Two Cheers for Socialism: Why Liberals Need Enemies on the Left is an interesting piece in which the author, a liberal, begins by distinguishing liberalism from the socialism of the left and the capitalism of the right.
But then he goes on to champion socialism.Liberalism meant a mixed economy, using either government or the market depending on what the evidence seemed to favor in any given case. (After Roosevelt’s era, liberalism also came to stand for more egalitarian social relations.) Roosevelt’s call for “bold, persistent experimentation” encompassed both the strength and the weakness of his creed. Experimentation meant liberals lacked any fixed principle to guide their shaping of the state, but it also meant that it would change with evidence. Rather than wage class war against the rich, or on their behalf, liberals set out to mediate it, preserving capitalism while sanding off its rough edges.
Over time, liberalism lost its identity as a creed of the center, and for the vast majority of Americans, has come to mean “left.” Decades of right-wing propaganda turned liberalism into a synonym for “socialism,” when conservatives weren’t calling liberals outright socialists, which they often were. Now, for the first time in decades, real socialism — as opposed to the scare term — has become an extant force in American politics. As a person of very-much-liberal (and very-much-not-socialist) sympathies, I might be expected to see this as a threat. Instead I see the potential rise of socialism as a way for liberalism to restore its vitality.
What's interesting to me is if you define capitalism, as the right does and supports, as free markets then it is a system in which the people as consumers truly rule. Something the liberal left is against in their support of the state.We habitually think of liberalism and conservatism as mirror images, but they are asymmetric at their very core. Conservatism uses simple precepts — “government is the problem” — for which liberalism has no ready answer. Liberalism is an attempt to pragmatically balance the market with the state, adjusting each specific case with the evidence.
...Socialists’ ideological distrust of capitalism is an almost perfect mirror image of the conservative distrust of the state. Socialists of course draw on an enormous amount of economic and social science research to form practical arguments for their policies. (As do conservatives.) But at bottom they are motivated by a philosophical belief that their program represents human freedom, and alternative visions represent unfreedom, regardless of their technocratic merits.