Zohran Mamdani recent statement on Jon Stewart’s The Weekly Show provides us with time to observe an example of a classic tactic and linguistic heist by Socialists and Communists, which contributed to the displacement of the republican tradition.
“Zohran Mamdani Explains His Democratic Socialist Vision”
“A lot of what we’ve come to accept as the facts of life across our country is driven by democratic socialist principles. If today you and I were to introduce the idea of a building that lends out books for free, we would be slandered in the same way that so many new ideas are slandered today and yet that’s the library. And the same thing with the fire department and the same thing with public schools.”
“Bernie Sanders Explains Democratic Socialism: Social Security, Medicare, Libraries, Fire Departments”
The same basic framing is presented, to claim that every day public services that most Americans take for granted are merely examples of democratic-socialist or socialist principles already embedded in American life.
Public libraries, fire departments, public schools and police are not examples of socialism, but they are longstanding examples of public goods or municipal services provided by governments of many ideological stripes. This is like basic information a child can learn. Calling them “democratic socialist principles” is a rhetorical expansion of the term that conflates ordinary collective provision with the actual historical and theoretical content of socialism. This is a recurring move by socialists and democratic socialists, and a historical pattern.
IMPORTANCE OF DEFINITIONS
Socialism, in its classical and most coherent sense (Marxist and non-Marxist), centers on social or public ownership of the means of production such as factories, capital goods, large-scale productive assets; and often on replacing market allocation with planning or collective control. It is not synonymous with “government spends tax money on shared services.” Merriam-Webster and standard political-economy definitions track the ownership and production point, not every tax-funded activity.
Libraries, fire protection, basic schooling, and policing are closer to classic public goods (non-excludable or hard to exclude, with significant externalities) or local public services. They exist under capitalism, mixed economies, social democracies, and authoritarian regimes alike. Every developed country has them regardless of whether it ever pursued socialist ownership of industry. Treating “the government does X with taxes” as socialism empties the word of distinctive content; and by that logic, the military, courts, roads, and sewers are also socialism, which is not a useful way to analyze political economy.
These institutions predate or developed independently of modern socialist movements. Everything does not depend on socialism and populism or what is popular. Educating and managing large-scale republics and federations of states have become difficult.
Libraries
- Subscription and membership libraries appear in the American colonies (Benjamin Franklin’s Library Company of Philadelphia, 1731). The first tax-supported free public library in the U.S. was in Peterborough, New Hampshire (1833). The Boston Public Library followed in the 1850s. The massive expansion came via Andrew Carnegie’s private philanthropy (capitalist steel fortune) funding thousands of buildings, later sustained by local taxes. This is civic improvement and literacy promotion in a commercial republic, not collective ownership of production.
Public schools
- Common-school movements in the 19ᵗʰ century United States (Horace Mann and others) aimed at creating an informed citizenry for republican self-government, assimilating immigrants, and basic literacy and numeracy. Jeffersonian and Enlightenment ideas about education for citizenship were central. While some 19ᵗʰ century reformers (including Owenites) had socialist leanings, the mainstream American system grew under liberal and republican frameworks, not as a socialist project of abolishing class or private property. The movement was explicitly framed in republican terms to develop an educated citizenry capable of self-government, civic virtue, moral formation, and national cohesion in a republic of freeholders. It drew on Protestant and Enlightenment ideas of preparing independent citizens, not on socialist theory of class struggle or social ownership. Compulsory public education long predates the rise of organized socialist parties as a major force.
Fire departments and police
- Professional municipal forces emerged in the mid-19ᵗʰ century as cities industrialized and urban density made volunteer systems inadequate. Modern policing models drew heavily from the London Metropolitan Police (1829, Peelian principles). U.S. cities established full-time forces in the 1830s-1850s (Boston, New York, etc.). These responded to practical problems of order, fire risk, and property protection in market societies. They are instruments of the state monopoly on legitimate force and local administration, not socialist economic reorganization.
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These developed under regimes that protected private property, markets, and limited government far more than they pursued socialist ends. Socialists later supported expanding or democratizing them (as did liberals, progressives, and conservatives), but that does not make the institutions themselves socialist inventions or proofs of socialist principles. These are classic public goods (or near-public goods) justified under classical liberal political economy (e.g., Adam Smith on certain public works) and republican theory of the common good and civic capacity. Minimal states still require police, courts, defense, and basic infrastructure precisely because markets and individual liberty depend on them. Equating them with “socialism” collapses the distinction between limited government provision of non-excludable services and the socialist program of collective control over production, investment, and distribution.
REPUBLICAN PRINCIPLES AND THE COMMON GOOD
Classical republicanism and the American founding mixture of republican and liberal ideas emphasize the res publica which refers to public affairs, civic virtue, the common good, and institutions that enable self-governing citizens. Public education for an informed electorate, libraries as repositories of knowledge, and basic order (or protection) services fit this tradition without requiring the abolition of private property or the subordination of the economy to collective ownership. The American founders and 19ᵗʰ century reformers routinely justified such institutions in republican terms: a republic needs literate, capable citizens and basic public order. That is distinct from socialist theory’s focus on class, exploitation, and transforming the ownership structure of production.
American republican tradition already had a robust vocabulary for these things: the common good, the general welfare, public virtue, civic education for self-government, and institutions that secure the conditions of liberty. The socialist framing displaces that language. It takes institutions that exist under private property, markets, and constitutional limits and re-describes them as “democratic socialist principles,” then uses the re-description to imply continuity with more expansive claims (greater redistribution, public ownership experiments, etc.).
This is a longstanding tactic to redefine a contested term downward to its least controversial application (libraries and fire trucks), thereby making the term seem already accepted and the remaining agenda merely an extension. Critics of actual socialism are then positioned as opponents of libraries or fire departments. Masterfully crafted to build a straw man, and it exploits modern social media patterns of thinking. The goal is popularization and rehabilitation of a word whose historical record includes central planning failures, authoritarianism, and economic stagnation in multiple 20ᵗʰ century experiments. There is no requirement that every public service be rebranded “socialist” for the public to continue supporting it.
PATTERN OF SOCIALIST RHETORICAL TACTIC
Zohran Mamdani’s formulation and Bernie Sanders’ nearly identical 2015 claim that libraries, fire, and police are “socialist institutions” is a classic move by socialists. The rhetorical tactic is to take popular, functional, long-established services and retroactively claim them as evidence that “democratic socialist principles” already undergird everyday life. The purpose of this is clearly to artificially normalize the label, blur the distinction between ordinary government and socialism, and invite the further claim that more ambitious measures (rent freezes, city-run groceries, heavier redistribution, or industry nationalization) are just “more of the same.” It also claims credit for institutions that were built, funded, and expanded primarily under non-socialist political economies, often with significant private philanthropy and market-generated wealth.
Critics of socialism have noted this for decades. It is easier to defend libraries than to defend the actual historical record of socialist ownership experiments. The same services exist in non-socialist places and were not dependent on socialist ideology for their creation. Expanding the definition makes socialism seem continuous with the status quo while the distinctive program of public ownership of capital, decommodification of large sectors of production remains the contested part.
Equating any tax-funded collective project with socialism empties the term of distinctive content; by that logic the military, the census, and street lighting are also “socialist,” which renders the category useless for serious political economy. True socialist traditions (including many democratic socialists) have historically aimed at deeper democratization of ownership and production (Chris Maisano, Isn’t America Already Kind of Socialist, Jacobin), not merely the existence of public libraries. Treating libraries and fire departments as the essence of the ideology confuses categories and avoids defending the actual distinctive claims of socialism on their own terms.
The word “socialism” does not need to be popularized. Public goods provision is compatible with (and often required by) liberal and republican orders that protect private property and voluntary exchange. High-tax, high-service social democracies that function well do so largely because they retain strong market institutions, private ownership of most productive capital, and rule of law, not because they have abandoned capitalism for socialism.
The claim is only repeated because it is politically useful, because everyday language often uses “socialist” loosely for any redistribution or collective provision, and because some genuinely equate any non-market allocation with socialism. It performs a linguistic appropriation from the republican tradition. Lack of precise understandings of these terms have created consequences. Public provision of certain goods is compatible with republican institutions, liberal democracy, and mixed economies, and does not require, prove, or constitute socialism. The opponents of the DSA are very incompetent and possess an incredibly weak practice of and wisdom about the system they have been elected to operate by a desperate population, which they are responsible for worsening. They are not able to actually capitalize on these flawed arguments being popularized, and these arguments make the decline visible, as citizens and influences appear too vulnerable to the rhetoric.