Welcome to Confronting Capitalism.

I'm Melissa Nashek, and I'm here, as always, with the Vec Chibber, the editor of Catalyst,

a journal of theory and strategy, and professor at NYU.

How's it going, V?

It's going as well as it could, I suppose, in a country where people are getting shot

in their SUVs for apparently no reason? Yeah, it's

pretty grim. It's, yeah, maybe I shouldn't have led with how's it going? Answer, it's bad.

You know, in other countries, they don't ask questions like that. Like, it's considered rude

to ask things like that. In Hindi, you say, Kasejo, which is how are you?

Uh-huh.

That's about the closest you get.

Well, today we're not going to focus so much on the horribleness of current events,

but we're going to continue our series on social democracy.

In the first couple of episodes, we took a broad view to discuss what social democracy is, the circumstances that led to its flourishing in the post-war period, what it accomplished, and the many challenges the movement faced.

So we're going to switch gears a little bit today to look specifically at social democracy in America. I don't think most people

really associate social democracy with American politics. So maybe to start off, can you talk about

if America actually had a period of social democracy? Yeah, it did. Remember when we tried to define what the goals of social democracy were, we said that there

was a kind of a minimalist and a maximalist agenda.

The minimalist agenda was to try to essentially tame capitalism and to give people some

necessary goods as a matter of right rather than a matter of privilege,

goods which the market gives them only if they have the money to do so. And so what Social

Democrats said was that, no, as a functioning member of society, you should have as rights,

...