America’s socialist surge and its hard limits

Socialism may be as popular in the US today as it has ever been. Pollsters report that close to 40% of Americans have a favourable view of it, a figure that rises to a majority among Democrats and young people. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) languished in obscurity for years after the organisation was founded in 1982. But it now has over 120,000 members, including the mayors of New York City, Seattle, Providence, Rhode Island and soon Washington, DC, and probably seven members of the next House of Representatives. Because its candidates run as Democrats, they come under attack by some moderates in the party as well as by Republicans hoping to brand the opposition as beholden to disciples of totalitarianism.

The roots of this upsurge lie in the discontent of Americans, particularly young ones, with the economic and political state of the nation over the past two decades. The Great Recession of 2008-9 did not just destroy the household wealth of tens of millions of people and throw many out of work. It also drove many to question the benefits of the finance capitalist regime that officials from both major parties had promoted. Many left-leaning Democrats soured on the administration of President Barack Obama, whose campaign echoed the language of the civil rights and labour movements but appointed Wall Street “insiders” to key posts and refused to break up the big banks and insurance companies they blamed for causing the massive slump.

Tackling the rich-and-everyone-else gap

The uprisings that took place in dozens of cities in 2011 targeted not just such policies but the gap between rich Americans and everyone else that had been gradually growing since the 1970s. The slogan “We are the 99 percent” kept resonating long after police broke up encampments of demonstrators in parks from New York to Oakland, California. A potent new tide of populist anger was rising.

To turn that discontent toward socialism, as both critique and vision, required politicians proud to embrace the term. In his extraordinary campaign for the presidential nomination in 2016, Bernie Sanders defined socialism not as a radical or unfamiliar doctrine but as an extension of domestic policies enacted by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and Martin Luther King’s eloquent calls for economic justice. The senator from Vermont received 45% of the vote in Democratic primaries and caucuses, winning an overwhelming majority of the votes cast by people of all races under 30.

In 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez surprised the political world when she defeated an incumbent congressman in her party’s primary on her way to winning a seat in the House of Representatives from a multiracial district in New York City. She belonged to DSA while Sanders did not. But it was the only socialist organisation equipped to welcome thousands of Americans thrilled and mobilised by their campaigns. Soon, dozens of DSA members were running for and winning local offices in progressive areas around the nation.

Staying away from mentioning communist parties

Yet socialism remains as disputed an ideal for its adherents as Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism have always been for believers in those faiths. Anyone can join the DSA for US$15 a month or less, and the 1,000 or so delegates to its biennial conventions have elected members of hard-left factions to leadership posts. One current co-chair, Megan Romer, belongs to a “Marxist-Leninist” caucus whose “primary goal…is to abolish capitalism and, ultimately, to achieve communism”. This August, the organisation honoured the late Fidel Castro on the centenary of his birth as “a stalwart symbol of anti-imperialist struggle”.

Popular socialist politicians like Zohran Mamdani, Sanders, and Ocasio-Cortez avoid mentioning regimes ruled by communist parties, whether past or present. They argue instead for changes that would give a measure of comfort and power to working Americans, such as universal access to government-funded health care, affordable housing, and the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO) Act, which would facilitate union organising. Such policies have long existed in countries like Norway and Finland, where wealthy entrepreneurs also thrive. 

Neither do any of these elected figures call, as in the Marxian fashion, for the working class to seize the means of production. Instead they advocate what amounts to an updated version of the Economic Bill of Rights Franklin Roosevelt proposed back in 1944, “under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed”. Such rhetoric and policies resemble those of left social democrats in Europe and DSA founders like the writer Michael Harrington more than they do sectarians who still pine for a “vanguard party”, despite the blatant failures of such organisations in America’s past.

Platforms, not ideology

But what elections can give, they can also take away. Most Americans who tell pollsters they favour socialism live in reliably Democratic states and districts. There may be little that distinguishes a DSA member who wins office from a victorious progressive who eschews the “S word”. That is particularly true for mayors whom voters judge more by how well they run their cities than by the ideology with which they identify. A healthy majority of New Yorkers like how Mamdani has governed so far. But only a quarter of Chicagoans approve of Mayor Brandon Johnson, his fellow left Democrat, whom the DSA chapter in that city endorsed and canvassed for in 2023.

I doubt the Democratic Party will become a party dominated by socialists anytime soon. Most Americans still reject the term, even if they are not sure what it means. And to win the presidency and enduring majorities in Congress, Democrats still must cobble together a broad coalition of leftists and moderates, gaining seats in conservative states while retaining them in ones where the party is already strong. In the party’s heyday from the 1930s through the 1960s, its leaders knit together its factions by articulating the vision of a federal state that would regulate corporate power and provide economic security for all Americans (and, eventually, civil rights as well) and doing what they could to fulfill those promises. If socialist Democrats can force the party to embrace those goals again, they can augment their influence and numbers and persuade Americans to believe their government is on their side again.

Related: Fukuyama: A superpower at war with itself | From founding order to utopian drift: How America lost its centre