Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we want to be fair, it depends on the characterization and its intended implications. The right has called every Democrat since FDR a "socialist" specifically to put the fear of tanks in the streets and death camps into people regardless of their actual policies. They called Obama a socialist. They called Hillary Clinton a socialist. So even if Mamdani calls himself a socialist it's important to ask what he means…
This line of thought bugs me. We use labels for a reason. Socialism has a well accepted definition and has for decades. We haven't modified it's meaning. I think it's fine to take someone at their word if they use a label. It's not on me to interrogate whether they mean something else when they use the label. It's on them to use the label correctly if they want to communicate. Especially if they are a politician wher…
You’ve adopted a certain definition of socialism and decided it’s the correct one. Which is fine, everyone does that with vocabulary. But you are not acknowledging to yourself that it was in fact an act of adoption to do so. Thus you are denying yourself the mental framework for evaluating how and why others might try to use competing definitions.
Metaphorically, words are buckets and different people put different things into the bucket. Sometimes it’s just silly like “is a hot dog a sandwich.” Other times there are more serious implications like the fundamental difference between “I have a theory” (about how a lamp got broken) vs “I have a theory” (a mathematical framework for predicting the relationship between genotypes and phenotypes).
And sometimes it is used to create shibboleths, whereby looking in people’s buckets communicates how open they are to persuasion of one type or another.
So it’s always a power move, and useful, to think “what exactly do they mean by that?” What do people gain and lose by adopting different definitions and words? Understanding that this happens continuously in all use of language helps one do a better job of relating labels to observable objective reality.
To come back to “socialism,” you might think Mamdani is doing himself a disservice by misusing (from your perspective) that term, thereby turning you off. But he just easily won a huge election! That’s objective reality: he got what he wanted, he succeeded. This might be a moment to consider other uses of that term, and the degree to which they may be outcompeting your adopted definition.