Had Bernie Sanders won the 2016 Democratic nomination and gone on to defeat Donald Trump—as most polls suggested he had a better chance of doing than Hillary Clinton, the actual nominee—he would be now entering his lame duck period, and perhaps Donald Trump might not figure in the current discussion much at all. (Alternately, had the party poobahs not closed ranks behind Biden with lightning speed to deny Sanders the nomination in 2020, he might have just completed his campaign for a second term—which he clearly would have been fit to serve.)
Sanders did not succeed in bringing democratic socialism to the White House, of course, but he did deliver the message to quite a number of other households during the Democratic nomination debates. As a result, two presidential cycles on, democratic socialists have now run and won races all the way up to the US House, and democratic socialism has now become a “thing” in American politics. Not a big thing, really, but most definitely a thing. Between the Republicans, right wing Democrats and the corporate news media, it’s a thing that certainly draws more negative mention than positive—but given that its critique of American society pointedly includes Republicans, right-wing Democrats and the corporations that own the news media, we could hardly expect it to be otherwise.
During this time, self-described democratic socialists have been elected and they’ve been unelected. They’ve exerted influence beyond their numbers; and they’ve also struggled with the hurly burly of political life. Some have been blown away by big money; some have contributed to their own downfall. In other words, they’ve run the gamut of the electoral political world—if still largely at the margins.
Any thoughts of a socialist wave following the first Sanders campaign or the election of the “Squad” soon bent to the more grueling reality of trying to eke out a new congressional seat or two each term—or defend those currently held, with efforts on the other levels of government playing out in similar fashion. But at the least we can say that the US has joined the mainstream of modern world politics to the point where the socialist viewpoint generally figures in the mix—albeit in a modest way.
The 2024 race stood out from the presidential election norm both for the return of one president, Trump’s return being the first since Grover Cleveland’s in 1892—also the only other time a president reoccupied the White House after having been previously voted out; and for the withdrawal of another president. Joe Biden’s exit from the campaign was the first since Lyndon Johnson’s in 1968. And, just like Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee—without running in any primaries.
Both of them inherited, and endorsed, the policies of the administration in which they occupied the number two office—which included support of a war effort opposed by a significant number of otherwise generally Democratic-leaning voters.
In Johnson’s case, the withdrawal of his candidacy had everything to do with that opposition, and the shock of Minnesota Senator Gene McCarthy drawing 42 percent of the New Hampshire Democratic primary vote running as an anti-Vietnam War candidate. But when Humphrey won the Democratic nomination and the equally hawkish Richard Nixon took the Republican slot, the substantial number of war opponents felt themselves facing the prospect of choosing the lesser of two evils.
The dismal choice presented in that race soured untold numbers of voters on the left who came to consider a choice between two evils to be the norm for presidential elections. Over time, the hostility faded, with most coming to judge the choice offered less harshly, now more one of picking the less inadequate of two inadequate programs—until now.
The intensity of opposition to the Biden-Harris support of Israel’s war on Palestine has certainly not approached that shown toward the Johnson-Humphrey conduct of the US war against Vietnam. But for a substantial number of people who considered it criminal to continue supplying 2,000-pound bombs to Israel’s relentless ongoing disproportionate obliteration of Gaza in retaliation for an atrocity that occurred on a day more than a year past, this was a “lesser of two evils” choice, to a degree unmatched since the bad old Humphrey-Nixon days.
And yet, while we don’t know how many opted not to vote for president at all, we do know that those who did vote almost all did make that choice. Even with a Democratic nominee preferring the campaign companionship of former third-ranking House Republican Liz Cheney to that of Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian democratic socialist, third-party votes did not prove to be a factor. There was no blaming Jill Stein this time.
Organizationally, the greatest beneficiary of the Sanders campaigns has been the Democratic Socialists of America. Ironically, while Bernie has been the nation’s twenty-first century avatar of socialism— generally understood to be a philosophy of collective action—he himself is not a joiner, being a member neither of the Democratic Party, whose presidential nomination he has twice sought; nor DSA, an organization he has long worked with.
With about 6,000 members, the pre-Sanders campaign DSA was the largest socialist organization in an undernourished American left. In the minds of some longtime members, their maintenance of the socialist tradition bore a certain similarity to the work of the medieval Irish monks who copied ancient manuscripts whose true value would only be appreciated in the future. But when the post-Sanders surge came, there DSA was—popping up in the Google search of every newly minted or newly energized socialist looking to meet people of like mind. Membership mushroomed to 100,000. Organizational inflation on that order that does not come without growing pains—the sort of problems that any organization covets, but problems nonetheless.
DSA’s very name reflects the troubled history of the socialist movement. In the minds of early socialists, the term “democratic socialist” would have been one for Monty Python’s Department of Redundancy Department. The whole point of socialism, after all, was to create a society that was more democratic than the status quo, extending democratic rights past the political realm into that of economics, and the difference between socialism and communism was pretty much a matter that only scholars concerned themselves with.
But with the devolution of the Russian Revolution into Stalinism, “communism,” the word generally associated with the Soviet Union, came to mean the opposite of democracy to much of the world. And in the US in particular, “socialism” too seemed tainted, to the point where socialists felt the need to tag “democratic” onto it.
DSA was an organization, then, where people most definitely did not call themselves communists. It was not the place to go to find people talking about the “dictatorship of the proletariatva,” or “vanguard parties,” or other phrases reminiscent of the 1920s or 1930s left. Among its members, the Russian and Chinese revolutions, while certainly considered interesting and significant—fascinating even, were not events to look to for guidance in contemporary American politics.
And then the expansion. A lot of previously unaffiliated socialists, pleasantly surprised—shocked even—to find the idea entering the public realm, decided it was time to join up and do something about it. The curious also came, eager to learn more of what the whole thing was all about, maybe suffering from imposter syndrome: “Do I really know enough to call myself a socialist?” And then there were the already socialists who would never have thought to join DSA in the pre-Sanders inflation era, some with politics that DSA’s name had been chosen to distinguish the organization from.
The expanded DSA was a “big tent,” a “multi-tendency” organization. Soon there was a Communist Caucus in DSA—along with a bunch of others.
Whether the internal dissonance can be contained and managed long-run remains to be seen, but then what is politics but a continuous series of crises? It’s to the organization’s credit that it has held itself together thus far, but for the moment some hoping to grapple with the questions of twenty-first century socialism may encounter local chapter leadership still finding their guidance in reading the leaves in the tea room of the Russian Revolution. Initial stumbles in the organization’s immediate response to the Hamas attack in Israel prompted a spate of long-time member resignations—some with accompanying open letters—but the trickle did not turn into a torrent.
In the meantime, DSA, now slimmed down to 80-some-odd thousand members, has also struggled with the more immediate, public, and arguably more important question of working out a tenable relationship with those members holding elected political office. While the organization encourages members to seek office and benefits from their successes, it understandably does not want to be associated with public figures with markedly divergent politics.
At the same time, office-holding members are answerable to their electorate, not DSA. In the light of some recent experiences on this front, Sanders’s non-joiner stance starts to look somewhat prescient. DSA’s long-term relevance will depend on its ability to carve out a meaningful role as a socialist organization that is not and does not aspire to being a political party.
Much of the post-election Democratic Party fretting has quite appropriately centered on the degree to which it has lost the presumption of being the party of the working class. One solution to the problem was succinctly, and improbably, formulated by the centrist New York Timescolumnist David Brooks: “Maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption—something that will make people like me feel uncomfortable.” By Jove, you’ve got it, Mr. Brooks: Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable! But Brooks goes on to fret, “Can the Democratic Party do this? Can the party of the universities, the affluent suburbs and the hipster urban cores do this?”
Can students, teachers, suburbanites and hipsters “embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption?” Well sure, quite a few have already done so — twice now. The roadblock clearly does not lie there.
The real problem is those uncomfortable with the idea of a Democratic Party no longer aspiring to the impossible status of being both the party of the working class and the party of billionaire financiers.
For a look into the void at the core of the Democratic Party we need only think back to that moment in February, 2020 when it began to look like the “Bernie Sanders-style disruption” just might pull it off and the party closed ranks, with candidates Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Michael Bloomberg, Elizabeth Warren, and Tom Steyer scurrying out of the race and endorsing Joe Biden in a matter of just six days. None of this underscored the party’s determination not to turn its back on the billionaires so clearly as the fact that at the time of his withdrawal Bloomberg was in the process of spending a billion bucks of his “own money” in pursuit of the nomination. Obama’s fingerprints were never found on these coordinated withdrawals, but most observers draw the obvious conclusions. And we know that the prior nominee, executive whisperer Hillary Clinton, was certainly all in on the move. Herein lies our problem, Mr. Brooks.
But how? And who? The how is the easy question in the sense that Bernie Sanders unforgettably demonstrated how much the right presidential primary candidate can alter the national political debate— even when the Democratic Party establishment pulls out all the stops to block them, and even if succeeds in doing so. At the same time, the difficulty in winning and holding congressional seats shows that, while self-evidently necessary in the long run, those campaigns do not have the same galvanizing potential.
Who? At the moment, the only person whose career thus far suggests such potential is New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. But then a lot can happen in four years. And Donald Trump’s reelection portends four years of American politics bizarre beyond anything we’ve seen before.
Tom Gallagher has been a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, chair of Boston DSA, and Democratic Presidential Nominating Convention Delegate for both George McGovern and Bernie Sanders.
