Last week, an episode of “The Daily” podcast of The New York Times focused on Charles Homans’ extensive reporting on the Democratic Socialists of America and “how it made this midterm election, to a large degree, about socialism.”
The hour-long podcast discusses the history of U.S. socialism and the tensions between the DSA — which isn’t a political party — and the Democratic Party. I’ll summarize the history today and the tensions tomorrow.
Homans says:
“To understand DSA, I think you need to understand the early history of socialism in this country. And that means going back to the early 1900s, which was the previous heyday of socialism here. This is the period right after the Gilded Age, when you had some Americans making just really enormous amounts of money, these sort of railroad barons, timber barons, coal mining, that kind of thing.
“At the same time, many Americans are working in these industries or in agriculture. And there’s this huge wealth gap between the rich and everybody else. And this creates a lot of inevitable political reactions, people who are trying to envision a way of redistributing the wealth. And one thing that comes out of that, eventually, is this American form of socialism, and specifically, the Socialist Party of America, which, in the early 1900s, was the largest and most organized socialist party in the United States.
“At the time, it [socialism] was defined pretty clearly as public control of the workings of the economy for the benefit of the workers.
“The socialists ran afoul of the government of Woodrow Wilson, specifically over World War I. The socialists were very opposed to U.S. involvement in the war.
“The socialists also ran into a lot of other problems of their own making. They split into a number of factions in this period. They lost a lot of ground in American politics. And they were kind of a spent force, really, coming out of the 1920s.
“A lot of socialist ideas that were pretty popular were advanced by non-socialist politicians in this period, most importantly, FDR.
“FDR is careful not to call this socialism ... because of what’s happening around the world at this time. The Russian Revolution has happened. The Soviet Union’s been born. This is the first country that embraces communism. Now, communism is a much more radical and, in the Soviet Union, undemocratic system evolving from socialism, one that many American socialists reject. But this has led to all these ideologies being seen in the United States as foreign and threatening in a way that they weren’t necessarily before.”
Fast forward to another time of a wealth gap and Bernie Sanders, who was “never a member of DSA, but he self-identifies as a Democratic socialist.
“What Bernie did that was really important was show that a self-identified socialist could actually do quite well in a Democratic primary. You have to remember that before this point, socialism was really a very taboo word in American politics and had been for quite a long time.”
In 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who had recently joined the DSA, wins a congressional seat.
Other DSA members, such as Rashida Tlaib, follow AOC.
And in 2025, Zohran Mamdani is elected mayor of New York City.
“Mamdani, within the first year of being mayor of New York City, turns around and uses his popularity to endorse fellow DSA candidates in Democratic primaries around New York. And several of them win. They take out more establishment Democrats. And that brings us to this summer of democratic socialism, where, in race after race after race, DSA candidates or DSA-adjacent candidates are winning these primaries.”
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