In a probing Substack, John Judis writes, “In ten or fifteen years, it is very possible that the Democratic Party will be known as ‘democratic socialist’ in the same way it is now known widely as ‘liberal.’” Before you dismiss this as ideological patter from a political adventurer, you should know that Judis is a relentlessly unenthusiastic realist, who’s been watching and commenting on the American political scene longer than I’ve been alive.

I’d like to take up his thought, with two tweaks. First, I’m less certain if the Democratic Party is going to be the vessel of this transformation. Though it may be at this point the oldest political party in the world — and, as Kevin Phillips famously called it, the second most enthusiastic capitalist political party in the world — the Democratic Party needn’t survive forever. Let’s use “Democratic Party” as a stand-in for whatever left-of-center party there is or may be in the decades to come. Second, I don’t know that the Democratic Party is widely known today as liberal. Let’s say instead that “liberal” has been the term for the dominant left-of-center ideology in America for about a century now.

With those tweaks in mind, I think Judis poses an interesting scenario worth discussing here.