In June 2019, Bernie Sanders gave a speech at George Washington University about his vision of democratic socialism. For Sanders, democratic socialism represented a “higher path” of “compassion, justice, and love” — and a “political revolution” where working people organized to claim new political and economic rights and freedoms currently denied by capitalism.

He also named some of those systemic barriers: the greed of Wall Street; the insurance and drug companies opposing Medicare for All; the agribusiness and fossil fuel industries accelerating our ecological catastrophe; and the violent military-industrial and carceral complexes that stand behind them all.

Sanders’s two presidential campaigns resonated precisely because of these conditions. They popularized the idea of democratic socialism for a broader American audience than ever before. Yet the deeper meaning of democratic socialism was not preordained prior to the rapid growth of this movement between 2015 and 2020 — it evolved in real time. Today, with Sanders having withdrawn from the race and the Democratic Socialists of America now numbering over seventy thousand members, making it the largest socialist organization in the US going back to at least World War II, pressing questions remain about both the guiding principles and the ultimate horizon of democratic socialism.