When Compact magazine launched yesterday, its website included a “Note From the Founders” laying out the shared political vision of the magazine’s three founding editors. They’re willing to publish an ideologically diverse range of writers, they say, but their “editorial choices are shaped” by a “desire for a strong social-democratic state that defends community — local and national, familial and religious — against a libertine left and a libertarian right.”

There are two problems with this vision of social democracy and social conservatism fusing together to reshape American society. The first is that, as a matter of political strategy, it’s never going to happen. The second is that, as a matter of justice, it shouldn’t happen.

Social democracy isn’t a term Americans use very often, but we at Jacobin publish about social democratic policies all the time. Medicare for All, free public higher education, universal pre-K are all social-democratic goods, along with other pro-worker policies like raising the minimum wage and lessening workplace tyranny. While our long-term horizons involve going beyond these kinds of policies that can be carried out within capitalism (“social democracy”) and envisioning a more egalitarian and democratic way of organizing the economy (“socialism”), we’re enthusiastic about any step that takes us in the right direction. That’s why we also spend a lot of time talking about what we’ll need to do in order to have any hope of achieving social democracy in America — like rebuilding the labor movement.