[VOX] "They are not traditional socialists. There is no call for communal ownership of production," said an MSNBC anchor while attempting to define "democratic socialism," a term that has burst onto the political scene since the unexpected win of democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a New York primary for a House of Representatives seat."I am open to persuasion on this, but my instinct is that if what you mean by ’democratic socialism’ is ’stuff FDR proposed’ you might be better off using a more all-American reference point like the New Deal or FDR," Vox senior correspondent Matt Yglesias said.
"Democratic Socialists will not be covered [by the media] as the radicals that they are," Glenn Beck said on his show. "They’ll be covered as ’innovative, millennial-friendly upstarts with fresh ideas’ when they’re really diet-Communism."
"It’s petrifying to me that this is being normalized," said Meghan McCain on The View.
The phrase is indeed everywhere. In addition to Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Bernie Sanders and now New York gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon have claimed the label. Meanwhile, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the country’s largest socialist group, is seeing its membership explode from 6,000 in summer 2016 to more than 45,000 today. And the media doesn’t quite know what to make of it all.
I’m a staff writer at the socialist magazine Jacobin and a member of DSA, and here’s the truth: In the long run, democratic socialists want to end capitalism. And we want to do that by pursuing a reform agenda today in an effort to revive a politics focused on class hierarchy and inequality in the United States. The eventual goal is to transform the world to promote everyone’s needs rather than to produce massive profits for a small handful of citizens.