One measure of her influence: As of early May, Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer had 1.7 million Twitter followers House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had 2.5 million Ocasio-Cortez had 4 million.Īlthough President Donald Trump declared war on socialism in his 2019 State of the Union address, its champions felt no pressure to back down. Their ranks included Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who quickly became one of the country’s best-known politicians. Bernie Sanders received 45 percent of the Democratic primary vote in 2016, and in the 2018 mid-term elections, members of Democratic Socialists of America were among the prominent Democratic victors. The crash of 2008, rising inequality, and an intensifying critique of how contemporary capitalism works has brought socialism back into the mainstream-in some ways even more powerfully than in Debs’ time, since those who use the label have become an influential force in the Democratic Party. But when it came to electoral politics, socialism was largely shunned or irrelevant. The New Deal drew on proposals pioneered by socialists, and it was a young socialist named Michael Harrington whose book The Other America helped launch the war on poverty. Socialism never lost its intellectual influence, however. After the war ended, the Communist seizure of power in what became the Soviet Union contributed to a “red scare” that further weakened America’s indigenous socialist tradition. (Debs secured almost a million votes in the 1920 presidential election, running from a jail cell). Socialism declined after this peak and faced repression during World War I because of the party’s opposition to the war. In the 1912 presidential election, Debs secured six percent of the popular vote, and Socialists held 1,200 offices in 340 cities, their ranks including 79 mayors. It’s worth recalling how important socialism once was at the ballot box to understand that this tradition has deeper roots in our history than many imagine.

I was once an avowed communist