The Democratic Socialists of America were a non-entity on the political landscape until Trump won.
to 48% who expressed a favorable view of capitalism. Polling by Survey Monkey for Axios likewise showed a majority of 18- to 34-year-olds holding a positive view of socialism, and Gallup found the same among Democrats across the board. HOWDID THIS HAPPEN? To begin with, “I’m just really pleased,” says pioneering late-20th-century socialist activist and reigning matriarch of City University of New York’s famously lefty poli-sci department Frances Fox Piven. A founding board member of the Democratic Socialists of America – alongside Michael Harrington – Piven was an early architect of the welfare socialist movement in 1960s New York. She and her husband Richard Cloward exerted prominent influence over public policy in the early Clinton years. Now, she’s a “benign adviser” to the DSA. “Conservatives still use the word ’socialist’ as a tag to tarnish their opponents,” she complains, “but they’ve been doing that since the Reagan era.” The sense of taboo has helped make socialism fashionable, she and I agree. Even Teen Vogue – as archetypal an arbiter of youth fashion as they come – routinely shills for the far left: An essay celebrating anarchism recently ran alongside “Who Is Karl Marx: Meet the Anti-Capitalist Scholar” and “What ’Capitalism’ Is and How It Affects People.” The lefty podcast Chapo Trap House propagates so-called “dirtbag” socialism on the digital airwaves – making irreverent but ideologically strident fun of their
man buns and teenaged girls in cut-offs and ponytails mouthing along to a familiar refrain about, “the millionaires and billionaires who are destroying this country.” Everybody knows what happened next. Clinton’s problem – one of several, as it happened – came to bear, a self-styled billionaire found his way to the White House, and the socialist anxiety percolating among fervid Sanders never died down. It went mainstream. Sanders is on a reunion tour, but he keeps having to remind his fresh- faced electoral heirs that he was there first. In reality, he’d been dancing more or less alone out on fringes of the far left since the 1970s. The Democratic Socialists of America were a non-entity on the political landscape until Trump won. Socialism itself had been something less than an electoral afterthought, relegated to the realm of fringe activism and academic esoterica since the age of Eugene V. Debs – whose speeches a 30-year-old Sanders used to edit for Burlington High School history class film projectors to supplement his freelance writing and amateur carpentry income. But in the two years since the DNC sidelined him, the DSA’s membership has grown from less than 5,000 to closer to 60,000 members. Last year, 53% of likely 18- to 29-year-old voters polled by Harvard’s Institute of Politics favored democratic socialism – compared
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April 2019
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