"Capitalism" and "Socialism" Basically Mean Whatever We Want
You don't have to bust out a dictionary to decide what you think of your mayor.
One thing the internet loves to do is get its collective panties in a wad over what people like to call stuff.
Last week everybody was dunking on this finding that “the free market” enjoys a dramatically higher net favorability rating than “capitalism” — despite their being, the argument goes, the same economic system described in different terminology. And the finding seems to replicate: Gallup holds approval for “free enterprise” in the low 80s while “capitalism” just posted its lowest number ever recorded (54%).
Leaving aside the fact that it’s perfectly coherent to have capitalism without free markets (e.g. monopoly dynamics) or free markets without capitalism (e.g. Tito’s Yugoslavia)1, this whole conversation reveals how much the Discourse winds up netting out to something recently-deceased Dilbert author and manosphere influencer Scott Adams — of all people — liked to call “Word-Thinking.”
Leaving aside the additional fact that Adams is (charitably) complicated and (less charitably) completely fucking insane, I do just kinda have to hand it to him on this one. People really like to develop a bunch of feelings about a bunch of words, independent of the actual slate of viable referents2 of those words.
Basically, “free markets” and “capitalism” have different vibes. But those vibes are part of what the respective words mean, and part of how people feel about what the words mean. Without getting all Saul Kripke on the communication-intention behind it3, there are dimensions of those vibes that are legit revealing, in that they suggest distinctions the distribution of people broadly think make sense. For “capitalism” versus “free markets,” one can easily imagine ‘capital’ evoking massive at-scale corporate or oligarchical forces looming in the distance shaping everything about your life without your input — a ‘lightning rod for vague feelings of discontent’ generated by an essentially indifferent world.
Another such word is “socialism,” which causes people’s brains to likewise break. Some people instantly jump to “Stalin” — Larry Kudlow literally called Mamdani “a throwback to Stalin” on national television — whereas others just say “oh, aren’t Denmark and Sweden great,” independent of both nations’ recent pivot toward something more like (uh) capitalism4.
The whole thing suggests that people have a bunch of vibes about what they want a bunch of terms to mean, and react emotionally based on those vibes while entirely talking past each other about anything even tangentially related to ‘substance’.
Word-thinking indeed.
But that’s also why there’s such a great opportunity for leaders to sidestep this debate entirely and just showcase what those words mean to them.
Recently, Zohran Mamdani kept the lights on all night (and staffed it, and didn’t charge for anything) at a soccer field in every borough so that New Yorkers could play pickup games while the World Cup was in town.
This super tangible, blocking-and-tackling-level intervention comes off the back of plummeting violent crime, wonky zoning reform, pothole blitzing, budget-balancing, and a historic childcare expansion — while walking back or delaying campaign promises of free buses and public grocery stores when they collided with fiscal reality, on top of scaling his $100 billion housing plan down to $22 billion.
Pretty based.
This is not to derail this entire piece into an argument about Zohran Mamdani. Lots of stuff he’s proposing I think is dumb — the rent freeze that has Wall Street collapsing onto its fainting couch is a policy nearly every economist hates, the proposed $1.1 billion parallel Department of Community Safety is a solution in search of a problem, and the damn grocery stores are probably going to happen anyway.
It’s just that while his opponents are busy getting triggered by word-thinking about what socialism does and doesn’t mean, he is going and defining what the idea means to him as a function of what he’s doing and prioritizing.
So, I pointed this out.
Naturally, people immediately responded with their own cascade of word-thinking about ideas ranging from socialism to communism to neoliberalism to social democracy, and the effects such concepts have upon their own personal feelings. Even Paul Graham, whom I think is great, got in on the fun — talking about “socialism” before posting a picture of communist Russia5.
That in turn got people going on “Islamism” just because.
And all of this is just a goofy and confusing and counterproductive way of doing politics.
Every generation takes a legacy of concepts inherited from its traditions and institutions and culture and political lineage — and also, straightforwardly, from its language — and instantiates new versions of what such things mean in its own particular context. This drives forward the long march of semantic drift, which is why “computers” are now machines on which we type Substack articles and not professionals sitting at their desks doing math problems on request.
It’s also why today’s Big Government version of “conservatism” includes things like deciding, company by company, who’s allowed to use which frontier AI models, taking a 15% cut of Nvidia and AMD chip sales to China, becoming Intel’s largest shareholder, deploying handpicked prosecutors against the President’s personal enemies, and generally just being kind of Peronist across the board6.
But it is just a waste of everybody’s time to argue about whether such things are ‘really’ the definition of whatever applicable piece of terminology, since what’s important is whether any of the respective policies are good ideas or not.
It’s also — more importantly — a terrible way of evaluating any given candidate.
Let’s take people who identify as “democratic socialists”. I, Zac Hill, basically think that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is super talented and Zohran Mamdani is super talented, whereas Cori Bush is kind of loose and bad and Darializa Avila Chevalier is kind of loose and bad.
I am sure plenty of people disagree with me.
I am also sure you could undergo this exercise for MAGAs and traditional conservatives and moderates and ‘Abundance Dems’ and ‘Orange Man Bad libs’ and whatever other group, and you could agree or disagree with the assignations I’d hand out there, too.
But — as this hypothetical reveals — what makes for a fruitful exercise is to just look at what the candidate does and says, and then form an opinion based on what the candidate does and says.
It does not mean you have to assign them to a category, preemptively decide everything you think and feel based on that category, and then act like you can predict everything they’re going to do based on their stated or nominal membership in it.
That is how you get people acting like Trump’s ballooning of the deficit and cash handouts to children are totally super conservative. Or acting like he can’t possibly be moderate despite 180-ing from Romney/Ryan’s unpopular positions on Medicare and Social Security in 2016, backing away from federal abortion action in 2024, and appointing two prominent recent Democrats — RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard — to his Cabinet as a Republican President.
Both Republicans and Democrats are at a massive inflection point that will determine the futures of their parties. Trump — having remade the Republican Party in his image — will leave office in 2028 with no clear heir, historic unpopularity, and no especial interest in leaving behind a particular ideological legacy à la Ronald Reagan. Democrats, on the other hand, have too many heirs. There’s a bench of moderate overperformers (Mary Peltola, Roy Cooper, Ruben Gallego, Jon Ossoff), an establishment that polls badly but — à la Hakeem Jeffries — is quietly productive, and an insurgent class of Democratic Socialists who just ousted the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, took out a 15-term incumbent in Denver, and hit primary ballots in Missouri and Michigan on August 47.
Each one of these candidates can be evaluated on their own merits, independent of the movement they represent. And they’ll define their label exactly how Mamdani is: by what they do while wearing it.
I am super interested to know what you think about a candidate based on stuff they’ve done and plan to do.
I am much less interested in broadsiding one another with our respective feelings about some words.
My own personal preference is the peanut-butter-and-chocolate-esque combination of both.
Like, the <gestures vaguely> whole ‘idea’ a word ‘refers’ to. There is a big dispute within philosophy about whether this is in fact how language works, but let’s just disregard all that and accept the commonsense premise that words refer to some conception of real or hypothetical or associational stuff.
Or lack thereof.
Denmark’s own prime minister flew to Harvard specifically to tell Bernie-curious Americans that “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy.” Sweden, land of the 60% top tax bracket, now has roughly 1.5 times as many billionaires per capita as the United States.
The storefront in his photo says МОЛОКО — a Soviet state milk store — with a Союзпечать kiosk out front. That’s the USSR’s state press monopoly.
My favorite description of this weird South American tier-two dictator turn is the cheeky “state capitalism with American characteristics” alluded to by our friends over at Washington Monthly.
One can argue that the impact of this faction is being exaggerated by their proximity to New York’s media-influencer class, but nevertheless, the wins are stacking up.