In the past week, candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) won nine out of the ten state and federal primaries contested in New York, including upsets in two congressional districts. Pennsylvania Democrats chose socialist Chris Rabb as the party’s candidate for the state’s Third Congressional District. Democratic socialist Janeese Lewis George will almost certainly become the next mayor of Washington, D.C. In Colorado, DSA-backed Melat Kiros won the primary for the First Congressional District, unseating 15-term incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette.
These and other gains have led to borderline hysterical commentaries from the center and right, many of them self-interested, all of them misleading.
According to a Wall Street Journal editorial, “Traditional Democrats are now facing a hostile takeover from the socialist left, and so far few are willing to put up a fight.” This is false. Corporate Democrats are fighting, with millions of dollars in super PAC ads; they’re just losing. They have only money. Democratic socialists have committed activists as ground troops.
Many commentators are also alarmed that the success of the economic left is often linked to a critique both of Israel’s policies of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank and of the excessive influence of AIPAC in domestic policies, often in bed with the corporate right and dark-money PACs. These critiques invariably raise the specter of antisemitism.
The Jewish Insider newsletter warned, “The Colorado results suggest that, far from being contained to a few scattered congressional districts in New York City, the momentum for far-left, anti-Israel candidates is only growing within the Democratic Party, especially within urban population centers.” I have yet to read any such critique which candidly acknowledges that the backlash might have something to do with Israel’s appalling behavior.
Even more nuanced commentaries get it partly wrong. Paul Krugman writes in a recent Substack post: “The fact is that very few Americans—even among politicians who call themselves ‘democratic socialists’—are really socialists. What many, I’d say a majority, of Americans support is what Europeans call social democracy—an ideology that is OK with living in a mostly market-driven economic system in which some people make much more money than others, but one that advocates policies to tame markets and inequality with progressive taxation, safety net programs, and regulations.”
Since his liberation from the timorously censorial New York Times, Krugman has become an indispensable source of insight on all things economic. But here Krugman is partly off because he doesn’t pay enough attention to the politics.
Social democracy is indeed popular throughout the West. Large majorities of people like universal health care, social retirement programs, good public transit, progressive taxation, and the rest of the “safety net” package. But social democracy is politically weak, and on the defensive, everywhere, because capitalists have too much wealth and power and use their power to destroy the social democratic compromise with capitalism.
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That’s why the shrewdest progressives have long understood that social transfers and regulatory strategies are not enough to keep capital contained. You need a good dose of socialist public ownership as well, combined with social movements like trade unions.
Franklin Roosevelt understood this. The original Fannie Mae, The Federal National Mortgage Association, which made home mortgages more plentiful, was a public institution. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation was a public investment bank. Social Security is not just a government-sponsored and -guaranteed system of retirement. It is frankly socialist. Capitalist financial institutions play no role in it whatsoever.
Krugman writes that socialism seems to be on the rise “because right-wing propagandists continually smear social democratic policies as socialist, trying to make popular, mainstream policy ideas sound extreme.” While the right does try to smear progressives as communists, I don’t think Krugman gets that quite right. As young people personally experience the ravages of American capitalism, socialism is on the rise because it is being transformed from a bad word into a good word.
According to Gallup, 66 percent of self-identified Democrats have a positive image of socialism, while only 42 percent feel that way about capitalism. The younger the voter and the further removed from memories of the Cold War, the more approval of socialism increases.
That doesn’t mean socialism is a good word everywhere. In more traditionally conservative areas of the country, such as Georgia or Texas, pocketbook progressives will not call themselves socialists, and the right will try to use the presence of more explicit socialists in the Democratic Party to tar candidates like Jon Ossoff or James Talarico as closet socialists. But ultimately, voter revulsion against the excesses of capitalism and the articulation of compelling alternatives matter more than the label.
The corporate right called FDR every name in the book. He wore the slurs as a badge, and the people knew whose side he was on.
