This is a partial list of notable social democrats.
'It's not socialism, it's social democracy, which is a big difference,' said Mike Konczal, an economic policy expert at the left-wing Roosevelt Institute.
Despite Sanders' self-identification as a 'democratic socialist,' all this is classic social democracy [...].
Robespierre's life was worth celebrating because he had consistently befriended the poor, defended the oppressed, championed social democracy, and fought for a fairer society.
[Bernie Sanders] doesn't want to nationalize our major industries and replace markets with central planning; he has expressed admiration, not for Venezuela, but for Denmark. He's basically what Europeans would call a social democrat — and social democracies like Denmark are, in fact, quite nice places to live, with societies that are, if anything, freer than our own.
Here Sanders was referencing Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights — the outline for American social democracy that the Democratic Party's patron saint sketched one year before his death. [...] In other words, Sanders is an admirer of European social democracy who sees FDR's Second Bill of Rights (not Karl Marx's Das Kapital) as the seminal articulation of his political philosophy.
Some see Robespierre as one of the founding fathers of social democracy, his revolutionary excesses occasioned by his championing the cause of the people.
With these positions, Sanders is technically a social democrat [...].
So until 1914, when war fractured the socialist movement, Lenin and Luxemburg were part of social democracy, not something apart from it. They were very much engaged in the struggle to make parties like the SPD radical, democratic organizations, capable of waging a fight against capitalism.
First, Sanders is not a socialist, but a social democrat. Second, the United States does not have a strictly capitalist economy, but a mixed one.