No, socialism is not "neighborliness"

Kamala Harris's new VP pick had a kind word to say about socialism, but only at the expense of redefining it.

Right out of the gate, Kamala Harris’s new vice presidential running-mate Tim Walz has gifted us with a thrilling new controversy: a video where he explains to volunteers that “one person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.”

If you have any doubt of the extraordinary power of the taboo our ideology has set in place against the word “socialism,” just look at the absolute meltdown this has already set off. No one actually believes that Kamala “Wall Street” Harris has any intention whatosever of abolishing private property or even instituting the Nordic model in the US, but now everyone involved is going to have to go through a very public ritual of denunciation and disavowal simply because Walz said the s-word.

On one hand, it is frustrating to see socialism trivialized into a mere expression of “neighborliness” and “progressive values” in a country where ignorance of our politics remains rampant. It should go without saying, but socialism is actually about the nationalizing the economy. For this reason it can actually be at odds with neighborliness, because sometimes the interests of your neighbors can be at odds with the greater good. If your city desperately needs to build a road that connects a massive public housing sector to a hospital and the road cuts through your neighbor’s petunia garden, should the socialist be neighborly? I would say no.

Socialism is not about neighborliness, and it is not about “progressive values” either. Walz’s “neighborliness” comment gives that game away, because for progressives this can just mean something like “putting out a charity jar at the gas station when private health care leaves someone unable to pay the bills.” That is certainly neighborly and progressive but it is not the socialist solution to health care.

This endless conflation of the socialist agenda with uncontroversial feel-good values may let liberal “progressives” flatter themselves as radicals, but it does nothing to advance our agenda, which is to nationalize the economy. Again, Kamala Harris does not want to do this. In 2020 she put out a “Medicare for All” plan that retained the private market that has killed around 130,000 people since then. Conflating her agenda with the socialist agenda under the umbrella of “progressivism” and “neighborliness” costs lives.

So on one hand, it’s frustrating to watch the liberal cooption campaign against socialism continue.

On the other hand, however, it is a testament to the progress our politics have made over the past decade that anyone would even want to co-opt socialism. The reason that the Trump campaign is pouncing on Walz so aggressively for using that word is that the taboo against that word — hammered into the American consciousness since the red scare in a way one simply doesn’t see in other countries — still has much of its potency. Trump thinks he can use this for the exact same reason he has hoped to use Harris’s race against her: he wants to trigger a prerational scare reflex in his base. That’s why you are not going to see a sophisticate effort to argue that Harris’s policies would indeed amount to the abolition of private property or whatever; you will just hear the word “SOCIALISM!” barked over and over in the furious, terrified voice of a rabid dog.

That Walz even dared to say that word on a volunteer call has to be credited to Bernie Sanders, who did more in the last decade to break the taboo against socialism than anyone. That was always one of the major selling points of his campaign: even in losing, he forced Americans to talk about something we haven’t talked about in decades.

Socialists would do well, I think, to imagine two linguistic weapons directed against us in a semantic war on our politics. First there is the red scare taboo against even saying the word socialism, which Walz is now learning about firsthand, and which we will have to overcome if we ever want to talk about it. Second there is the liberal campaign to redefine it, which Walz here participates in himself. Whether Democrats stick to the second attack or retreat to the first will tell us a lot about how socialist struggle will play out in the post-Sanders era.