Democrats have made the primaries about much more than US President Donald Trump. Sanders’ momentum reflects a yearning for radical solutions to serious structural economic problems. Decades after World War II, the US economy became steadily more productive and wages for all workers grew by over 2 percent per year, on average. But that is no longer the case today.

Over the last four decades, productivity growth has been lackluster, economic growth has slowed, and an increasing share of the gains have gone to capital owners and the highly educated.

Meanwhile, median wages have stagnated, and the real (inflation-adjusted) wages of workers with a high school education or less have actually fallen.

Just a few companies (and their owners) dominate much of the economy. The top 0.1 percent of the income distribution captures more than 11 percent of national income, up from around just 2.5 percent in the 1970s.

But does democratic socialism offer a cure for these ills? As an ideology that regards the market economy as unfair, un-equalizing, and incorrigible, its solution is to cut that system’s most important lifeline: private ownership of the means of production.

Instead of a system in which firms and all of their equipment and machinery rest in the hands of a small group of owners, democratic socialists would prefer “economic democracy”, whereby companies would be controlled either by their workers or by an administrative structure operated by the state.

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