For a few months after cities and states across the country began implementing stay-at-home orders to forestall the spread of COVID-19, many on the Left feared a political chilling effect. The abrupt end of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign in early April intensified the ominous feeling that the Left’s momentum, which had accelerated for years with no sign of reversal, would find no outlet and grind to a standstill.

In the last weekend of May, that fog of doubt lifted as first hundreds, then thousands, then eventually hundreds of thousands of Americans took to the streets to protest the police murder of George Floyd. June saw the continuation and growth of the street protests, as well as victories for democratic socialist electoral campaigns undertaken in difficult conditions in Pennsylvania and New York.

In July, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) secured another electoral victory in Texas, while socialists and working-class people in Seattle successfully mobilized to tax large corporations, Amazon chief among them, to provide coronavirus relief, and fund social housing and a Green New Deal.