Following his deportation from the Soviet Union, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn warned, “There always is this fallacious belief: ‘It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.’” Writing from his new home in Vermont, he went on: “the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.” Near the conclusion of The Gulag Archipelago, his meticulously researched (and lived) account of the atrocities carried out under the name of socialism in the Soviet Union, he writes, “You may suddenly understand it someday — but only when you yourselves hear ‘hands behind your backs there!’ and step ashore on our Archipelago.”
Solzhenitsyn directly experienced the abuse of power that is the natural consequence of centralizing political authority. As J.S. Mill wrote, “every increase of the functions devolving on the government is an increase of its power, both in the form of authority, and still more, in the indirect form of influence. The importance of this consideration, in respect to political freedom, has in general been quite sufficiently recognized…”
This insight was later developed by F.A. Hayek in The Road to Serfdom, where he claimed that individual and democratic liberty cannot be sustained under socialism, writing, “If ‘capitalism’ means here a competitive system based on free disposal over private property, it is far more important to realize that only within this system democracy is possible.” But in some of my research, I find this somewhat of an unfair attribution, given that many of the prominent socialists Hayek was engaging also expressed concerns about the potential erosion of democratic freedoms under socialism. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were quite upfront in the Manifesto of the Communist Party about the “despotic inroads” that would be required “in the beginning” to “wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie…”
But Hayek’s hypothesis about the incompatibility of socialism and democratic freedom has been criticized in recent years, being called “wrong” by Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz (Columbia University) and an “idiotic claim” by Henry Farrell (Johns Hopkins University).
My recent research has sought to arbitrate these disputes. Using a new dataset put out by the Varieties of Democracy Project, my coauthors and I gathered all the data for every available country having both an annual measure of political liberty and a measure of their degree of socialism (state ownership of the economy — the economic definition of socialism). What we found was striking: not a single country, going all the way back to 1789, has sustained a high level of political freedom under socialism. In fact, only one country — Belarus in 1991 — maintained it for a single year. These results corroborate similar empirical tests by Robert Lawson and J.R. Clark on Milton Friedman’s variant of the hypothesis, specifically the relationship between economic freedom and political freedom, and recent work on the deep relationship between democracy and capitalism by Vincent Geloso and Alex Tabarrok.
But how relevant are the historical disasters of state socialism to modern debates of socialism? As Kristian Niemietz exhaustively demonstrates in his book Socialism: The Failed Idea that Never Dies, many experiments with socialism begin with democratic ideals (Bolsheviks derives from the Russian word for ‘majority,’ after all) and promises of popular liberation. The working poor are initially praised by socialist academics and public intellectuals, only to be abandoned when their political utility and economic liberty decline together. One of the most recent examples was Venezuela, where Hugo Chavez promised a new form of socialism that would learn from history and would be “built on cooperation.” Bernie Sanders offered support of this project as late as 2011, and Joseph Stiglitz praised Chavez’s efforts as “very impressive.” At the very least, socialists’s repeated failure to distinguish “good” from “bad” socialism at its origin should give us reason to be cautious. Even more so when combined with the failed record of any socialist experiment — past or modern — to maintain individual and political liberty.
Socialists, both historic and modern, tend to define socialism not by the means but by the ends. But holding up utopian ends can lend itself to justifying a broad array of even despicable means. Writing about the 1917 Russian Revolution, Dan Edelstein notes, “The choice of dictatorship was rather a temporal shortcut, encouraged by the belief in a perfected future. By opening up the future as a space to be colonized by a just society, the modern doctrinaires of progress encouraged their followers to value the world to come so highly that they were willing to accept the temporary suspension of democratic beliefs.”
The natural objection at this point is the Nordic countries. Do they not show that we can have our cake and eat it too by offering a pathway towards democratic socialism and political liberty? Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has assured us that “when millennials talk about concepts like democratic socialism, we’re not talking about these kinds of ‘Red Scare’ boogeymen. We’re talking about countries and systems that already exist and have already been proven to be successful in the modern world.”
But as the economist Benjamin Powell (Texas Tech University) has argued, the Nordic countries are not socialist. In fact, they are among the most economically free countries in the world, according to the Economic Freedom of the World Index, with Denmark and Finland ranking in the top ten. While Sweden expanded state ownership of the economy in a piecemeal fashion starting in the late 1960s, it became widely recognized as a “costly failure” within 15 years, leading it to re-embrace private ownership. The Nordic countries are known for having strong welfare states, but this is not socialism. Their social welfare expenditures also don’t clearly outpace those of the United States, according to research by Price V. Fishback, which compares all private and public welfare expenditures between the United States and the Nordics. The United States has achieved the same — or even higher — levels of social welfare spending while maintaining higher GDP per capita, more robust and more stable economic growth, and even tolerating more concentrated ownership of total national wealth.
That is one major reason I’m skeptical when a socialist says they want what the Nordics have. The market economies they run on is condemned by Democratic Socialists of America’s own statement of values. Zohran Mamdani in New York has explicitly called for “seizing the means of production.” Media darling Hasan Piker has, even more boldly, expressed regret that the Soviet Union lost the Cold War.
While surveys show the support for socialism comes primarily from those identifying as Democrats, surveys by Gallup and YouGov do show some Republicans concurring. More importantly, the policies supported by both major political parties suggest a growing embrace of state ownership of the economy. The Trump Administration has now taken equity stakes in at least 35 private companies: expansions of state ownership of the economy.
The range of policies widely accepted as legitimate options, referred to as the “Overton Window,” has shifted toward greater government direction of the economy, with some conservative politicians and voters now treating partial state ownership as an acceptable function of government. This parallels to the conditions F.A. Hayek faced in the 1930s in London, prompting him to dedicate The Road to Serfdom, “To the socialists of all parties,” because parties on both the left and the right embraced platforms that expanded state ownership of the economy.
The record, from 1789 forward, is not ambiguous. High degrees of political freedom and heavy state ownership of the economy have not been sustained together. The countries held up as proof that they can be — the Nordics — are among the world’s more capitalist economies, financing large welfare states out of private ownership rather than replacing it. What has shifted in the United States is not yet socialism on that definition. It is the willingness of both parties to treat ownership stakes in private firms as ordinary policy. That was the audience Hayek addressed. According to Solzhenitsyn, what enabled the gradual suppression of individual liberty in the Soviet Union wasn’t that the people there were more evil; it was that they “didn’t love freedom enough.” Everything else, he argues, followed from that.