Between now and next year’s midterm elections, the “S” word, and even the “C” word, are going to get a workout. President Trump and his allies have called New York’s socialist mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani a Communist, a Marxist, a terrorist, and even a jihadist. They’re warning that the U.S. is experiencing a wave of “socialism,” a term that they hope still carries its hoary Cold War connotations. They hope to make Mamdani the face of the Democratic Party, a tactic intended to discredit its candidates in swing races.
During the Red Scare hysteria of the 1950s, American socialism fell on hard times. Few Americans distinguished between the European social-welfare systems and the communism of the Soviet Union or China. Across the nation, universities, labor unions, public schools, movie studios and other major institutions purged themselves of their left-wingers. Even many liberals were afraid to speak out for fear of being called a Communist and losing their jobs.
Through the Obama administration, the use of the term “socialism” as a kind of political epithet was on full display, with the president’s opponents — the Republican Party, the Tea Party, the right-wing blogosphere, the Chamber of Commerce, and conservative media figures such as Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh — labeling anything he proposed, including his modest health-care reform law, “socialism.”
Over the last decade, however, something has started to shift. Republicans have not stopped red-baiting, and they will continue to shout “socialism” as they attempt to defeat Democrats next year and in 2028. But the political climate has dramatically changed. Americans, particularly those under 50, are more open to candidates who call themselves socialists, so long as they have practical ideas for solving their problems. They are reassessing their understanding of socialism, and its place within American identity.
This is fitting: For more than a century, socialism has been integral to American progressivism, championing early many of the reforms that would eventually come into vogue on the center left.
We are seeing that dynamic play out again today.
From the margins to the mainstream
Mamdani is a member of Democratic Socialists of America, but most of the one million New Yorkers who voted for him would likely not describe themselves as “socialists.” The same is true of those who voted for Katie Wilson, the socialist community organizer who will become Seattle’s new mayor, or for the other dozen socialists who were elected to office for the first time in November. There are few self-identified socialists among the voters who supported the more than 250 people now serving in office who are DSA members, were endorsed by local DSA chapters, or, like Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, call themselves democratic socialists but have never joined the organization.
There are now at least 135 DSAers and DSA-affiliated city council members, 64 state legislators, 21 school board members, 6 mayors, and three members of Congress. In November, voters in Atlanta; Detroit; Tucson; Greenbelt, Maryland; Troy and Poughkeepsie, New York; Hamden, New London and New Britain, Connecticut; and Amherst, Massachusetts elected democratic socialists on their city councils. Minneapolis added one new democratic socialist to its city council, bringing the total to five. Ithaca, New York, added two, bringing the total to three. Five DSAers serve on the Chicago city council and four serve on its counterpart in Portland, Oregon. In Los Angeles, four of the 15 city council members are affiliated with DSA, and two others are currently running for council seats that will be decided next year. Voters have elected eight DSAers to the New York state legislature and three to Pennsylvania’s. Last year, voters in Eau Claire, Wisconsin elected socialist Christian Phelps, a freelance journalist and organizer for Wisconsin Public Education Network, to the state assembly, replacing a Republican.
To put that all in perspective, we haven’t seen so many socialist office holders since, roughly, 1912. That year, Eugene V. Debs — the Socialist Party’s presidential candidate — won more than 900,000 votes, 6 percent of the total (and fewer than the votes Mamdani got for mayor). Debs might have garnered even more, but two other candidates — Democrat Woodrow Wilson and Progressive Party candidate (and former president) Theodore Roosevelt — stole some of the Socialists’ thunder, winning the support of workers, women and consumers with promises of such progressive reforms as women’s suffrage, child labor laws and workers’ right to organize unions — policies the socialists helped to mainstream.
Debs lost, but that year 1,200 members of the Socialist Party held public office, from school boards to Congress, including 79 mayors in cities such as Milwaukee, Buffalo, Minneapolis, Reading and Schenectady. In office, they pushed for the expansion of parks, libraries, playgrounds and other services, including public ownership of utilities and transportation facilities, free meals for poor schoolchildren, a living wage for workers, and a friendlier attitude toward unions, especially during strikes.
This has been the pattern with American socialists. For more than a century, their role has been to move so-called “radical” ideas — proposals to make society more humane, more livable, and more fair, and to give everyday people a stronger voice in their democracy and workplaces — from the margins to the mainstream.
In 1916, Congressman Victor Berger, a Milwaukee socialist, sponsored the first bill to create “old age pensions.” The bill didn’t get very far, but two decades later, in the midst of the Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt persuaded Congress to enact Social Security. Conservative critics and big business groups denounced it as un-American, even Communistic. But today, most Americans, even conservatives, believe that Social Security is a good idea. What had once seemed radical has become common sense. In fact, much of FDR’s other New Deal legislation — the minimum wage, workers’ right to form unions and public works programs to create jobs for the unemployed — was first espoused by American socialists.
A crisis of capitalism
The DSA was founded in 1982, as the Cold War waned, after a merger of two small leftist organizations. Before Sanders ran for president in 2016, its membership hovered around 8,000. Within a year after Sanders’ first presidential campaign and then Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’ victory in 2018, the number jumped to about 32,000. Mamdani’s campaign inspired a new wave of membership, which now exceeds 80,000 nationwide. The median age has declined from 68 in 2017 to about 33 today, according to DSA.DSA members, however, represent just a tiny sliver of the Americans who offer support for socialism at the ballot box. According to a recent Gallup poll, 39% of Americans (including 66% of Democrats) have a positive attitude toward socialism. Moreover, the proportion with a favorable view of capitalism has plunged from 60% in 2021 to 54% today.
But even that figure underestimates that potential appeal of socialist-like ideas among Americans. Polls show that a vast majority of Americans share progressive views, even if they don’t describe themselves as socialists. For example:
- 71% consider wealth inequality a serious national issue.
- 69% of Americans think the American economy is rigged to advantage the rich and powerful.
- 82% view the influence of money in politics as a threat to American democracy.
- 71% of Americans (including 53% of Republicans) think that billionaires aren’t taxed enough.
- 63% of Americans — including 43% of Republicans — say tax rates on large businesses and corporations should be raised.
- 82% say the cost of prescription drugs is unreasonable, and say profits made by pharmaceutical companies are a “major factor” in the high price of prescription drugs. Surprisingly, 89% of Republicans share this view, compared with 78% of independents and 84% of Democrats.
- 62% of Americans — including 90% of Democrats, 65% of independents, and 32% of Republicans — think it is the responsibility of the federal government to make sure all Americans have health care coverage.
- 59% support a single-payer or Medicare for All system (27% oppose the idea and 14% had no opinion).
- 68% of Americans support labor unions, a significant increase since the 1960s.
- 83% support raising the federal minimum wage from the current $7.25 an hour to $12, while 64% of voters (including 45% of Republicans) think it should be increased to $17 an hour.
- 82% (including 76% of Republicans) support a federal paid family and medical leave program.
- 73% of Americans support government-funded universal child care.
- These views align with the positions of DSA office-holders and other progressive officials. In fact, nothing about Mamdani’s agenda for New York, or Wilson’s for Seattle, is particularly radical. For example, many cities around the world, and quite a few in the United States, provide free public transit. Hundreds of cities already have some form of rent control, including New York. Government-run grocery stores — a Mamdani proposal on which right-wing voices fixated — are successful around the world, operated by governments left, right and center, and, in fact, already exist in New York.
- If Mamdani, Wilson, and other democratic socialists have any model at all, it is not the authoritarian governments of Russia, China or Cuba, but the social democracies of Scandinavia. These countries have greater equality and a higher standard of living for working families, stronger unions, and a much wider social safety net. They also have free (or almost free) universities, universal health insurance, and lower poverty.
- Like social democrats and democratic socialists, most Americans agree that private businesses should be subject to rules that require them to act responsibly. Banks shouldn’t engage in reckless predatory lending. Energy corporations shouldn’t endanger the planet and public health by emitting too much pollution. Companies should be required to guarantee that consumer products (like cars and toys) are safe and that companies pay decent wages and provide safe workplaces.
- They want to reduce the political influence of the super rich and big corporations, increase taxes on the wealthy to help pay for expanded public services like child care, public transit, and higher education, and reduce barriers to voting. They support a higher minimum wage, paid sick days and paid vacations, safer workplaces, and unions. Socialists emphasize government enterprise, but even most Americans favor government-run police departments, fire departments, national parks, municipally-owned utilities, local transit systems, and public state universities and community colleges.
- It was Mamdani’s and Wilson’s focus on affordability and democracy that catapulted them into the winner’s circle. The lesson for Democrats is not that all or even most of their candidates should run as democratic socialists, but that they should embrace policy ideas that help Americans who are worried about making ends meet, concerned about the widening wealth and income divide, and upset that our democracy is being gutted by billionaires. Indeed, the arrogance and corruption of Trump and Elon Musk — and their obvious indifference and cruelty toward Americans just trying to get by — were a major factor in recruiting Americans to vote for Mamdani, Wilson, and other socialist candidates, as well as Buffalo’s newly-elected progressive mayor Sean Ryan and more mainstream Democrats like newly-elected governors Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia.
A very American tradition
Throughout American history, some of the nation’s most influential activists and thinkers, such as Debs, John Dewey, Helen Keller, W.E.B. DuBois, Albert Einstein, A. Philip Randolph, Walter Reuther, Gloria Steinem, and Martin Luther King Jr. embraced democratic socialism.King believed that America needed a “radical redistribution of economic and political power.” He told his staff, “maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.”
Conservative Americans love to recite the “Pledge of Allegiance” and sing “America the Beautiful. Few probably know that Francis Bellamy, a socialist Baptist minister, wrote “The Pledge” and that a socialist poet, Katherine Lee Bates, penned “America the Beautiful” in the 1890s.
In the early 1900s, socialists led the movements for women’s suffrage, child labor laws, consumer protection laws and the progressive income tax. Socialists were in the forefront of the civil rights movement from the founding of the NAACP in 1909 through the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Socialists have long pushed for a universal health insurance plan, which helped create the momentum for stepping-stone measures such as Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s and Obamacare today.
Mamdani, Wilson, and other elected socialists are well-acquainted with the history of American socialism, including the opportunities and pitfalls they faced when governing cities.
In the early 1900s, Milwaukee was the center of American socialism. Dominated by the brewery industry, the city was home to many Polish, German, and other immigrant workers who made up the movement’s rank and file. In 1910 Milwaukee voters elected Emil Seidel, a former pattern maker, as their mayor, gave socialists a majority of seats on the city council and the county board and selected socialists for the school board and as city treasurer, city attorney, comptroller and two civil judgeships.
In office, the socialists expanded Milwaukee’s parks and library system and improved the public schools. They granted municipal employees an eight-hour day. They adopted tough factory and building regulations. They reined in police brutality against striking workers and improved working conditions for rank-and-file cops. Milwaukee’s socialists improved the harbor, built municipal housing and sponsored public markets. The socialists had their own local newspaper and sponsored carnivals, picnics, singing societies and even Sunday schools. Under pressure from city officials, the local railway and electricity companies — which operated with municipal licenses — reduced their rates.
Grateful for these programs, voters kept socialists in office. They elected Daniel Hoan as mayor from 1916 to 1940. In those years, Milwaukee was frequently cited for its clean, efficient management practices, and its leaders boastfully called themselves “sewer socialists.”
In April 1936, Time Magazine put Hoan on its cover. The story called Hoan a “reform mayor” who “represents a party which has only some 3,000 paid-up members in a city of 578,000 people. The city’s bankers, utilities and big real estate owners are his “his sworn enemies,” Time noted, and the local press is “solidly against him.” Despite this, Milwaukee voters kept Hoan in office for 24 years. The reason, Time explained, is that Hoan “remains one of the nation’s ablest public servants, and under him Milwaukee has become perhaps the best-governed city in the U.S.”
New York City, too, has a history of adopting policies labeled as “socialist.” Fiorello La Guardia, during his three terms as New York’s mayor (1933–45), was in particular denounced as a leftist by his critics. Though he ran an honest, efficient, and progressive administration that helped lift the spirit and improve the conditions of New York’s polyglot working class, business groups constantly attacked him as an impractical radical. When La Guardia wanted the city to purchase snow-removal equipment in advance of winter storms, Comptroller Charles Craig said it was “the wildest kind of radical, socialistic” idea. La Guardia once told the New York Times, “When anyone raises a question about the existing order, he is called either a reformer or a radical. It has been my lot to be called the latter. Why? Only because I have consistently objected to things which I believe unjust and dangerous.”
Socialists and the Democratic Party
In 1932, in the depths of the Depression, Norman Thomas, a Protestant minister, ran for president on a Socialist Party platform that called for old-age pensions, public works projects, a more progressive income tax, unemployment insurance, relief for farmers, subsidized housing for working families, a shorter work week and the nationalization of banks and basic industries. Thomas figured that in such desperate times, his message would appeal to voters. But many voters who may have agreed with Thomas’ views did not want to “waste” their vote on a socialist who had no chance to win and who might even take enough votes away from the Democratic candidate, Franklin D. Roosevelt, to keep Republican Herbert Hoover in office. Thomas did not expect to win, but he was disappointed that while FDR garnered 22.8 million votes (57 percent), he had to settle for 884,781 (2 percent). When friends expressed delight that FDR was carrying out some of the Socialist platform, Thomas responded that it was being carried out “on a stretcher.” He viewed the New Deal as patching, rather than fixing, a broken system.
Following the success of his popular muckraking book, “The Jungle,” about the horrors of Chicago’s slums and factories, journalist Upton Sinclair moved to California and ran on the Socialist Party ticket for the House of Representatives (1920), the U.S. Senate (1922) and California governor (1926 and 1930), winning few votes. In 1934, Sinclair figured he might have more influence running for office as a Democrat. He wrote a 64-page pamphlet outlining his economic plan — “I, Governor of California and How I Ended Poverty” — and entered the California Democratic gubernatorial primary.
Much to Sinclair’s surprise, his pamphlet became a bestseller across California. His campaign turned into a popular grassroots movement. Thousands of people volunteered for his campaign, organizing End Poverty in California (EPIC) clubs across the state. The campaign’s weekly newspaper, the EPIC News, reached a circulation of nearly one million by primary day in August 1934. The campaign allowed Sinclair to present his socialist ideas as common-sense solutions to California’s harsh economic conditions.
Sinclair shocked California’s political establishment (and himself) by winning the Democratic primary. Fearing a Sinclair victory, California’s powerful business groups joined forces and mobilized an expensive and effective dirty-tricks campaign against him. On Election Day, Sinclair got 37 percent of the vote — twice the total for any Democrat in the state’s history.
Sinclair did not win, but his ideas pushed the New Deal to the left. After the Democrats won a landslide midterm election in Congress that year, FDR launched the so-called Second New Deal, including Social Security, major public works programs and the National Labor Relations Act, which gave workers the right to unionize.
The Sinclair campaign taught socialists a valuable lesson: Rather than run candidates on a third-party ticket, which would make them a fringe political movement, they would not only continue to participate in the key movements for a more robust politics and humane country, but also work within the Democratic Party to push it to embrace more radical ideas.
The new Gilded Age
As the Democratic Party finds its way, largely out of power amid Trump’s authoritarian onslaught, oligarchs’ looting of government and a precarious, worsening economy, New York voters welcomed Mamdani’s laser-like focus on making the city more affordable, including free buses, universal pre-K and child care, city-owned grocery stores, and rent freezes.
New Yorkers also embraced his attacks on the city’s super-wealthy, including the outsized influence of the Wall Street and real estate industries. Voters favored Mamdani’s plan to increase taxes on the city’s super-rich to help pay for improving and expanding public services. This includes an additional tax bracket for New York City residents with income over $1 million, which would be taxed at 5.9%, and raising the state’s highest corporate tax rate from 7.25% to 11.5%.
Mamdani frightened many of the city’s, and the nation’s, billionaires, who were used to getting their way in politics. Within the last few weeks before the November 4 election, a few dozen billionaires donated over $8 million to political action groups opposed to Mamdani or in support of his chief rival, ex-governor Andrew Cuomo. That last-minute war chest had little impact on the outcome. Mamdani (who beat Cuomo in the Democratic primary in June) garnered over half the vote in a three-way contest with Cuomo (running as an independent) and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa.
At the root of Americans’ growing criticism of capitalism and support for socialist-like policies is the widening disparity of wealth and income. The country’s 1,135 billionaires are today worth $5.7 trillion, more than the combined wealth of the bottom half of U.S. households. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg alone accounted for nearly $1 trillion in wealth. In 1965, CEOs were paid 21 times as much as the typical worker; it has since skyrocketed to 285 times. This year Starbucks is set to make over $25 billion in profits. Brian Niccol, its CEO, made $95.8 million last year, while the typical barista earned less than $15,000. Starbuck’s CEO-to-median-worker pay ratio is 6,666-to-1.
More than one-third of Americans say they can’t afford an unexpected expense of $400, with close to half saying they have less in emergency savings than they did a year ago. Rents are skyrocketing, making it difficult to save to buy a home. The median age of new homebuyers is now 40 — the highest it has ever been. Meanwhile, in this new Gilded Age, billionaires like Trump and Musk flaunt their wealth, engage in the corrupt practices of crony capitalism, and reveal their disdain for democracy and ordinary Americans. It is not lost on voters that these are facts of the sort that America’s most well-known democratic socialist politician, Bernie Sanders, injected into the electoral conversation — messaging that has helped socialism’s rehabilitation after decades of red-baiting.
Mamdani’s come-from-far-behind victory was made possible by an army of over 100,000 volunteers. Some were veterans of earlier electoral fights; some had been active in union, community organizing, and other battles. For others, the Mamdani crusade was their first political involvement. The same was true of the more than five million Americans who participated in October’s “No Kings” marches and rallies across the country, the largest one-day protest in the nation’s history, many of whom are now part of the resistance to Trump’s ICE and Border Patrol invasions of U.S. cities. The key organizers of these efforts are progressives and leftists, but most of the participants are simply people who are fed up with economic hard times, fading dreams, and anger at the arrogance of wealthy plutocrats.
These dynamics have helped put socialists into office, but winning office is just a first step. For those who have had to actually govern cities, Mamdani has perhaps the hardest task. He must run an administration that focuses on civic housekeeping — getting the trash collected, fixing the potholes, making sure the parks and playgrounds are maintained, and guaranteeing that the schools and hospitals have the resources they need and the police respond quickly to 911 calls. To make that happen, he has to work with Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state legislature, because the city lacks the authority and money to adopt many of his ideas, which the real estate and finance lobby groups will try to obstruct. Can the state’s liberals and progressives, including DSA, push Hochul and state legislators to embrace Mamdani’s agenda? For the next three years, he’ll also have to deal with a hostile president, determined to undermine cities run by Democrats. If the Democrats take back the House next year, it could help to blunt many of Trump’s policies — including attacks on the things that many New Yorkers and Americans rely on, such as health insurance, food stamps and rent subsidies. If a Democrat wins the White House in 2028, New York, and Seattle, could serve as laboratories for a progressive agenda on jobs, environment, and housing.
In his November 4 victory speech, Mamdani said: “The sun may have set over our city this evening, but as Eugene Debs once said: ‘I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.’” If they want his administration to succeed, Mamdani’s supporters need to recognize the constraints he’s facing, give him leeway to forge compromises to get things done, and mobilize when business lobbyists try to block his proposals in the legislature. A better day is possible, but it won’t happen overnight — in New York, Seattle or across the country.
Peter Dreier is professor of politics and urban policy at Occidental College. His books include "Baseball Rebels: The Players, People, and Social Movements That Shook Up the Game and Changed America," "We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism, American Style," "The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame," "Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century," and "The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City." From 1984-1992 he served as a deputy to Boston Mayor Ray Flynn.
