Since
its heyday in the early 20th Century, socialism in the US struggled
to win even a tiny following. Now candidates are openly calling
themselves socialists and winning elections.
by
Dave Lindorff
Last
month, a major earthquake shook the bedrock of New York City
politics, sending shockwaves that were felt across the US as
28-year-old Brooklyn-born Puerto Rican socialist Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez trounced Rep. Joe Crowley, a 10-term House of
Representatives member who was widely presumed to be the likely
successor to long time House leader Nancy Pelosi.
A
socialist winning an important House race in a country that just
elected billionaire capitalist Donald Trump as president, and handed
control of both houses of Congress to the Republicans – a party
dedicated to unfettered capitalism? How can this be?
Clearly,
some kind of tectonic shift is underway in American politics, because
Ocasio-Cortez is not the only socialist winning elections and ousting
establishment Democrats. Four incumbent members of the state
legislature in Pennsylvania, a state that narrowly voted for Trump in
2016, were defeated this year in primaries by insurgent candidates –
all of them, like Osario-Cortez, members of Democratic Socialists of
America, a little-known political group that has suddenly grown in
membership from 6000 prior to 2016 to over 40,000 this year.
And as
if that weren’t enough, in a stunning aftershock following her
initial win in Brooklyn, Ocasio-Cortez learned that she had won a
primary in a neighboring district in the Bronx on the Reform Party
line. That minor party had no candidates running and had urged voters
in the district to write in Osario-Cortez’s name, which they did in
large numbers.
Socialism
as a political force has never had an easy time in the US, a country
that mythologizes the go-it-alone entrepreneur and the iconoclastic
loner. For a brief time in the period between the two world wars,
socialism was popular enough among US workers that American Socialist
Party leader Eugene Debs was able to win almost a million votes for
president in 1912 (about 6 percent of the popular vote at that time).
But after two brutal government anti-red campaigns in the ‘20s and
‘50s that included Debs’ arrest, the blacklisting of many actors,
teachers and journalists in the 1950s on charges of being Communists,
and finally decades of government and media propaganda equating
socialism with Communism, Bolshevism and Maoism, socialism has had
few adherents and little public acceptance among most Americans.
Until
now, that is.
Things
started to change in late 2015 and the spring of 2016 when the
independent US Senator Bernie Sanders, who has long called himself a
"democratic socialist,” surprised everyone by running a
popular grass-roots primary campaign that nearly defeated Hillary
Clinton for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. (Many
believe hidden favoritism and sabotage by the leadership of the
Democratic Party may have stolen that primary from Sanders.)
Now, in
part because the Sanders campaign has made socialist ideas like
national healthcare and free college education – once not on any
Democratic candidate’s campaign agenda – suddenly acceptable
topics for political discourse, his millions of enthusiastic youthful
supporters from that campaign are openly considering socialism as a
possible answer to the economic problems they face.
And as
those young people, and older folks too, look for answers, more and
more candidates are willing to espouse them. And like Ocasio-Cortez
and the four socialists who won primaries in Pennsylvania, they are
showing that proposing or supporting socialist programs, and even
calling oneself a socialist, can be a winning strategy.
One sign
that this sudden popularity of socialist politics and ideas is not
just a short-time phenomenon is that it’s showing up most among
younger people, many of whom hadn’t shown much interest in politics
before. A Harvard University study published in April for example,
found that 51 percent of those between the ages of 18-29 disliked
capitalism, with a majority preferring socialism as a political
system. A year earlier, the conservative magazine National Review
wrote with alarm that in the wake of the Sanders campaign, a poll by
the conservative American Culture and Faith Institute had found 40
percent of Americans saying they favored socialism over capitalism.
Add to
that the huge and growing older population of retirees living on
Social Security retirement benefits (which Republicans and
conservative Democrats keep warning need to be reduced), and already
dependent on a kind of socialized medicine called Medicare which is
inadequate but still wildly popular and only available to those over
the age of 65. These people already know the value of at least two
socialist-style programs. Meanwhile many Baby Boomers, who came of
age during the ‘60s and ‘70s, a period of rejecting capitalist
consumerism and of experimenting with communal living, are
considering returning to their "socialist" roots,
re-establishing communes as a away of reducing living costs and
avoiding being moved into nursing homes as they age.
One
person who sees a new receptivity among Americans for socialist ideas
and candidates is Kevin Zeese, a long-time activist and occasional
candidate for the Green Party – a small environmentalist/socialist
party that has been running candidates locally and nationally for
years, including in presidential races. He tells RT, “Yes,
socialism is getting more popular. It is an economic approach that is
kept out of schools and not fairly discussed in the media, so when
someone says they support socialism - what do they mean? I suspect
there are lots of different types of answers.”
But he
adds, “Putting aside those details, people are experiencing the
unfairness of capitalism. When half the US population literally has
wealth equal to three people, there is something seriously wrong,
especially when that half of the population is economically insecure,
tens of millions in poverty, and many not having enough income to
rent a decent house, not to mention buy one. Capitalism is not
working for most people and they want an alternative.”
Zeese
cautions against reading too much into the recent primary victories
by socialist candidates like Ocasio-Cortez and others across the
country in state and local races, noting that voter turnout in
primary races, as opposed to general elections, is always fairly
small, and that in any case, each local race or congressional race
has many local factors and issues. For example, he points out that
Ocasio-Cortez, a Latina, ran in a district that is primarily Latin
American, including many voters who are Puerto Ricans like herself.
But
having made that caveat, he goes on to say her primary victory and
the likelihood that she will win of a seat in Congress in November
gives her “a very important role in educating people on the
issues, as she now has a big megaphone. More people will learn from
her and the socialist movement will develop.”
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