[ Gary Dorrien’s sweeping history of American democratic
socialism weaves personal, intellectual, and spiritual narratives
together in a book that reminds us of the great potential of the
socialist movement.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

‘AMERICAN DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM’ HAS A PROUD, DIVERSE, AND
INSPIRING HISTORY  
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Matt McManus
February 14, 2023
Current Affairs
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_ Gary Dorrien’s sweeping history of American democratic socialism
weaves personal, intellectual, and spiritual narratives together in a
book that reminds us of the great potential of the socialist movement.
_

Eugene V. Debs addressing a crowd at the Hippodrome Theatre, New York
City, 1910, New York Herald photo // The New York Review

 

_A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her
astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives
of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil.”_

TERRY EAGLETON, _IDEOLOGY: AN INTRODUCTION_
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_“[I]t’s hard for me to believe that, thirty years after I came to
America as an idealistic teenager, this is where we are headed. In
college I read John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which contains the
thrilling declaration “If all mankind minus one were of one opinion,
and only one person of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more
justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power,
would be justified in silencing mankind. We seem to have gone, in one
generation, from the bracing atmosphere of Mill’s On Liberty to the
dark, dank atmosphere of Orwell’s 1984. Hate Week! The Ministry of
Truth! The Thought Police! All of this—once the hallmark of faraway
socialist regimes—is now familiar. It has become our world.”_

DINESH D’SOUZA, _UNITED STATES OF SOCIALISM_

_“To me, what socialism means is to guarantee a basic level of
dignity. It’s asserting the value of saying that the America we want
and the America that we are proud of is one in which all children can
access a dignified education. It’s one in which no person is too
poor to have the medicines they need to live.”_

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ, _VOGUE_
[[link removed]],_ _2018
 

America was never, is not, and will never become a socialist country.
It is where socialism goes to die. Just over a week ago, the
Republican led House of Representatives handily passed a
resolution denouncing 
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“crimes” of socialist autocrats like Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot and
rejecting the implementation of socialist policies in the United
States. This followed on the heels of the Republicans’ own discount
autocrat Donald Trump having in 2020 denounced 
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“socialist agenda” that would “demolish” the country. Of
course, other countries may have, or have had, thriving democratic
socialist parties and leaders. Nearby Canada crowned
[[link removed]] Tommy
Douglas1
[[link removed]] its
most beloved son—the leader of the socialist Cooperative
Commonwealth Federation and the ‘father’ of Canadian public
healthcare beat out a dream team of hockey stars to win the
designation. The National Health Service, or NHS, a creation of
the British Labour
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is among the most
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institutions in Britain. And the Nordic welfare states, largely the
product of worker movements aligned with various social democratic and
democratic socialist parties, are widely regarded as the most
flourishing societies created
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far. And that was (maybe) fine…for them. But that has no place in
the land of free markets, white Jesus, and _GoFundMe_ medical
fundraising
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This was the conventional wisdom for the last 100 years since Eugene
Debs led the Socialist Party of America_ _to its best ever showing in
the 1912 presidential election, winning 6 percent
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the vote. After this, even germinal socialism dwindled and died,
existing only in fringe left-wing communities and far from fringe
right-wing conspiracies propagated by the likes of the John Birch
Society and Fox News. Then, as if thunder on a sunny day, everything
changed in 2016 when Bernie Sanders decided to run for the Democratic
presidential nomination. Sanders was dismissed as something of an
eccentricity at first, but no one was laughing when he ran
a competitive
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even in the face of severe disadvantages and a media environment that
ranged from bemused to outright
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Over 13 million people cast a ballot for Sanders during the primary,
and he won a large number of the northern states that constitute the
Democrats’ heartland. Chillingly, this included other states such as
Michigan and Wisconsin that Clinton would later lose to Trump in the
general election. Since 2016, American democratic socialism has
refused to go away, becoming an important segment on the political
spectrum—surviving and thriving in spite of its small size. This
includes around 90,000 members of the Democratic Socialists of
America [[link removed]] and DSA-adjacent politicians like
AOC and democratic socialist Bernie Sanders being two of the most
popular and most-followed members of Congress
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social media.

So goes a narrative that most of us who came to democratic socialism
in the 2010s are familiar with. It has a lot of appealing mythological
qualities to it: feisty rise until Eugene Debs, long tragic fall, and
then a potential phoenix-like rebirth. And, of course, it flatters the
conceits of the present to imagine we’re the creators of something
tremendous and unprecedented, that we are on the precipice of an
overdue paradigm shift in American culture and thinking. 

Dorrien’s History of American Socialism

Every now and then a book comes along that warrants the
adjective _magisterial_. It’s not a word to be rolled out casually.
Even though it conveys something positive, it’s also a bit
intimidating. Tolstoy’s _War and Peace _is magisterial. Simone de
Beauvoir’s _The Second Sex _is magisterial. Karl
Marx’s _Capital _is so magisterial that I’ve met committed
Marxists who’ll admit, usually after a few drinks, that they’ve
never made it the whole way through even Volume One. Big books that
get the M word slapped next to them run the risk of never being
read—winding up on people’s shelves, either to impress a date or
as a kind of New Year’s resolution to better oneself.

 

American Democratic Socialism: History, Politics, Religion, and Theory
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by Gary Dorrien
Yale UUniversity Press; 752 pages
Hardcover;  $50.00
September 14, 2021
ISBN: 9780300253764

 

Yale UUniversity Press
 

That must not be the fate of Gary Dorrien’s magisterial
[[link removed]] _American
Democratic Socialism: History, Politics, Religion and
Theory. _Clocking in at 700 pages and change, the book could be used
productively by weightlifters. Its 100-plus pages of footnotes no
doubt come across as intimidating. But Dorrien, the Reinhold Niebuhr
Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor
of Religion at Columbia University, hasn’t written an intimidating
book. He has written a masterpiece. _American Democratic
Socialism _will be the definitive history for some time. Purely as a
factual account of a complex series of development, Dorrien’s book
is unrivaled. And he is a talented storyteller, weaving personal,
intellectual, and spiritual narratives together into a gigantic
tapestry of life and struggle. In Dorrien’s hands, people like
Eugene Debs, Cornel West, and May Wood Simmons come alive as
complicated and very human actors.

More than just a chronicler, Dorrien has been involved in American
socialist circles for decades, and even made cameos within the
history, dialoguing with writer-activists like Michael Harrington
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who founded the DSA in 1982 and wrote important defenses of its
principles. This proximity to its subjects gives Dorrien’s history a
kind of texture most histories can only dream of; the people in his
book are often easy to admire and empathize with but are very far from
perfect. 

But more than that, Dorrien’s theological training comes very much
in handy in describing the shifting pathos of distance and closeness
to one’s convictions so characteristic of the radical. Shockingly,
at many points, his history of democratic socialism is more
Kierkegaard’s _Either/Or _than Marx’s _The Civil War in
France._ In other words, Dorrien evokes the soul of American
democratic socialism. He charts how Eugene Debs found his way from
patriotic American reformer to democratic socialist with some
difficulty, stirred by a combination of empathy for the working
classes and an inner conviction that socialism wasn’t anti-American
but in fact all about freedom. Dorrien discusses the theologian
Reinhold Niebuhr’s complicated socialist radicalization and his
equally complex transition to liberal realist under the pressures of
the Second World War. Ironically, Niebuhr was guided by a very Marxist
sense of realpolitik coupled with a gloomy version of Christian
outlook that saw much of humankind as radically fallen. And, more
importantly, Dorrien powerfully captures the frustration felt by women
like Ella Baker and gay men like Bayard Rustin. Baker and Rustin made
absolutely critical contributions to the Civil Rights Movement and the
advancement of welfarism but were deeply hurt that their straight male
counterparts either took them for granted as all but hired help or
sneered at their sexuality.  

But more than just a chronicle, the book has three important lessons
for American socialists. 

Three Lessons for American Democratic Socialists

The first and most important contribution of _American Democratic
Socialism _is to highlight the inherent diversity of the movement
throughout its history. Dorrien doesn’t shy away from the fact that
many American socialists were morally culpable in the prejudices of
their time. Eugene Debs gets a lot of credit as a charismatic figure
who pushed the movement forward. But Dorrien points out that he had a
bad habit of ignoring how racism operated independently of class
oppression, and how many in the early socialist movement held bigoted
views. Michael Harrington, an important socialist intellectual, is
applauded for bringing attention to the plight of America’s poor.
But Dorrien notes how he long struggled to understand the emotional
register of feminist language. Dorrien also highlights the vital
contributions of long marginalized identity and ideological groups to
American democratic socialism at all levels, which testifies to its
intellectual, political, and activist diversity. This includes figures
from W.E.B Du Bois to Martin Luther King Jr., Nancy Fraser, and the
women of color “Squad” members who are the face of progressivism
today. Overall, the book should be the final stake in the heart of
accusations that American socialism, past or present, is nothing but a
bunch of white male “Bernie Bro
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wages and pensions for people who look like them.

For the most part, Dorrien applauds this diversity as a sign of
democratic socialism’s broad appeal and integrity, but he rightly
stresses how it has and does pose intellectual and organizational
challenges. As an academic, I empathize with Dorrien’s description
of the heated battles between the “old” and “cultural” left
that broke out in the 1990s and have been waged ever since. “Old”
left intellectuals held that American progressives had resigned
themselves to accepting the worst kinds of neoliberal capitalist
exploitation and environmental degradation as long as there were more
CEOs of color. Meanwhile, cultural leftists focused on demanding
inclusion and liberal rights insisted that old-school Marxist and
revolutionary materialists hadn’t achieved anything of note for
decades next to the real advances obtained for women, people of color,
and queer individuals that were spearheaded by rainbow coalitions and
politics. This calcified into an enduring fault line amongst American
progressives that has only recently been softened. Political diversity
is a strength, but it is also something that requires constant
dialogue and empathy to avoid becoming factionalism.

Secondly, Dorrien’s book decisively overturns the myth that American
socialism was just a nonstarter. As he points out, between a long
history of capitalist-driven antebellum slavery
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by segregation, the toleration of far-right terrorism from the Ku Klux
Klan, the use of mass violence
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labor movements and strikes, and obsequious levels of inequality
during the “Gilded Age,” there was more than enough oppression to
catalyze an American socialist movement. Why it never took off is a
complicated question that much of _American Democratic Socialism _is
dedicated to answering. Dorrien admits that “America’s culture of
capitalist individualism thwarted socialists from the beginning.” In
its more benign forms, this just made socialism a tough sell, but the
culture of capitalist individualism could also be appealed to in order
to justify outright use of state force to marginalize or even crush
serious socialist agitation. Dorrien might have added something about
the paradox of this very culture of capitalist individualism often
assuming a markedly nationalist tone, which has enabled reactionaries
to wrap themselves in the flag while gutting programs that benefit
their fellow citizens.

But Dorrien doesn’t let socialists off the hook by blaming its
failings on the opposition; one of the remarkable points he makes is
that the American Socialist Party was one of the earliest of its kind,
and yet counterparts in Europe overcame similar odds over a shorter
period of time to win power. Dorrien claims that early democratic
socialist parties made a serious error in not sufficiently building
alternative networks and working-class organizations aligned to the
party. In the 1930s and ‘40s, American socialists adopted a critical
attitude towards the New Deal and War on Poverty— efforts advanced
by Democratic institutions—even though many of the initiatives were
things they supported. This kept them from claiming credit for very
real achievements—even if incomplete—that required decades of left
activism to win. More recently, he expresses worry that “Green”
initiatives put forward by legislators like AOC, however necessary,
may struggle to win working-class support if people’s jobs are
impacted. Of course, much of this is speculative on Dorrien’s part
given the Green New Deal never passed Congress, meaning it is
impossible to gauge support for its impact. But ensuring any
environmental policy works to the advantage of the entire community,
including workers in traditionally extractive industries, is
important, and Dorrien is right to anticipate the point.

And third and most importantly, _American Democratic
Socialism _is—beyond just a history—a deep and moving account of
socialist faith. Many socialists accept Marx’s gloomy description of
religion as the “opiate of the masses.” And certainly, the
vulgarity of Christian evangelism in this country has done little to
discourage this view. As Obery Hendricks observed
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his book _Christians Against Christianity_, it has been rather
astonishing to see the right take a faith tradition whose central
figure insisted [[link removed]] to the rich
man “if you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give
to the poor” and mutilate it into a defense of avarice and
punishment. But Dorrien points out how many of the most central
figures in American democratic socialism, from George Woodbey to
Martin Luther King Jr. and Cornel West, were and are Christian
socialists. The theological dimensions of this are complex
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debatable. But Dorrien’s emphasis on the centrality of Christian
socialism to the American left should give militant left secularists
pause, and hopefully will provoke a crucial dialogue that has been
avoided for too long. 

In his book _Dynamics of Faith_,the Christian socialist
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Paul Tillich observed that faith spoke to what people thought was of
existential “highest concern.” It often did this in a symbolic
way, and as Marx (and Jesus, for that matter) pointed out, it is all
too easy for the symbol to become idolatrously fetishized in place of
deep rumination of what really gives human existence meaning. In my
experience, modern socialists are very good at speaking to people’s
yearning for justice on this earth, but we are not yet as talented at
connecting this to broader questions about the point of life: why
anything we do or don’t do matters at all, and why it’s important
to struggle against the evils of the world rather than cynically
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nihilistically resigning ourselves to them. 

By contrast, the political right constantly peddles its own, rote
answers to what Freud called “oceanic” questions by blunting their
capacity to provoke a yearning for justice. The meaning of life lies,
as Roger Scruton put it in _The Meaning of Conservatism, _in people
becoming “tolerant of the burdens that life lays on them” while
being “unwilling to lodge blame where [there is] no remedy, [to]
seek fulfillment in the world as it is—to accept and endorse through
their actions the institutions and practices into which they are
born.” Or it comes from following Peterson’s _12 Rules for
Life _by cleaning your room, standing up straight, and working on
getting ahead individually rather than wasting time reading bell hooks
and trying to change a world too complicated to understand. In other
words, reactionary faith traditions become the handmaiden of
idolatrous injustice where they demonstrate a less than religious, all
too human deference to worldly power. It is no coincidence that even
self-declared defenders of Christian civilization
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Jordan Peterson and Dinesh D’Souza so admire Nietzsche, the
“anti-Christ” who denounced the “lie of equality of souls” and
called socialism “the residue of Christianity and Rousseau.”

This is, of course, profoundly contrary to the ethical spirit of
religious movements like Christianity, which radically insisted
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wretched of the earth will know that God is on their side” and which
insists that we must do on Earth what would be done in heaven. As
Hendricks points out in his book _The Politics of Jesus_
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its best, this has led Christians to condemn systems of oppressive
power from the Roman empire to Jim Crow and demand a better kind of
society based on care and fraternity. Against accusations that this
radicalism means “politicizing” Christianity, Hendricks points out
that this just shows that progressive Christians take Jesus’ message
seriously enough to act on its demands. By contrast, it is intriguing
how, while many conservatives claim to love the Christian God, they
have little interest in his message that “whatever you do unto the
least of your brothers and sisters, you do unto me.” If the left is
to be successful, both religious and atheistic leftists will need to
rediscover how to connect our yearning for justice to questions of
existential meaning without giving into fanaticism or chauvinism. It
will mean recognizing how a life of the spirit is not one which is
directed inwards to the aesthetic realm, or even outwards to the
ethical world of tradition and moralism. Instead, it requires faith
that when God speaks to us, it is on behalf of the poor, the wretched,
and the outcast.
 

_“The American people are infected with racism—that is the
peril. Paradoxically, they are also infected with democratic
ideals—that is the hope. While doing wrong, they have the potential
to do right. But they do not have a millennium to make changes. Nor
have they a choice of continuing in the old way. The future they are
asked to inaugurate is not so unpalatable that it justifies the evils
that beset the nation. To end poverty, to extirpate prejudice, to free
a tormented conscience, to make a tomorrow of justice, fair play, and
creativity—all these are worthy of the American ideal. We have,
through massive nonviolent action, an opportunity to avoid a national
disaster and create a new spirit of class and racial harmony. We can
write another luminous moral chapter in American history. All of us
are on trial in this troubled hour, but time still permits us to meet
the future with a clear conscience.”_

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., _AUTOBIOGRAPHY_

Gary Dorrien’s _American Democratic Socialism _is more than just
an epochal history. It’s also a guide to the future. He recognizes
that we are at a crucial tipping point now. We must not let the early
anti-Trumpist energy erode (for now) because there is no reason things
couldn’t go backwards as they have many times before. The history of
democratic socialism in the United States is for the most part a proud
one, but incomplete. It has been relegated to the sidelines for much
of the country’s history. The job of contemporary democratic
socialists is to complete this history by transforming the present.
Thomas Paine once said that we have it in our power to remake the
world anew. Dorrien’s _American Democratic Socialism _left me
feeling that we still have that power if we’re willing to use it.

1. No one is perfect, and it’s important to note that Douglas
initially had some bad views on issues like eugenics
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* socialism
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* DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM
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* DSA
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* Democratic Socialists of America
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* Socialist Party
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* Socialist Party
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* Communist Party
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* Eugene Debs
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* Norman Thomas
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* Martin Luther King Jr.
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* Martin Luther King
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* Bernie Sanders
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* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
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* Social Movements
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* socialist movement
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