton, but of course part of the reason why, at least a portion of the reason why there was so much opposition to her was just a campaign against her, part for many of the wrong reasons, the corrupt reasons to campaign against Hillary Clinton. I think the Bernie campaign embodied those correct reasons, and there was always obviously the long sexist campaign, you know, against her since the 90s and Benghazi. Yeah, of course. Now, Biden really did want to be a transformative president. He really did want to be a president with FDR-like ambitions. And there's a reason why until the last days of his campaign, Bernie and AOC were his last defenders. I was doing an interview with Bernie the day the George Clooney letter came out and really the coup against Biden really started, and, you know, I told Bernie, I was like, there's no way this guy wins an election. So I don't care where this comes from. I agree with you that this is true, but I think it's a good thing because, you know, Biden has zero chance at that point, in my opinion. Bernie's response was essentially, listen, this guy would have signed anything we brought to his table. Medicare for All, anything we had votes for, he would have signed and supported, which is more than progressives could say about any president in his lifetime. That was his defense of Biden. AOC also felt like she was at the table with Biden. In part, I think what we saw during those years was the inability to communicate successes. So in part there was this theory in the Democratic Party, people call it deliverism: oh, you just deliver good outcomes, you create manufacturing jobs, you deliver successes for certain welfare programs, and you build a constituency just through delivering. I don't think that's right. Actually, Obama's getting some flak from the left for saying something like this. I actually think that he's right to some extent, and that politics is about narratives and about communicating victories. Sean O'Brien from the Teamsters famously spoke at the RNC in 2024. He said that he would have endorsed Biden because at least Biden did something for the Teamsters, a massive bailout of their pension fund. But he said he was unable to ever talk to anyone from the White House or Biden. And what I thought in that moment was this is the — politicians would talk your ear off. They would pretend to be your best friend, but they would deliver you nothing. Biden, on the other hand, delivered them a billion-dollar bailout of their pension system, their pensions, but then wouldn't talk to them. And I think that really embodied a lot of what went wrong in his administration and the whole nature of his collapse, Harris sort of being thrust forward without having a true democratic mandate. And also I think Trump's ability to run a campaign about prices and inflation, and Harris not wanting to run the campaign that said there's something wrong with our economic policy, I'm going to change it, because she was too close to Biden and the administration she was a part of, really fueled the return of Trump. Though he had far less of a mandate than he thought he had, he immediately has squandered it. And I have to say, I know it's been bad for the world, I know it's been bad for America, but we should be so grateful that Trump has been this incompetent, because if he ran a different sort of term, a more moderate term, a more sensible term, a more domestically focused term, this could have been a right-wing majority for 12 years, you know, this really could have been different.
Absolutely. And he's effed up so bad.
Uh, I think he kind of inadvertently admitted it today. He goes, "I've been shitty as president. I've done a shitty job as president." I think he was self-joking, but people are like, "No, you did." Um, but we've seen a situation where you saw people vote for Trump, then turn around, vote for AOC and Mamani, Democratic Socialists. And you've seen all the polls in the past, just every three months where they do polls of democratic socialism, more and more young people are like, "Give me some democratic socialism."
My take on this, and I appreciate you doing this Delorean time travel because I think it's important we've gotten to this point, right? Because a lot of people are like, I don't understand, why is democratic socialism taking off? Every three months they do the polls, more and more Americans, not just young people, are like, give me some democratic socialism. I'm not opposed to it, I'm willing to test it out. And my take on this, Bhaskar, and the reason why I'm not surprised at all is looking at the past ten years in particular, to me it seems that people are giving up their fidelity and loyalty to institutions and brands, whether it's Democrat or Republican or capitalism. Hell, even democracy. People are like, "Fascism, will it get me paid family leave? Bring on fascism." All right. Democratic socialism, sure. MAGA, what do you got for me? I'll try Islam and Sharia, right? Like, people are increasingly desperate, which is why they're like, I'll take anything that can materially improve my life. Just give me what you got. Because what you've given me sucks, and the myths and the stories that you've given me about democracy and capitalism, that won't work anymore. Uh, democracy and capitalism, blah blah, I don't give a... That doesn't matter. I'm broke. I'm 30. I can't get a job. I went to school. The promise of an education to get me a job was all lies. I got $150,000 in debt. I'm living at home. I'm on my parents' insurance. The average age to get a home is 41. What the f? I'm single. This sucks. All right. Now you have a situation where Mamani emerges, a democratic socialist mayor of New York.
Talk to us about that vision of economic policy and why that has resonated not just in New York, but you've seen the polls. He's plus five nationally.
I think part of it is his campaign was based on the idea that people cared about affordability and that was their main concern. They didn't care about experience. They didn't care about... though obviously Cuomo had exactly the wrong type of experience: how to fail over and over again, get kicked out of office amid a sexual harassment scandal and so on. But going into this race, people really thought it was going to be about experience and name recognition, and they didn't think that Zoran had a chance. But instead, he was able to make his race about the things he wanted to talk about, which was affordability. And he was able to take a very complex platform and distill it into three core demands that explained his political point. You know, free buses, an investment in housing, a demand around child care, freeze the rent, child care.
On a certain level, some of these are complicated or arguably misguided from a very narrow policy lens. I'm all for the rent freeze, as we did in New York for rent-stabilized units. It only makes sense because Zoran's also doing a ton of work to create more supply, supporting both public housing construction and also allowing private housing construction to expand, makes sense in that policy framework. Some of the other demands that were popular, like a public grocery store, a couple pilot public grocery stores, one in each borough, are not going to make a difference in a city of our size. But it signaled concern and it shifted the political terrain to: we're going to talk about why native New Yorkers are getting pushed out of their city, and we're going to talk about the power of ordinary working-class people to reshape the terms of the argument and debate.
And I think this broad narrative of hope, we can make the city more affordable, summoned really the best of what that Obama moment was. Obviously, we talked a lot about our disappointment in what Obama became, but all of us, at least all of us of a certain age, remember just what the George W. Bush years were and what it meant to be an American in all the worst ways, and Obama signaled something different and better that really summoned a narrative. And now Zoran has combined this narrative with actual real competence governing. And that combination of delivering plus narrative is something that Biden didn't have. Obama had the narrative. He didn't quite deliver the goods. You can argue about why. Biden, at least on domestic policy, certainly not foreign policy, delivered the goods, but had no narrative. Zoran has both. And I think for a lot of young people now, the right is turning democratic socialism into a boogeyman. The worst people in the Democratic Party are turning democratic socialism into a boogeyman. So to some degree, it's also, hey, I hate all these people and they seem to hate this guy and this movement. I might as well check to see what they're all about.
And how would you differentiate Mamani's democratic socialism with, say, Russian socialism? Because honestly, the attacks are: look at Russia, look at the Soviet Union. Do you want to collapse? Do you want the rise of a dictator? Do you want long breadlines? Because that's what you're going to get in New York.
Well, the Soviet Union, obviously, there it was a system built out of Tsarist Russia, an illiterate, peasant-dominated society. And it was an authoritarian political system, a political system that didn't respect the fundamentals of what we would call negative freedoms, the freedom of people to just be free in civil society. Also, it was a system that, in a misguided way, tried to plan the entirety of the economy. I think a lot of us on the left can agree that certain spheres of the economy should be planned. We should have our rail system publicly owned and not privately owned. We should have our health system perhaps entirely publicly owned, like it is in the UK, not privately owned.
But beyond these sort of commanding heights of the economy, the idea that every little bodega should be run by the state and take their orders from the state and deliver to people on a schedule from above, like you have in command economies, is obviously absurd. But Zoran and I are both members of the Democratic Socialists of America. We both come from a political tradition that has always opposed that type of authoritarian socialism or communism. To some degree, it is somewhat obviously exhausting to talk about a system that's long gone, that your movement of course has opposed for decades. But it really is a way, I think, of the right to scaremonger people when the real threat to their livelihood, the real shortages, are being created by bad bosses and exploitative corporations that are doing price manipulations and all sorts of other factors. And the least things that people have to worry about in the world is labor unions and democratic socialists, you know, messing up the economy.
