Socialism is not Liberal Moralism on Steroids

Socialists don’t need to appeal to morality and justice. Unlike liberals and conservatives, they can point out how the world works, and how our political imagination is constrained as a result.

Saying that socialism is to the left of liberalism is obvious, but it can also be misleading. The image of a right-left spectrum may suggest that we can get from liberalism to socialism just by keeping on in the same direction. We can’t. We may expect socialism to follow liberalism historically, but that’s not to say that socialism is liberalism plus so…