Democratic socialism has been rising in the U.S. for over 50 years

The Democratic primaries leading up to the midterm elections in November have so far been a high point for the American left. Building on the momentum produced by Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s election last year, three insurgent congressional candidates on the left won their primaries in New York City in June. Two of these candidates were endorsed by the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), while the third ran with Mayor Mamdani’s strong support. Weeks later, a DSA-endorsed candidate defeated a longtime Democratic member of Congress in Colorado. And although the Democratic U.S. Senate nominee from Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, did not seek DSA’s endorsement, he won on a platform similar to those of several DSA challengers—including the candidate who unseated the Democratic incumbent in the state’s 13^th congressional district on the same night.

These advances for democratic socialists, along with numerous victories at the state and local level, have spooked establishment Democrats protective of their positions—as well as moderate-to-liberal commentators worried about the party’s chances in November. A new and alien force, they claim, has entered the Democratic Party, displacing its traditional constituencies and candidates.

Except nothing could be further from the truth. DSA’s strategy is not new, and democratic socialists made inroads in the Democratic Party decades ago.

There are many historical moments to which we can trace the origins of the present democratic socialist moment, but 1973 may be the most pertinent. That year, a new democratic socialist organization sought pragmatic ways to engage with electoral and party politics, racking up achievements that have been long overlooked.

In the early 20^th century, the Socialist Party of America, founded in 1901, ran its own candidates in U.S. elections, famously Eugene V. Debs in 1912 and 1920, and Norman Thomas between 1928 and 1948. But by the 1960s, members of the party disagreed about how to achieve a democratic form of socialism during the Cold War. In general, the American left was undergoing tumult and conflict, with the emergence of the New Left, associated with the student movements of the ‘60s. The Vietnam War and nationwide urban crises added more pressures, and Nixon’s defeat of George McGovern in 1972 brought the party to a breaking point.

The 1972 election exposed fault lines within the Democratic Party and within the Social Democrats U.S.A. (SDUSA), the successor organization of the Socialist Party. Most SDUSA members were militantly anti-communist and believed McGovern’s foreign policy agenda was tantamount to appeasement of global communism. Organized labor was also not enthused and the AFL-CIO refused to endorse the Democratic nominee.

In 1973, the public intellectual and social activist Michael Harrington broke with SDUSA and founded the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), taking with him a number of prominent leftists as well as labor leaders who dissented from the AFL-CIO’s neutrality in 1972. Harrington had come up in the anti-communist Old Left and clashed with Tom Hayden at the famous 1962 Students for a Democratic Society convention in Port Huron. Figures associated with this Old Left like Harrington and Dissent editor Irving Howe (who joined DSOC) rejected the New Left’s tactics as well as what they saw as its most extreme elements, including supporting revolutionary movements in Cuba, China, and the Middle East that were not democratic.

But while DSOC was to the right of this New Left, they were decidedly to the left of the Democratic establishment. They believed that neither the mainstream of the labor movement nor the liberals in the Democratic Party, both tainted by support for the Vietnam War, would be able to mobilize the broad center-left coalition necessary to expand economic opportunity in the 1970s as the long postwar boom entered into crisis.

DSOC, in Harrington’s words, sought to be “the left-wing of the possible” in the Democratic Party and pursued what he and socialist leader Bayard Rustin called “realignment.” (Rustin himself, however, did not join Harrington’s new group.) Building on alliances with allies in the labor movement, DSOC sought to shape the Democratic Party at a time when the liberal accomplishments of the 1960s were coming under threat. As Harrington’s biographer Maurice Isserman writes, “Michael [Harrington] and his comrades were doing for liberalism what it could not seem to do for itself, which was to set forth a coherent response to the conservative attack on the welfare state.” This took the form of, for example, the Democratic Agenda conferences that DSOC held in Washington. At these confabs, DSOC brought together activists, elected officials, and progressive labor leaders to apply pressure on Democrats on issues ranging from full employment to universal healthcare to affordable housing.

DSOC participated in Democratic Party midterm conventions, electing delegates and working the room to influence the party platform. Both the party establishment and the “New Democrats,” an insurgent group of centrist, market-oriented Democrats elected in the wake of Watergate, opposed them. But DSOC found allies among traditional liberals like Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Sen. Hubert Humphrey (D-Minn). They also gained allies in Congress who were willing to affiliate with the organization, including Ron Dellums (D-Calif.) and John Conyers (D-Mich.), leading members of the Congressional Black Caucus.

The 1976 nomination of Jimmy Carter, a moderate Democrat from Georgia, was a disappointment to Harrington and DSOC. But it was during the Carter administration when its strategy began to bear some fruit.

The economic crisis of the 1970s had hit poorer and minority communities especially hard, producing disproportionately high unemployment rates. In response, civil rights activists like Coretta Scott King promoted the Humphrey-Hawkins bill, named after sponsors Sen. Humphrey and Rep. Augustus Hawkins (D-Calif.), that committed the federal government to achieving full employment, with the creation of new public sector jobs as a last resort. The Carter administration was reluctant to get behind this effort, fearing that more spending would fuel inflation, and Harrington and DSOC played a key role in the coalition to pressure the president into supporting the measure. Although the bill was watered down by the time it reached Carter’s desk—the mandate it imposed on the administration lacked teeth—the campaign for a full employment bill demonstrated the promise of the realignment strategy.

At the start of Reagan administration, DSOC merged with the New American Movement, a post-New Left formation, to form DSA. This attempt to heal the wounds of the 1960s with those on the New Left who now accepted working within the Democratic Party, however, foundered on the shoals of the 1980s. Historical circumstances, particularly hyperinflation, meant that the Democratic Leadership Council, an organization of the “New Democrats,” ended up pushing the Democratic Party to the right on issues like support for public programs, taxation, and urban crime, rather than DSA moving the party to the left, as Harrington envisioned.

It would take a new economic crisis, that of 2007, and its aftermaths to revive democratic socialism in mainstream politics, in the form of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign. Following Trump’s election, many volunteers for Sanders joined DSA in 2017, where they found both an organization and a strategy with which to continue their work. In 2018, DSA member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shocked the establishment by ousting the high-ranking incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley from his House seat in Queens. While some in the DSA membership do not favor working within the Democratic Party, the organization through its local chapters has continued the realignment strategy favored by Harrington and DSOC in the 1970s.

The victories of democratic socialists in Democratic primaries echo the 1970s in an important respect. Then, as now, Democratic leaders in Congress struggled to respond to a right-wing movement intent on drastically reshaping American society in its image. With the Cold War now in distant memory, American democratic socialists have been much more successful in filling the leadership void and capturing the discontent of Democratic primary voters. But they are nevertheless building on the political and strategic foundations of those who came before them.

Abe Silberstein is a doctoral student in the joint program in History and Hebrew & Judaic Studies at New York University. He is researching socialism and Jewish politics during the Cold War. He is also a member of DSA in New York City.

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