A Linguist’s Case Against <em>Socialism</em>
Last month, Senator Bernie Sanders defined his vision for democratic socialism in an address at George Washington University. The speech elicited mixed reactions from political reporters and scholars, several of whom questioned how Sanders had evoked socialism, and from some of Sanders’s Democratic rivals. When my colleague Edward-Isaac Dovere told Senator Michael Bennet the title of the speech, “How Democratic Socialism Is the Only Way to Defeat Oligarchy and Authoritarianism,” Bennet responded, “I don’t think the American people even know what that means.”
To John McWhorter, a linguistics professor at Columbia University and a to , such debates about the use of the democratic-socialist label are a losing enterprise for everyone involved, because the American public doesn’t have a signifies. “When we’re talking about politics, especially today, with politics as urgent as it is, we can’t use terms for which we would have a hard time explaining the meanings,” he said Saturday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and .
