Popular intellectuals always try to give socialism a pass. It is left-wing sentiments—or more generally, anti-free-market sentiments—that enable industries to convince the populace to support laws that give them feudalistic control. See how the Hotel Industry successfully used these to lock down major short-term rental markets:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/16/technology/inside-the-hot...
And what can reasonably be described as socialism in the context of these type of broad-strokes grand narrative discussions: compulsory income redistribution to fund social programs, has massively grown—at the expense of the private sector's share of GDP—over the last 60 years:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...
What has happened is that socialism has advanced due to the nature of democracy and short-term voter considerations, while the private sector has become more feudalistic due to the expansion of regulations (e.g. 5% of jobs required an occupational license in 1950. Today it's 30%).
Another subject that intellectuals of this type won't touch is unions. Doctorow is well aware that all of the major institutions involved in the generation of ideas, like journalism and academia, are captured by unions. He's going to remain politically correct and not talk about the rent-extraction that unions engage in. e.g. unionized government sector workers in California now earn twice as much as private sector workers:
https://www.hoover.org/research/california-state-government-...
Not only are government sector unions seeing their income, as a share of GDP rise as they become kingmakers in municipal and state politics, but they are also successfully getting compliant governments to agree to collective bargaining terms that increasingly shield them from accountability, e.g. only 75 public school teachers were fired in New York over 16 months in 2015 and 2016:
https://www.the74million.org/article/investigation-nyc-tried...