It is a truism of contemporary politics that the 2016 presidential election upended American democracy. Yet, if Donald Trump’s unexpected victory, and the fallout from it, threw the established political order into crisis, it is not the right that now appears poised to make the greatest gains. Rather, it is the left. Since 2016, a new socialist movement has started to take shape in the USA. After decades at the margins of political life, the radical left is now growing rapidly, making startling inroads among young people and progressive Democratic voters.
These developments, rooted in from the 2007 to 2008 financial crisis and the frustrated hopes of the Obama years, coalesced in Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign. Since then, the rising influence of the far left has been exemplified by three interrelated trends: first, an increase in public support for socialism and for Sanders’s progressive reform agenda; second, the emergence of a growing number of popular left-wing candidates for local and national office; and third, the explosive growth of the Democratic Socialists of America as a mass-membership group representing the leading edge of the new socialist left.
The rise of socialism in the USA is particularly notable because it has happened at a time when in much of the developed world, the left has found itself mired in stagnation and organizational decline. In this chapter, I trace the growth of the new socialist left in the USA. Its emergence, I argue, reflects a historical irony: today, the historical marginalization of American socialism has been transformed from a weakness into a strength.
Unlike in Europe, the US left was never a mass force, and it had no presence in the electoral arena: yet, in the long run, its very isolation meant that it bore no responsibility for the transformation of postwar capitalism over the past four decades. Untainted by any history of left governance, socialists in the USA are able to present themselves as a definite (if not always clearly defined) alternative to the political status quo.
At the same time, I argue, the socialist left’s very newness also means that it faces a series of dilemmas that must be resolved if it hopes to continue advancing. Centrally, these revolve around issues of program and strategy, the left’s relationship with the Democratic Party, and a number of controversial political issues. Underlying all of these questions is the deeper problem of how to develop a stable social base at a time when organized labor remains historically weak and workplace militancy is episodic.
The current socialist revival has deep historical roots. Its origins lay in the restructuring of American capitalism beginning in the 1970s. The decades since have witnessed a steady rise in social inequality and economic insecurity and a concomitant decline in wage growth and unionization (a familiar story for advanced capitalist democracies during these years).
As in Europe, those trends were overseen by governments of both the right and the center-left. In the case of the USA, the rightward turn of the Democratic Party did not give rise to any new political formation to fill the resulting vacuum. As mainstream liberalism veered toward ever more business-friendly policies, the absence of any strong traditions of socialist organization meant that there was little basis for a challenge from the left. At best, during the 1980s and 1990s, small and isolated groups of radicals found themselves joining liberals in their (largely unsuccessful) efforts to defend the fruits of a bygone era of welfare expansion and social reform—Civil Rights legislation, protections for women, and the limited federal anti-poverty programs established during the 1930s and 1960s.
Yet, as inequality rose and business became increasingly organized and effective in the political arena, policy outcomes tended more and more to reflect the priorities of the very rich rather than the public as a whole.
As a result, the functioning of American democracy took on the appearance of an empty ritual, which could no longer mask the overwhelming dominance of those with concentrated economic power.
All of this came to a head following the 2008 financial crisis. The fallout from the crash highlighted the devastating consequences of four decades of welfare retrenchment and an economy built on low-wage employment and skyrocketing personal debt. It also raised expectations that something would be done to improve the situation. Those hopes were embodied in the person of Barack Obama, whose election in November 2008 was a seminal event, not just because of the sea change in public attitudes around race and racism it signaled but because of its impact on a generation of younger voters. Coming of age in the context of the Iraq War and the inequities of the pre-2008 boom, they saw in Obama’s election as both a repudiation of the presidency of George W. Bush and a harbinger of much larger changes in American political life.
Yet, to a great extent, those hopes would be disappointed. The initial belief that Obama’s election represented a transformative moment in American political life would soon give way to disillusionment on the left; while Obama himself often managed to avoid the brunt of that frustration (and retains today a high level of personal popularity, especially among Democratic voters), his administration failed to stem the tide of rising social polarization and political frustration.
In office, Obama reneged on several key campaign promises while implementing heavily watered down versions of other proposals. Even his signature legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act, would come to be seen by many of his supporters on the left as hopelessly compromised by a number of key concessions to the private insurance, health provider, and pharmaceutical industries.
More generally, Obama oversaw the continuation of policies and approaches on issues that would soon become flash points for popular protest. In 2011, anger over rising inequality, and the government’s unwillingness to crack down on the banking and financial industries provoked a wave of mass occupations of public parks and urban centers under the slogan “Occupy Wall Street.”
As a social movement, Occupy shared many of the weaknesses of other recent mobilizations in the USA: for instance, the lack of a sufficient organizational base or political strategy, and a tendency to grow explosively and collapse just as suddenly. Yet the breadth and dynamism of the movement was indicative of the feeling that had built up in much of American society that the economy was rigged against them.
Not long after that, another wave of protests swept the country after a series of high-profile shootings of unarmed African-Americans. Those demonstrations, known by the hashtag “#BlackLivesMatter,” were largely framed around claims of widespread police bias and demands for an end to extrajudicial killings by law enforcement: protestors pointed to the hundreds of people who die every year at the hands of the police, disproportionately black, a large number of whom are unarmed and guilty of only minor offenses or nothing at all.
Yet the movement also reflected deeper tensions over the extent of racism and inequality in the Obama era. These protests exposed the limits of black political representation at a time of historically unprecedented levels of incarceration—particularly of young black men—while highlighting widespread poverty and deprivation in the segregated neighborhoods that dot American cities.
In the long run, neither of these movements could be sustained, and they left in their wake little in the way of concrete institutional reforms. Yet, in a broader sense, their impact on American politics was significant: above all, they brought to the fore issues and concerns that would later help galvanize the new socialist movement. They were particularly significant for a layer of younger activists, who came of age after 2008. These leftward-moving millennials are part of a generation whose lives have been shaped by a multitude of pathologies characteristic of contemporary American capitalism: far more likely than their parents to have a college degree, they now face a labor market where that does not guarantee stable employment; in which jobs often come with low pay and no security, opportunities for advancement are limited, and access to decent and affordable health coverage—let alone other benefits, like a pension—is anything but certain. The challenges of the millennial job market are compounded by massive levels of student debt, which, along with the rising costs of housing, have made it unlikely that many young people will ever have the option of buying a home.
It is no wonder then, that by 2016, these millennials were expressing views on a range of social and economic questions that put them far to the left of previous generations. Young people in the USA are not just more supportive of proposals like the “Green New Deal” and a federal jobs guarantee. They are also more negative in their outlook on capitalism. Indeed, survey data suggests that this was central to their political evolution in recent years, with one 2018 poll reporting a “12 point decline in young adults’ positive views of capitalism in just the past two years and a marked shift since 2010, when 68% viewed it positively.” As a result, today, “Americans aged 18 to 29 are as positive about socialism (51%) as they are about capitalism (45%).”
These attitudes are at odds with the views of older Americans, especially those over the age of 60. In fact, younger Americans diverge from their parents and grandparents on a wide variety of issues: for instance, they are more favorable toward immigrants and immigration, more supportive of measures to promote gender equality, and far friendlier toward increased legal protections for LGBT people. They are also much less enthusiastic about American nationalism, the police, or the use of military power by the American government. Sociologically, their lives also diverge from the pattern set by earlier generations: they are, for instance, much less likely to be affiliated with a religious organization or to describe religion as important to them.
Having grown up in the post-Civil Rights era, they are also less discriminatory in their outlook and attitudes and less likely to embrace the “dog-whistle” politics of thinly veiled bigotry and coded racism. In fact, while white Americans as a whole are largely hostile toward systematic efforts to redress de facto segregation and racial inequality in American society, younger whites are more evenly split on the question—with opinion polls suggesting that a majority of those under 30 were supportive of the #BLM movement.
These generational divisions came to the fore during the 2016 presidential election. In the campaign for the Democratic nomination, younger voters overwhelmingly supported Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton; the same group also reported the greatest levels of opposition to Donald Trump during the general election. While in the USA, the common cliché is that young leftists inevitably turn into rock-ribbed conservatives as they hit middle age that has not always been the pattern. In fact, during the 1980s, younger Americans were among the most enthusiastic supporters of Ronald Reagan. In 2016, however, Sanders appealed to these voters by focusing on issues like rising income inequality, mounting student debt, and the gross inequities of the private health insurance system. The concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, he argued, was indicative of the stranglehold of the “1%” over political and economic life in the USA. The solution was a “political revolution” to wrest control of the democratic state from their hands.
Sanders campaign platform included a variety of far-reaching reforms to be paid for through a tax raise for high earners and corporations. Of these proposed measures, he particularly highlighted the need for a universal system of publicly provided medical coverage (“Medicare for All”), a rapid increase in the federal minimum wage, and the introduction of tuition-free college education at public universities. This policy agenda represented a move toward what he termed “democratic socialism.”
What exactly Sanders meant by this was never entirely clear, but he often compared American capitalism unfavorably to the traditional social democracies of Scandinavia.
This message resonated widely during the campaign, especially in parts of the “Rust Belt,” where Trump would go on to win several important states that previously swung Democratic. In the general election, Clinton, who ended up losing a third of all counties nationally that Barack Obama won in both 2008 and 2012, failed to turn out lower-income voters who had come to the polls for Obama, and she was heavily defeated in poorer rural areas which had tipped toward him. In purely electoral terms, Clinton’s loss reflected the failure of a strategy that emphasized winning support among higher-income suburban voters at the expense of voters in regions suffering acute levels of poverty, insecurity, and unemployment.
Whatever the explanation for the historical weakness of American socialism, the consequences have been significant. For the US left, the impact has been severe. In the second half of the twentieth century, it meant decades of general isolation and sustained organizational weakness. Politically, the absence of a strong electoral socialist or labor party meant that the American left was closely tied to mainstream liberalism. Most importantly, that connection was reflected in the dominance of the Democratic Party as the primary vehicle for progressive electoral politics.
Given recent events and our history, and the rapid rise of a new socialist movement since 2016 was to be expected. While the factors that have driven this socialist revival—starting with the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis and culminating with Trump’s election—are not hard to identify, it was impossible to predict that an obscure senator from Vermont could inspire such a dramatic change in the fortunes of the left.
This situation also reflects a historical irony: it is precisely because the American left did not enjoy extensive support or a high degree of institutional power during the postwar era that it has escaped the general disillusionment with American politics more recently. In that sense, the left’s past weakness has now become a source of strength in contrast to the situation facing Europe’s social democratic and labor parties.
That same legacy, however, means that the emerging socialist left now has to confront a number of crucial political and organizational issues. The very newness of groups like DSA means that they are able to sustain a high level of excitement and optimism while major questions about political program and strategy, organizational structure, and political priorities remain unanswered. While the return of socialism to American political life shows no signs of slowing down, in the long run, the answers that are given to these questions will help determine the future direction of left politics in an age of deep-seated social and political crisis.
