Their is a continuing push, everywhere, to get parties that once identified as socialist and/or fought for socialism to abandon that term and identify, instead, as "social democratic".
The question is...what core values, if any, are still attached to the term "social democracy"?
At one point, it was associated with the valid and still-legitimate idea of creating a socialist society by democratic means- of creating a radical transformation to an egalitarian, oppression-free and more fully democratic society, with a foreign policy that was as non-militarist as possible- and presented itself as such as an alternative to Stalinism.
Over time, though, the parties that called themselves social democratic moved further and further away from this.
After World War II, none of these parties-other than that of historically neutral Sweden- have challenged any part of the perpetual military buildup that has continued throughout the democratic world since 1945, or opposed any of the utterly pointless wars Britain, European countries or North American countries have engaged in since the war against fascism.
After the Fifties, most "social democratic" parties no longer supported putting any significant part of the economy, and were completely unwilling to back any measures to encourage worker ownership and self-management.
After the Seventies, many if not most of these parties stopped pushing for any expansion of "the social wage"(the welfare state which acted as a redistributor of wealth without redistributing economic power to working people at all) and many stopped defending the existing levels of social spending. In numerous countries, these parties even started cutting the social wage, accepting the idea that the social wage should be no larger than what corporate power would tolerate.
After the Eighties and Nineties, these parties largely stopped supporting any tax increases on the wealthy- and began making smug, dismissive comments about being "extremely casual" about massive concentrations of wealth in the hands of the few.
Since 2000, most "social democratic" parties haven't supported anything progressive other than a few relatively mild antiracist and anti-LGBTQ measures. They no longer feel any obligation to support the labour movement, no longer stand with the poor against the rich, do not challenge "market values" decision that turn who they no longer feel any obligation to oppose austerity. They've been, at best, indifferent to "green values". These parties no longer stand for anything other than getting "our kick at the can", and, in every country where they exist, they are now nothing but the slightly-less-nasty wing of the establishment.
And none of the rightward changes had had positive results for "social democrats" or social democracy in electoral terms.
In every European country, this perpetual rightward swing has brought nothing but defeat and irrelevance for social democratic parties.
In Germany, where the term "social democracy" was coined, the SPD, the world's first social democratic party, is headed for a humiliating defeat in the next elections- the polls there now have the SPD, at best, in third place, behind the Christian Democrats and Greens, and at times just barely ahead of the racist, xenophobic, all-but-Nazi AfD(Alliance for Germany).
In most of the rest of Europe, parties identifying as social democratic are winning only about 20% of the vote in recent election-many have seen their vote share slide in election after election. Most are third parties, some are FOURTH parties.
All that being the case, why not just retire the term "social democracy" and try to create a radical, democratic, egalitarian, green political force that addresses both the continuing issues of the powerless and dispossed and of the historic working class, while finally taking up the issues of the "precariat", those who do precarious or "gig" labour and are, as a group, facing massive obstacles to their struggle to gain rights in their workplaces and to their ability to organize into unions, the only organizations that can ever effectively fight for their rights?
Social democracy is moderated itself out of relevance and, in many respects, out of existence.
Let's create something that matters, instead.
