The Misleading Labels Used for Political and Economic Movements Distorts Our Thinking and Our Actions
Political thinking in the modern democratic era easily lends itself to the reliance on simplifying labels – in other words, ideologies. A danger of this reliance is that the labels commonly used may change their meaning over time, without this being widely recognized, or may disguise, from the outset, the real nature of the political or economic phenomenon they purport to describe.
How Liberalism Got its Moniker
Let’s start with the term “liberalism.” In the United States, until the early decades of the twentieth century, it referred to something like the doctrine of the American Founders (inspired by Locke, Montesquieu, and the British common-law tradition) that emphasized individual rights, limited government, and promoted economic freedom. As Daniel Klein of George Mason University explains, the word “liberal” (derived from the Latin word for “freedom”) was first employed in a political sense in a 1769 book by Scottish historian William Robertson, who used it to refer to the principles of liberty and commercial freedom that were subsequently elucidated by Adam Smith in his great treatise The Wealth of Nations (1776). Smith recommended what he called the "liberal system of free exportation and importation” (that is, free trade), as well as what he called the plan of “allowing every man to pursue his own interest in his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice.” Beginning around 1809, political movements influenced by Smith’s thought adopted the term “liberal,” first in Sweden and Spain, later in Britain (and in the twentieth century, I would add, France). But it was already implicit in America’s Declaration of Independence and our Constitution.
When the Term “Liberalism” Changed
A great transformation of the meaning of liberalism in this country manifested itself with the election of Franklin Roosevelt to the Presidency in 1932. Instead of emphasizing individual freedom and (concomitant) limited Constitutional government, the term now referred instead to a doctrine of ever-expanding government control over the economy, including higher taxes and more regulations. (This transformation of the term’s meaning was discussed by the legal historian Ronald Rotunda in a 1968 essay titled "The Liberal Label: Roosevelt's Capture of a Symbol.”)
During the 1932 campaign, incumbent Republican President Herbert Hoover – hardly an advocate of pure laissez-faire – challenged FDR’s usage of the term, warning that Roosevelt’s plans for expanded government would undermine Americans’ tradition of individual self-reliance. But he lost the rhetorical battle as well as the election.
Perhaps the last gasp of the older usage in this country was the argument of another unsuccessful Republican challenger to Roosevelt, Wendell Willkie, who in his 1940 acceptance of his party’s nomination maintained that a liberal in the proper sense was someone who believed in the primacy of individual freedom, in contrast to Roosevelt’s endeavors at economic redistribution, which he termed a program of “distributed scarcity” (since Roosevelt had contended, starting in his first Presidential campaign, that America had probably reached the limits of its possible economic growth, and the time had come to focus instead on “administering” our wealth in a way that would distribute its wealth more fairly.)
Enter Progressivism
From Roosevelt’s Presidency onward, liberalism has continued to be identified with the ideology of the Democratic Party, otherwise known in more recent decades as “progressivism.” That term, like liberalism, has a little-known history, the understanding of which makes evident its tension, if not outright contradiction, with the principles of the American Founders. This history has been elucidated by Jeffrey Paul of West Virginia University in his 2024 book Winning America’s Second Civil War: Progressivism’s Authoritarian Threat, Where It Came From, and How to Defeat It. Paul identifies the source of American progressivism in a “counterrevolution” against the Founders’ doctrine of natural rights, which ironically began in this country shortly after the end of the Civil War (which had been successfully fought to vindicate and extend those rights), thanks to the influence of German historicism, which challenged all such “transhistorical” standards of right.
That doctrine achieved influence in this country, Paul explains, thanks to its transference by American political scientists and economists who had either studied in Germany or (like Woodrow Wilson) been educated by those who had trained there. By 1903, Charles Merriam, the first professor in the University of Chicago’s political science department, maintained that the Founders’ “individualistic ideas” of natural rights had been “discredited and repudiated,” citing as their replacement the position of John W. Burgess (who established Columbia’s graduate program in political science) that “the state,” rather than nature, was the true “source of individual liberty.” Similarly, at Columbia, Burgess, following his German mentors, dismissed natural rights in favor of a comprehensive notion of government’s sovereign power as “original, underived,” and “unlimited.”
Paul does an excellent job of exposing the way American progressives succeeded during the interwar years in obscuring the German roots of their doctrine by renaming it as “liberalism” — thereby engaging in what the New York Times denounced as the “expropriation” of a “time-honored word” that had always signified the securing of individual rights, rather than their suppression by an all-encompassing state. (That was back in 1924 and 1930: how the Times have changed!)
By contrast, the erudite President Calvin Coolidge, in his 1926 address on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, argued that there could be no progress beyond that document’s principles; any retreat from them would be regressive. (Coolidge is now disparaged by most historians as a “do-nothing” President, despite the peace and previously unparalleled prosperity Americans enjoyed under his governance.)
Paul’s account of the rise of American “progressivism” brings to mind the way in which that term, as now used, just like the transformed term “liberal,” serves to bias political discourse in a misleading way.
By definition, nearly all Americans, along with the citizens of other democratic (and many nondemocratic) nations, regard progress as a good thing – however they may understand its content. But nowadays, that term has come to denote not only ever-expanding programs of economic regulation but also of cultural transformation, notably in the form of the “sexual revolution” and ultimately in the endeavor to remake human nature itself. Whether or not one favors such policies, it is surely question-begging to call them “progressive.”
A Brief Note on Conservatism
I proceed here, more briefly, to the term “conservatism.” That term is now commonly treated as the opposite of “liberalism.” Yet there is no intrinsic opposition between the two words. By definition, a conservative is someone who wishes to preserve or save something valuable, which may entail exercising caution about making changes to it. But to be a conservative in America, given its founding principles, would entail being a liberal as well: preserving the Founders’ doctrine of liberty. (A teacher of mine used to enjoy pointing out that in the 1950s, one of the most ostensibly conservative – really, reactionary and even racist – organizations in this country called itself “the Daughters of the American Revolution”! Of course they weren’t true American conservatives, some of them even evincing admiration for the Old South. But it was revealing that they still couldn’t avoid associating themselves, at least by name, with the cause of revolution.)
Capitalism
Next term up for critical examination: “Capitalism.” It continues to astound me that even advocates of the system of economic freedom, or private enterprise, should continue to denote it with a term invented by its most powerful enemies, the Communists. (Karl Marx used the title Das Kapital for his lengthiest work of ostensible economic analysis; his Soviet translators then turned it into an “ism.”) Calling the free-market system “capitalist” is a misleading move designed to convince people that that mode of economic organization inherently favors the (few, rich) owners of capital at the expense of the (many) people who work for a living. But as any respectable economics textbook will explain, every modern economic system – whether based on free enterprise, socialism, fascism, or some other invented form – depends on the combination of capital with labor.
“Capital” denotes numerous forms of stored property – factories, machines, farmland, copyrighted inventions, a trained workforce, as well as wealth available for investment. As the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey demonstrates in her trilogy Bourgeois Dignity, Bourgeois Equality, and The Bourgeois Virtues, the “Great Enrichment,” based on the application of Adam Smith’s principles, combined with ever-growing innovation, starting just over two centuries ago, ultimately raised living standards in industrializing countries including Britain, Japan, and the U.S. by anywhere from 3,000 to 10,000 percent. For every tycoon, from John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, millions of other people prospered, far beyond what their predecessors (peasants, artisans, serfs, slaves) could have dreamed of.
And as Phil Gramm and Donald Boudreaux observe in their new book The Triumph of Economic Freedom: Debunking the Seven Great Myths of American Capitalism (even they insist on using that term!), in a free-enterprise economy the wealth of mercantile or innovative tycoons is not purchased at anyone else’s expense. Instead, those “bourgeois” individuals benefit their fellow citizens by producing an abundance of desired goods, generating employment, fortifying their nation’s ability to defend itself, and typically also donating large portions of their wealth to charities. (Marx himself lacked experience of the productive process, depending instead on subsidies from his co-author Friedrich Engels, the wealthy owner of English factories he had inherited.)
Zohran Mamdani’s Democratic Socialism
But I come, finally, to the most dangerously misleading political term of our time: “democratic socialism," the program espoused by the surprise winner of New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, the 33-year-old Zohran Mamdani.
“Democratic socialism” is an oxymoron. By "democracy" Americans normally mean not simple majoritarianism, but liberal, constitutional democracy, a system that combines moderated majority rule with protections for individual rights/the rule of law. In reality, there has never been a literally socialist democracy, one that (per the program of the Democratic Socialist Party of America) entails nationalizing "the means of production" and distribution as Marx and Engels advocated.
The benign image of "democratic socialism" some naive voters have received is based on what are actually "social democracies" such as exist in Scandinavia. Those nations have higher tax rates and higher rates of social-welfare provision than the U.S. But private enterprise, including large corporations, still flourishes there (think Saab, Volvo, Nokia) – along with continued Constitutional government. (In fact, both Sweden and Norway have a larger number of billionaires relative to their populations than the U.S. does, and although overall taxes paid are higher in Europe as a whole for most groups, America’s “taxation profile is unambiguously more progressive”: Steven F. Hayward and Linda L. Denno, “Envy and Social Justice,” National Affairs, no. 64 [Summer, 2025], 115.)
Following his primary win, Mr. Mamdani, interviewed on television, stressed the distinction between his socialism and communism. And PolitiFact insists that “Mamdani’s platform is not akin to communism, a system of government which calls for government takeover of private property and control of industry.”
But in 2020, Mamdani rebuked the Democratic Party for claiming that “the Biden-Harris administration is committed to rebuilding an economy that welcomes everyone as full participants,” since that goal could truly be achieved only through “worker ownership of the means of production.” And in addressing the 2021 conference of the Young Democratic Socialists of America, Mandami explained that the “purpose” of his “entire project” was “not simply to raise class consciousness, but to win socialism” and elect leaders who are “unapologetic about our socialism.”
While acknowledging that certain causes that socialists, by his account, “firmly believe in,” including BDS (boycotts, divestment, and sanctions directed against Israel) are not yet widely popular with the American electorate, he stressed the need not only to consider “what people are [currently] ready for,” but “ensure that over time we can bring” them to support such policies, with “the end goal of seizing the means of production” – as already noted, the same core goal as that of Marx and Engels, the founders of communism.
Numerous critics have pointed out the naiveté of the first steps that Mamdani proposes to take towards government ownership of the economy. One is establishing state-owned grocery stores, which while “competing” with private supermarkets and bodegas, would gradually drive them out of business, since the state-owned stores would pay neither property nor sales taxes, and would have no need to earn a profit (relying instead on government subsidies to cover their losses).
Mamdani and his followers seem unaware of the breadlines in which subjects of the Soviet state waited to purchase food – only to find, often, that the foods they wanted were gone. While Mamdani majored in “Africana Studies” at Bowdoin College, he appears never to have studied economics, more specifically the principle of supply and demand: if you don’t allow food producers and merchants to earn receipts sufficient to produce enough, and of good enough quality, to meet consumer demand, there won’t be much food available. And as the examples of communist regimes in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and Cuba demonstrate, “worker ownership of the means of production” is neither efficient nor democratic: in the name of “the workers,” it is party apparatchiks – selected more for their loyalty than competence or industry – who run the show, while workers have far less choice of where to work, or even influence over the work environment, than they do under free enterprise. Other Mamdani promises include a rent freeze on the City’s already “rent-stabilized” apartments, which would heighten its housing shortage by deterring building owners from maintaining them, and promote the trend of simply abandoning them; a thirty-dollar minimum wage, which will raise the cost of living while driving smaller businesses out of the city or compelling them to replace workers with technology.
But Mamdani’s statement of his “end goal” makes it doubtful that he himself believes in the chimera of “democratic socialism.” Defenders maintain that there’s a clear distinction between democratic socialism and Marxian communism in that the former doesn’t call for the violent overthrow of existing institutions. But that distinction becomes blurry when one considers how professed socialists have rushed to defend violent rioters in cities like Los Angeles, just as they did in 2020; and call for “decarceration” of violent offenders along with depolicing. The anarchy these policies would promote, if extended, threatens indeed to encourage a situation like the one in which Communists seized power in Russia. Added to Mamdani’s demonstrated disrespect for Constitutional institutions is his (surely unconstitutional) plan to tax “white” neighborhoods at a higher rate than largely “black” ones. Then there’s his expressed desire to eliminate “billionaires,” just because he doesn’t like them. His real vision is one of arbitrary rule.
Finally, it is doubtful how far the means by which Mamdani won the primary are truly democratic. His victory was assisted by the complicated “ranked-choice voting” system that New York, along with some other progressive cities, has recently adopted. It asks people to vote for up to five candidates, ranked in order of preference, rather than just one. Typically, it is activists who tend to take most advantage of that system – including through a “trans-endorsement” such as Mamdani arranged with a would-be rival, leftist city councilor Brad Lander, with each encouraging his supporters to rank the other as his second choice. Additionally, in the name of democracy, New York City now rewards candidates with a public “matching” of smaller campaign contributions at an eight-to-one ratio, taxing its citizens to assist the candidacies of previously unknown, inexperienced office-seekers with simplistic slogans who also make heavy use of in-kind support as Mamdani did provided by hordes of youthful activists with time on their hands – hardly a cross-section of the populace.
A Call to Clarifying our Political Language
It is often remarked that civic education in America’s K-12 schools has badly declined. Meanwhile, the teaching of history and political science in our colleges has de-emphasized the study of the nation’s constitutional institutions and their development with “social” history and highly partisan denunciations of those institutions (as in the Times’s “1619 Project”). As we seek to restore proper civic education, clarifying the real meaning as well as the evolution of political language should play a part.
