The word “socialist” has a unique ability in American politics to provoke high emotion. President Trump warned last month that the recent success of democratic socialist politicians posed “the most serious threat to our country since its existence.” He compared it to “an uncontrollable form of cancer” that will eventually destroy the country.
And that’s just the Republican response. Some Democratic leaders, too, want nothing to do with the socialists after a number of incumbents in New York and Colorado lost their primaries last month to insurgents from the left. These candidates won by harnessing a wide sense of grievance. They have also staked out positions uncomfortable for top Democrats, like ending all deportations and stopping military aid to Israel. “If you’re a socialist, you’re not a Democrat,” said Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey. “We are capitalist, not socialist,” announced a letter signed by a group of moderate House Democrats worried that their whole party will look extreme — and will lose in purple states and districts.
Socialists are used to losing in this country. Yet their movement has endured, because socialism — more of a spirit than a single ideology — adapts to each era. Socialists are astute critics of the status quo, always imagining other ways to live, whatever historical moment they happen to be in. Now their fortunes have turned, and they could be “on the verge of the political revolution we have fought for for such a long time,” as Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who has bedeviled the party while becoming the most influential American socialist in a century, said last week.
But if the movement is so amorphous, what is the type of socialism that is ascendant now?
Viewed through the lens of history, the modern version of American socialism is in some ways a throwback. The Democratic Socialists of America platform calls for universal health care, an idea long since implemented by their counterparts in Europe. Socialists have always tried to advance a spirit of cooperation, rather than competition. They abhor inequality — and don’t mind agitating the establishment in pursuit of their moral ends.
In one important way, though, the American socialist movement is breaking new ground. “This is the first time that a mass socialist organization has had members where almost all of them decide to run as Democrats, instead of running on their own party line,” said Michael Kazin, a professor of history at Georgetown University and a former editor of Dissent, a magazine of the social-democratic left.
It’s a bet that, with a new strategy this time, socialist ideas can be realized at a greater scale than ever before in the United States. The inside track is less revolutionary but far more threatening to the Democratic Party leadership, weakened after losing to Trump in 2024 and no longer able to ignore the rising forces to its left.
The ascent of the new D.S.A. candidates may have surprised the political establishment. But it’s not because the socialists have changed their tune. It’s because throughout their history, they have fallen short when they worked outside the two-party system. And now the call — ringing louder and louder — is coming from inside the house.
The outside arc
When socialism emerged in Europe in the early 1800s, the idea of capitalism had not fully crystallized. The earliest socialists were utopian thinkers. They dreamed of a society where people felt bonded to their neighbors, never pitted against them.
But the very loftiness of socialism has left room for wide interpretation and disagreement — both over what it looks like in practice and how to achieve it politically. Some proponents have wanted to smash capitalism entirely. Others hoped to work within liberal governments to reform it, spreading wealth to more people. Always, there are pragmatists who chase achievable results and purists who scoff at such moral capitulation.
But socialism also persists because its ideas can win adherents in moments of political and economic crisis. When the market collapses, when leaders are venal, when everything seems too expensive, socialism is ready. At its heart, socialism is “the hope for human freedom and justice under the unprecedented conditions of life that humanity will face,” wrote Michael Harrington, who led the American socialist movement in some of its most fallow years and co-founded the D.S.A. in 1982.
Some of the earliest socialists were in fact capitalists — only they were consumed by a utopian vision requiring a total restructuring of society.
Robert Owen, a Welsh industrialist and cotton manufacturer, became horrified by factory conditions in England in the early 19th century. Children as young as 6 worked for 16 hours a day. Workers were routinely maimed or died on the job. To Owen, industrialization felt exploitative and cruel. The more factory owners competed with one another, the more they squeezed their workers to accrue greater profits.
In an era with no factory regulations, Owen shortened the workday, refused to employ children under the age of 10 and opened a company store with affordable goods for workers. Then he began to imagine entire communities built in the spirit of cooperation. Socialism was to be a new science of society itself, with ideas for how to eradicate poverty and inequality. He moved to Indiana in 1825 and founded a community called New Harmony, where everyone would pitch in to farm, to clean, to cook. All would be shared. Within a few years, however, the project failed.
Compared with England, it took longer for socialism to emerge in the United States, since the country was slower to industrialize. But when the ills of factory life arrived in the late 19th century, the socialist movement soon flowered. The Socialist Party, founded in 1901, attracted an unusual collection of people horrified by the way economic forces were reshaping their country. There were tenant farmers on the Great Plains, secular Jews in New York City and tradesmen in Midwestern cities, united in their revulsion toward big business. Socialist newspapers, bookstores, even summer camps flourished. Many socialists were Christians fervently trying to follow Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.
Eugene V. Debs, a charismatic labor leader from Indiana, became the face of the movement and ran for president five times, urging crowds to vote out “the foul and decaying system.” His strongest performance came in 1912, when he won 6 percent of the popular vote.
Further down the ticket, though, some socialists were victorious and began running cities. These mayors, in places like Milwaukee, built a reputation for good governance. Known as “sewer socialists,” they cleaned up unhygienic water systems, built libraries and parks, fortified funding for public schooling.
These years would mark the apex of American socialism in the 20th century, though. Cold War politics would later mash socialists and communists together into one common enemy. Yet the two groups were in fact often rivals. Many of their ideals overlapped, but when the Bolshevik Revolution inspired some leftists to swear their loyalty to the new Russian regime, socialist leaders balked. The Communists formed their own party, and thanks to Soviet sponsorship, its ranks swelled as the Socialist Party lost members.
Still, in times of crisis, socialist ideas occasionally took hold.
When capitalism nearly self-destructed during the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt enacted programs like Social Security, modeled on a socialist idea for old-age pensions. The president borrowed another socialist notion — public works projects — and employed millions of jobless Americans to build structures like the Hoover Dam and the Lincoln Tunnel.
In the 1960s, socialists were among the most effective leaders of the civil rights movement, bringing radical ideas of racial and economic equality to the masses. A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, both socialists, organized the 1963 march where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.
Harrington, an ally of King, emerged in the late 1960s as the next leader of the socialist movement. He brought a new approach. Harrington believed that the socialists would never succeed by running candidates under their own flag and instead should work to transform the Democratic Party in order to pursue a “left-wing of the possible.” After Harrington’s influential book “The Other America” drew a devastating portrait of American poverty, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration asked him to help wage the so-called war on poverty. Harrington urged Americans to notice that they were settling for a far weaker welfare state than other liberal democratic countries in Europe.
Nevertheless, these were decades of decline for socialists. By the end of the 1980s, capitalism was in full triumph as communist regimes crumbled. An ethos of individualism and competition — the opposite of the original socialist spirit — animated American culture. At the turn of the century, the movement seemed anemic, with D.S.A. membership numbering roughly 5,000.
A new path
But the inside track would eventually bear fruit. The 2008 financial crisis exposed terrifying cracks in the economy, now thoroughly globalized and maximized for profit by Wall Street. Millennials graduated college into the most miserable job market since the Great Depression, and Americans began paying more attention to an elderly senator from Vermont who called himself a democratic socialist. In 2016, Sanders soared in the Democratic presidential primary, winning over young people, including many independents, who feared economic insecurity more than a Soviet boogeyman that had been vanquished for decades.
Among these fresh acolytes were figures like Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, both of whom eventually won elections in New York by running in Democratic primaries. Others in this cohort have won that way this spring, from New York to Colorado to the District of Columbia, where the next mayor is set to be a socialist. A feeling of revolution is back in the air. But for now it is the party, not the country, that is being remade.
The D.S.A. has an opening because of dissatisfaction not just with the economy but also with Democratic leaders. In a recent New York Times/Siena poll, more than half of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents indicated they felt frustrated with the party. Many of these voters want it to stop promising to return America to the pre-Trump status quo, since they no longer believe in that system.
The socialists are drawing from a national rage at the state of the country that has been gathering steam for decades and transcends party and ideology. Americans are bitter over how their leaders have handled its economy and its wars, and each cycle they have tried to express it, one way or another. First, the Republican base took out its party’s leadership and installed Trump and the MAGA movement. Now Democrats are firing incumbents.
Some Democrats argue that in the face of the rising tide of D.S.A., the party should affirm its support for capitalism. This may be a tough sell in a time when capitalism is falling in popularity. Under half of Americans say capitalism is working very well or even somewhat well, down from 60 percent a decade ago, according to a new Wall Street Journal-NORC survey. Whatever you want to call the status quo, many Americans say they simply don’t want it.
This is precisely the type of historical moment when socialism begins to make sense to more people, and now socialists have come to Democratic voters to offer it. When your life feels horribly constrained by forces beyond your control, when it feels as if every possible avenue has been exhausted, socialism arrives with a vision of another way: Here, it says. Here lies the way out.
