Bernie Sanders is technically a social democrat, not a democratic socialist
In the U.S., the term "democratic socialism" conjures up the image of Senator Bernie Sanders. However, when we analyze his specific policies, it is clear that he's not a genuine socialist, but rather a social democrat. Bernie Sanders does not have plans for the government to nationalize all industry and turn over the ownership of the factories from executives and shareholders to the workers. Nor does he have plans to expropriate owned land and abolish private property. Nor does he have plans to abolish the profit motive and replace the regulated free market.
In fact, in a conversation with The Brookings Institution, Senator Sanders explicitly expressed his support for the capitalist mode of production. While Senator Sanders opposes casino capitalism and runaway capitalism, he supports market capitalism in general, and doesn't seek to abolish it. Sanders asserts that market capitalism serves as a good basic framework for an economy, feeling it generates wealth, creates vibrant small businesses, and empowers creative entrepreneurs. Marxists, and traditional socialists in general, find Senator Sanders extremely conservative compared to themselves.
What Senator Sanders proposes is mild social democracy (left capitalism), not a revolution, despite using the word "revolution" his interviews and speeches. While Sanders is perceived to be "left-wing" or "far-left" in America, if Bernie Sanders were in France, he would be right where President Francois Hollande is on the political spectrum. In Canada, Sanders would be a run-of-the-mill NDP politician (and the NDP is expected to win the upcoming Canadian federal elections). In the UK, Sanders would probably sit in the left-wing of the Labour Party. Jeremy Corbyn is much further left than Bernie, for example. And all of these are the major, and often governing, center-left parties of their respective nations. Indeed, Bernie Sanders would fit in quite comfortably in the mainstream center-left political parties in Western Europe and Scandinavia, given that in those countries, many of his preferred policies are already the status quo. Most likely, political parties to the left of mainstream center-left parties in Europe would find Sanders way too conservative. For example, Sanders is significantly, significantly to the right of Greece's Syriza, which is a coalition of various radical leftist groups.
If millions of people in the U.S. truly went on a general strike and ground our economy to a halt to demand anything, Senator Sanders would be appalled. Senator Sanders merely seeks to regulate the market capitalist economy more effectively while strengthening the social safety net. He does not desire to abolish capitalism and replace it with the public ownership over the means of production, distribution, and exchange. When questioned on what exactly he means by the term "democratic socialism," Bernie Sanders points to the mainstream social democratic and labor governments in Western Europe. Sanders' inaccurate conflation of socialism with social democracy resembles the rhetoric of former Swedish Prime Minister, Olof Palme, a fellow social democrat.
Capitalism and socialism are often ill-defined and vague terms, so before we continue this discussion, I wanted to provide the technical, precise definitions for both. Capitalism and socialism describe fundamentally divergent forms of social ownership. Under capitalism, the commodities that workers produce are owned and sold by another party (the business manager) for a profit. These profits accrue to the capitalists and business owners rather than to the workers themselves. Capitalists are the ones who own and direct the means of production, including raw materials, natural resources, factories, machines, and entrepreneurship. In contrast, under socialism, workers themselves own the products and services they produce. The community democratically directs distribution and exchange, and collectively owns economic inputs. Socialists furthermore oppose capitalist business hierarchies and traditional employer-employee relationships.
Socialism, by definition, is the social ownership of productive property. That means that productive property (factories, farms, workshops, the like) is owned either by a democratic state or directly by the workers themselves. It is not the case that this merely a "strict" definition of socialism, in that broader definitions of socialism include social democracy. This is just what the word means. This is the definition to which academics, socialist activists, socialist philosophers, and prominent socialist thinkers throughout history have adhered, as economist Richard D. Wolff has often elaborated.
Socialism is not raising the minimum wage, raising the top marginal tax rates, providing public roads and infrastructure, redistributing wealth, guaranteeing healthcare as a right. or promoting a strong social safety net. These are simply government interventions that can exist in both capitalist and socialist systems.
Similarly, capitalism on a fundamental level is not about excessive greed, corporatism, cronyism, unregulated free-trade, the dominance of investment banks, environmental degradation, unsustainable growth, poor healthcare, exorbitant inequality, and corporate influence of money in politics. If an economic system retains commercial private property, private businesses, private ownership over capital, capital accumulation, market-based distribution, and the profit-incentive, despite what interventions and regulations you put on that system, it is still fundamentally a capitalist economy.
Socialism promises an alternative method of social organization in which there is workplace democracy. If one believes that the capitalist system is "fine if we just tinker with it" along the lines of Scandinavia, then they are a social democrat. However, if they believe that capitalism must be replaced, then they are a genuine socialist.
Somewhat confusingly, despite having nearly identical names, "social democracy" and "democratic socialism" are very distinct concepts. Modern "social democrats" support maintaining market capitalism, whereas "democratic socialists" seek to eradicate the capitalist system and replace it with socialism through democratic, non-revolutionary means.
Social democracy "is a political ideology that supports economic and social interventions to promote social justice within the framework of a capitalist economy, and a policy regime involving welfare state provisions, collective bargaining arrangements, regulation of the economy in the general interest, redistribution of income and wealth, and a commitment to representative democracy. Social democracy aims to create the conditions for capitalism to lead to greater egalitarian, democratic and solidaristic outcomes. 'Social democracy' is often used in this manner to refer to the social and economic policies prominent in Western and Northern Europe during the latter half of the 20th century." Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy
In contrast, democratic socialism "rejects the social democratic view of reform through state intervention within capitalism, seeing capitalism as incompatible with the democratic values of freedom, equality and solidarity. From this perspective, democratic socialists believe that the issues inherent to capitalism can only be solved by a transition from capitalism to socialism - by superseding private property with some form of social ownership, and that any attempt to address the economic contradictions of capitalism through reforms will only cause problems to emerge elsewhere in the economy.
However, 'democratic socialism' is sometimes erroneously used as a synonym for social democracy, where 'social democracy' refers to support for political democracy, regulation of the capitalist economy, and a welfare state." Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_socialism
Remember that "socialism" is distinct from "social democratic" policies. Many people incorrectly conflate welfare policies and state intervention in the market with “socialism.” Technically, Sweden isn't more "socialist" than America; rather, it just has a stronger welfare state to deal with inequality and other market failures. Scandinavia and Northern Europe are fundamentally private enterprise market economies. They are vigorously capitalist in their economic organization.
Sweden, Norway, Denmark, etc., have rather stringent rules on protecting private property. These countries use money as their medium of exchange, have private ownership over capital, have mostly privately held businesses, have robust stock exchanges, have financial sectors, promote private-sector entrepreneurship, have competition, and utilize the profit-incentive to coordinate distribution over the free market. In Scandinavia, there aren't many state owned enterprises, some sectors of the economy are lightly regulated, free-trade is promoted, and companies that fail aren't bailed out. Scandinavian countries often score high on economic freedom measures, sometimes higher than the U.S. in some areas. Income and wealth inequality, poverty, and unequal outcomes exist in these countries.
What Sweden has is a large social welfare system bolted onto its highly capitalist economy, but that does not make Sweden any less "capitalist" or make it more "socialist." Nordic countries are market-based, meritocratic, competitive, innovative, open economies that care enough about fairness to justify relatively high marginal income tax rates to temper capitalism's harsher effects. Their models have very little to do with socialism as the term has traditionally been defined. Sweden, Norway, Denmark etc., retain the capitalist mode of production and don't seek to overturn it anytime soon, so they are social democracies, not socialist countries. Sweden is a "social democracy," not a "democratic socialist" county.
This confusion is understandable: the word "socialism" is constantly misused in colloquial language. The abuse of the term is perpetuated by the media, public, and some politicians. While the term is used incorrectly among the public in both America in Europe, Europeans are much more likely to know the difference between social democracy and socialism. However, people in the U.S. tend believe that a "socialist" is a big government, tax and spend leftist. This is in no small part due to conservative propaganda that slaps the "socialist" label onto any remotely center-left policy to delegitimize it.
However, leftists are also complicit in perpetuating this misunderstanding and not making clear distinctions. Various leftists in the U.S., including Bernie Sanders, have attempted to claim the term "socialism" for their own preferred welfare-state policies. Yet, they are also confusing the terminology. Genuine socialists who support economic democracy are among the first people to object to social democrats calling themselves "socialists" or "democratic socialists." Socialists are frustrated because there are leftists who identify as something that is literally not socialist by definition, and advocate positions that are actually against socialism, but call themselves socialists anyway. Some argue that through humanizing capitalism and making it palatable to the masses, social democrats are a bigger threat to the socialist cause than proponents of unfettered capitalism.
I myself, am a social democrat, not a socialist or a democratic socialist. If you took a spectrum of market capitalism, and looked at the left-wing end of the spectrum, "social democracy" would fall under there. "Social democracy," while still being a form of capitalism, is essentially the last train stop before you get to genuine socialism. To me, social democracy is superior to both more neoliberal manifestations of capitalism on the right and genuine forms of socialism on the left. If I lived in Sweden, I would be a conservative in the sense that the political-economic status quo would largely satisfy me.
But I do think that it's important to point out these distinctions and to use the proper, formal definitions of these terms to ensure nuanced discourse and precision. I like 95% of what Bernie Sanders is proposing, and I'm voting for him as president, but he's not a true "socialist" or "democratic socialist" using the formal, non-colloquial definitions of these terms.
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