What Would It Mean For the Democratic Party to Become a Social Democratic (or Democratic Socialist) Party?
All of this makes the idea that the Democratic Party is a Social Democratic Party or a Democratic Socialist Party rather ironic, because those would be two very strong visions of the future to base a party around. Democratic socialism broadly refers to an political philosophy that, unlike social democrats, does not accept the existence and continuation of capitalism as necessary but unlike Leninist communists abjures the idea of violent revolution as the means of achieving its end. You can think of Eugene V. Debs as an archetypal democratic socialist – someone who viewed capitalism as an inherently immoral and exploitative institution, but who sought to abolish poverty through the electoral victory of the Socialist Party and the passage of legislation. The modern Democratic Socialists of America – who might well have a trademark infringement case on their hands- are a group that emerged out of several factional disputes in the 1970s and 1980s, and have been closely associated with the
