Don't understand that statement. Bernie described himself as a socialist. That doesn't mean he is a system, it identifies an ideological position.
And, I think she was reacting to Sanders describing himself as a socialist during the campaign. Which he wasn't.
In reality, both are - were - capitalists. However, I would describe Clinton as a centrist capitalist, and Sanders as a social-democratic capitalist. Differences more of degree than kind. (There's room for people in the middle of those two positions, as well.)
https://www.theatlantic.com/internation ... sm/471630/Let us start at the well of the socialist renewal, the Vermont senator. Sanders, as everyone knows, calls himself a “democratic socialist.” The word “democratic” is fundamental here, because historically socialism has not, typically, come about as a result of free and fair elections.
In most socialist countries, like the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic where your humble author was born, socialism was imposed at the point of a gun. Sanders, therefore, is wise to distance himself from the socialists of yesteryear and insist that socialism in America should be chosen, freely and fairly, by the electorate.
As many of Sanders’s supporters have repeatedly and rightly pointed out, socialism is not communism. In fact, for most of the 20th century, socialism was understood to be a halfway house between capitalism and communism. The latter was a utopian vision of the future characterized by classless, stateless, and moneyless communal living. Strictly speaking, therefore, no communist country was ever “communist”—not even the Soviet Union (a.k.a., the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics).
What then was socialism? Socialism was an economic system where the means of production (e.g., factories), capital (i.e., banks), and agricultural land (i.e., farms) were owned by the state. In some socialist countries, like Poland, small privately owned farms were allowed to operate. In other countries, like Yugoslavia, small mom-and-pop shops also remained in private ownership. Strict limits on private enterprise limited accumulation of wealth and supposedly provided for a relatively high degree of income equality.
Two important caveats need to be kept in mind. First, lack of private enterprise resulted in low economic growth and, consequently, low standards of living. Thus, while income equality was relatively high (if party bosses and their cronies were excluded from the calculations), people in Soviet-bloc countries were much poorer than their counterparts in the West. Nobody has yet figured out a way of combining genuine socialism with high rates of growth over a long period of time.
Second, top members of the communist parties, which ran socialist countries, were generally exempted from limits on wealth accumulation. As such, communist leaders from Josip Broz Tito in Yugoslavia to Kim Il Sung in North Korea enjoyed luxuries unimaginable to the rest of the populace. Most importantly, top members of the government were above the law. They could not be accused, arrested, or convicted of ordinary or even extraordinary crimes (e.g., Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot). As such, inequality of status between the governing class and the governed masses in socialist countries was as great, if not greater, as it was under feudalism.[snip]
Sanders is not a typical socialist. Sure, he believes in a highly regulated and heavily taxed private enterprise, but he does not seem to want the state to own banks and make cars. Considering the negative connotations of “socialism” in America, it is a bit of a puzzle why Sanders insists on using that word.
It would be much less contentious and more correct if he gave his worldview its proper name: not “democratic socialism,” which implies socialism brought about through a vote, but social democracy.In a social democracy, individuals and corporations continue to own the capital and the means of production. Much of the wealth, in other words, is produced privately. That said, taxation, government spending, and regulation of the private sector are much heavier under social democracy than would be the case under pure capitalism.[snip][end]
Accurate terminology matters. As a social democrat, Sanders accepted reformed, regulated, socialized capitalism. I guarantee you his poll numbers would not have been as good if he ran as an actual socialist ... he didn't.
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