America Can Never Sort Out Whether ‘Socialism’ Is Marginal or Rising
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Version 0 of 1. “Can you donate $5 NOW to defeat the socialist uprising?” a Republican congressional candidate tweeted in late June — just after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a self-identified democratic socialist, won a New York congressional primary. Numerically speaking, the socialist “uprising” remains small: one safe-seat Democratic primary, a presidential-primary near miss by Bernie Sanders, a handful of local races around the country and a total membership of about 40,000 for the Democratic Socialists of America. What it all means, though, is a different matter. American politics may speak in the language of statistics and projections, but when it comes to the question of socialism, hard numbers have never counted for much. A lot can be a little, and a little can be a lot, and either one may or may not be a sign of more in the future. In 1906, for instance, the German scholar Werner Sombart published a classic essay asking, “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?” One answer he identified was workers’ access to “roast beef and apple pie,” consumer luxuries that led them to reject European-style class politics. But another response is that there was, at the time, actually quite a lot more socialism in the United States than Sombart let on, particularly in the Midwest. In 1912, 6 percent of the presidential vote went to the socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs, setting off predictions of, well, a socialist uprising. A strange logic has always surrounded this topic in the United States: Both interpretations — that socialism is a dead letter and that it is the wave of the future — can exist side by side. At the end of the Cold War, we heard that socialism was at last forever vanquished, but in 2009 Newsweek declared that “We Are All Socialists Now.” By 2016, Sanders’s presidential campaign was reviving talk of a “revolution” in the making, as if nobody remembered that we had already been socialists for seven years. Some of this revolution is said to be occurring outside the electoral sphere, where trends can be hard to measure. Polls suggest that almost half of millennials have a favorable impression of socialism, though surveys rarely delve into the details. After Ocasio-Cortez’s victory, Merriam-Webster reported a surge in look-ups for “socialism” — which could be evidence of a significant surge in sympathy and interest, or just a reminder that many people in 2018 remain unsure what “socialism” really means. Even among avowed socialists, there’s robust disagreement about what the word actually entails. Is it an idea? A set of policies? A political identity? Is its presence or absence best measured by public sentiment, or by electoral outcomes, or by what happens to Obamacare? Does being a good socialist mean trying to win elections and influence policy or seeking to transform the entire social order? Can it be all of these things at once? Almost from its origins, the word “socialism” came with modifiers. The Oxford English Dictionary has it naming a belief in “state or collective ownership and regulation of the means of production, distribution and exchange for the common benefit of all members of society” — but this sort of description is more open-ended than many of socialism’s 19th-century adherents could embrace. Soon enough there were Fabian socialists and Marxian socialists and Debsian socialists, along with profusions of anarchists, syndicalists and trade unionists who shared one or another element of the socialist dream. “Democratic socialist” (or “social democrat”) — the label of choice for politicians like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez — emerged around 1848, wedding the collective aspirations of socialism to the individual freedoms of democracy, suggesting no person could truly be free without some measure of economic security. One result of Ocasio-Cortez’s victory is that mainstream news outlets have been drawn into this left-wing definitional quagmire, offering up awkward primers on the differences between communists and socialists and social democrats. “So what are we talking about here?” the host Stephanie Ruhle asked in an MSNBC segment, with background graphics highlighting that democratic socialism is “NOT Socialism” and “NOT Communism” but something more like a fondness for Social Security and Amtrak. The D.S.A. itself both embraces and rejects such friendly definitions, explaining that it “fights for reforms today” but still seeks to overturn “an international economic order sustained by private profit, alienated labor” and other forms of exploitation. Debs wrestled with a similar issue, veering between identifying as a “revolutionary” (or even a “Bolshevik”) and seeking to attract a respectable number of socialist votes. More than a century ago, he founded the Social Democratic Party — later merged into the Socialist Party of America — to rally the left around issues like inequality, wage insecurity and the corrupting force of money in politics. A few years later, he was present at the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World, a self-described “revolutionary” union. It was around an I.W.W.-led textile strike in 1912 that the organizer Rose Schneiderman coined a lasting socialist slogan, declaring that “the worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too” — that working people deserved not just full bellies but also beauty in their lives. This spring, fast-food workers at the Burgerville chain in Portland, Ore., unionized under I.W.W. auspices. They professed to want what most people who join unions want — a raise; “affordable, quality health care”; “fair and consistent scheduling” — but also adopted some of the I.W.W.’s swashbuckling radicalism, proclaiming that their workplaces should run “for the benefit of workers and communities rather than for a handful of bosses and executives.” At a moment when American unions seem to be in free fall, this revival of radical aspirations might be viewed as a nonevent — a handful of millennials playing revolutionary in a true-blue town. Or, like the victory of a single primary candidate in New York, it might be seen as the first hint of a coming “red” wave. That second interpretation was easier to embrace at the start of the 20th century, when socialists believed that history was on their side and that the tide of human progress would move inexorably in their direction. The Bolshevik Revolution seemed to confirm this in 1917, creating a home for “actually existing socialism” in a hostile capitalist world. But association with the Soviet Union quickly became a political liability in America, where “Communist” and “Socialist” were all but interchangeable — shorthand for tyranny, disloyalty and treason. The end of the Cold War produced reams of self-satisfied commentary about how capitalism had won, socialism had lost, ideological struggle had ended and the glory days of human freedom lay ahead. In retrospect, though, rather than foreclosing talk of socialism for good, the end of the Cold War seems to have opened up space for a new debate, with new terms of argument. When today’s leftists talk about socialism, they point to places like Sweden and France (home to robust maternity leave and universal health care) or even to lost relics of America’s recent past (stable jobs, union power, a collective investment in human welfare). On the right, the great socialist specter is not a hostile superpower but Venezuela, currently in the throes of hyperinflation, food shortages and mass misery. These disparate reference points can produce genuinely bizarre miscommunications. In a notorious 2018 interview, an Infowars reporter cornered a woman outside a Sanders appearance to ask, “Why is socialism good?” Soon the reporter was warning that in Venezuela, “a majority of the country is currently eating rats,” while the perplexed interviewee maintained that “I just want people to have health care, honey.” The right’s vehemence on the subject may, oddly, have aided in today’s revival of socialist discourse. Younger Americans, after all, have spent their lives hearing that even popular, market-driven policies like Obamacare are part of a grand socialist plot, steps on the path to totalitarian ruin. That leaves little reason to avoid more radical alternatives. What are opponents going to do — denounce it all as socialism? Actively embracing the “socialist” label conveys a certain left-wing ambition and commitment — a willingness to think big and imagine a wildly different future. And the source of all our recent attention to socialism is obvious: A larger-than-usual share of that left-wing ambition is being aimed at the conventional political project of reshaping the Democratic Party. Many of the policies being advocated by so-called socialists — labor rights, affordable public education, a vibrant welfare state — were once vital to that party’s identity, especially during the New Deal. To conservatives, this may look like proof that Democrats have been socialists all along. Seen from another perspective, though, what appears to be a surge from the left also feels like evidence of how far right the party has shifted in recent decades, leaving its labor-left constituents stranded on the fringe. Now one of the best ways to indicate support for that lost vision is to adopt a label outside Democratic politics — or perhaps one that’s a little outside and a little inside, all at once. |