It’s Prime Time for Socialists. How We Make Our Case Matters.
Democratic socialists have a historic opportunity to make socialism a mass politics that wins over millions. We can’t take full advantage of that opportunity without carefully calibrating our rhetoric and demands.
For decades, socialists mostly talked to each other. Now that Americans are actually listening, we can’t hold onto the rhetorical habits we picked up in isolation. (John Lamparski / Getty Images)
If a store where you live still carries newspapers, you can try a little experiment. Pick up the most recent issue of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or the New York Post or the Washington Post. Start flipping through the pages, and see how many seconds it takes you to find the word “socialist” in a headline.
In August 2026, this won’t be a very time-consuming experiment. Since Zohran Mamdani became mayor of the most important city in the capitalist world, socialism has been a hot topic. Now several other Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members have won their primaries and are likely headed to Congress, putting socialists even more in the spotlight. DSA conferences are getting long write-ups in mainstream national publications. Cable news hosts are eagerly seeking out socialists to defend their ideas. When DSA put out a new platform document, the Speaker of the House denounced it on the floor of Congress.
This explosion of visibility has come with some growing pains. Democratic socialism was long a marginal force in American politics, if it was even in the mix at all. Where in the last several decades we’ve become far too accustomed to mostly talking about our ideas to each other, we are now speaking before a general audience.
Much of our political program is relatively straightforward. Some socialist policies, like Medicare for All and reducing the workweek to thirty-two hours, are already quite popular. When we say that the fight against the Trump administration’s disturbing authoritarianism needs to be linked to a broader project to curb the political and economic power of the wealthy, and that the Democratic Party establishment is very much part of the problem, many ordinary Americans are prepared to listen.
In other ways, though, we have a steeper hill to climb. Even the chunk of the public that most aligns with our short-term goals has not yet been won over to our long-term vision. We’re socialists because we don’t just want a better social contract for the working class within capitalism in the short term, although we certainly do want that. We understand that whatever reforms we win now can be rolled back tomorrow if wealthy business owners are allowed to hold onto their structural power in our economy, and thus continue to influence our politics. To both secure the gains already won and remedy the core injustice that structures our society, socialists contend that society’s productive assets must eventually come under collective and democratic ownership.
This vision lies entirely outside the map of “normal” political disagreement in our society. We’re raising fundamental issues with exploitation and ownership that traditionally haven’t been considered up for debate. That means that our ideological opponents’ go-to move is always going to be to portray us as insane, out-of-touch ultraradicals. And if we lack rigorous thought and discipline around the less persuasive and defensible ideas floating around the socialist movement, we only make our opponents’ job easier.
Breaking Bad Habits
During the long decades when socialists were unaccustomed to having to justify ourselves to anyone but one another, we had many incentives to take whatever positions felt the most hard-line. When political power seems permanently out of reach, politics becomes reduced to a kind of symbolic moral protest. And if that’s all it is, there’s nothing left but to lodge the purest protest we can manage.
Instead of trying to persuade those who are, if not actually right-wing, at least to our right (that is, the vast majority of the public), we got in the habit of spending our time trying to prove our leftist bona fides to those who might outflank us to the left. We picked up many bad habits during this long sojourn in the political wilderness — habits that we still need to do much more to shed.
Most of the new DSA platform, for example, is excellent, but it includes multiple lapses into dubious maximalism, on subjects ranging from borders to policing and prisons.
DSA-affiliated politicians who have to worry about defending their positions to voters have declined to defend those elements of the platform. This in turn has led some socialists to argue about how to hold such politicians “accountable.” But it might be more politically productive to take a beat to consider the possibility that our political instincts need correcting. It’s a reasonable aspiration for a socialist organization to want to build firm consensus around a series of core ideas, such that we would then withdraw support from officeholders who deviate too much from that consensus. But it’s not realistic to first throw all sorts of radical-sounding but half-baked ideas onto the pile and then try to build a firm consensus around the whole thing.
No one denies that there are genuine points of principle that need to be defended even when they’re unpopular. Even there, we must think carefully about which fights to pick, and how to express unpopular but genuinely vital principles in a way that makes them as appealing as possible to the people we’re trying to win over. But the worst-case scenario is one where socialists feel we need to prove our radical credentials to each other by defending positions that are not only unpopular but genuinely poorly thought-out.
What, for example, does it mean to say, as DSA’s national platform does, that various laudable and desperately needed criminal justice reforms should be understood as steps toward “abolishing” police and prisons? Even in an advanced socialist society where poverty was something people read about in history books, at least some interpersonal violence would almost certainly still persist. When it does, investigation by some sort of professionalized, publicly administered law enforcement body followed by trials and involuntary confinement for those found guilty is a far better solution than vigilantism, vendettas, or ultralocalized community groups deciding who’s guilty and what they think counts as a fair punishment à la medieval villages.
If what we really mean by “abolition” is that we want the corrupt and brutal forms of policing and prisons that exist now to be replaced by more humane and democratic versions of law enforcement in a socialist future, expressing this as a call for “abolition” is misleading on the substance of the proposal, since we aren’t actually calling to abolish policing and prisons but rather to change them. It is also flagrant political malpractice, as any average person who hears “abolish police and prisons” imagines a world overrun by theft and violence with no recourse. And rightly so, as the term “abolish” means to eliminate immediately and entirely, which was the position of nineteenth-century abolitionists toward the institution of slavery.
When some DSA spokespeople go on large media platforms and bite the bullet on every wildly unpopular and poorly thought-through maximalist idea that’s arisen in our movement — cheerfully affirming that, yes, we do want that — it’s an easy way to win points for loyalty and radical commitment within the circles of the already converted. But it’s a very bad strategy for making our case to a broader public.
Recently, Jacobin contributor and DSA member Eric Blanc made these very points in a WNYC interview with host Brian Lehrer. “It’s frankly just a mistake that national DSA took certain positions that are both marginalizing for us in the short term and just politically wrong even in the long term,” Blanc said. “In what world does it make sense, if our goal is to organize millions of people and to overcome the Democratic establishment and to defeat Trumpism, to take a position that you know is just going to give fuel to your opponents, and for which there’s no practical upshot right now? Taking that sort of doctrinaire ideological position seems to me a reflection of a lack of experience and a lack of engagement in mass politics.” He’s exactly right.
It’s Showtime
There are many existing institutions that we really could and should “abolish” in the short or medium term. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, for example, is a brutal agency that Donald Trump has increasingly wielded as a kind of private army. It’s also a relatively recent addition to the American state. Anyone who can remember what life was like in the 1990s should be able to imagine its abolition. The US Senate, of course, is vastly better entrenched, but it’s also deeply undemocratic, and DSA and other socialists have rightly called for getting rid of it.
Those are the kinds of arguments any socialist interested in publicly defending our movement should be prepared to take up on Fox News or anywhere else. But we unnecessarily make the task of persuasion harder when we let our enemies present these positions as part of a package deal with far murkier and less defensible demands.
Similarly, if we’re trying to argue that the failures of authoritarian state socialism in the twentieth century shouldn’t mean that capitalism is the best humanity will ever be able to do, and that a better form of socialism is possible and desirable, we don’t do ourselves any favors by refusing to say anything too negative about left-wing dictatorships targeted by US foreign policy.
Oftentimes, this reluctance is motivated not by sympathy for the political systems of the targeted countries but by fear of “conceding” something to neocons and warmongers. The problem is that this does exactly nothing to reassure anyone that we really are committed on principle to free speech and multiparty democracy. It also makes the warmongers’ task easier by giving them fodder to portray everyone who opposes imperial aggression against these countries as a stealth supporter of their systems.
The points we should be relentlessly making instead are that societies are far less likely to liberalize when they’re faced with external threats, and in any case US policy should focus on what the United States can reasonably bring about — alleviating suffering by dropping sanctions and normalizing relations. This is the line DSA cochair Ashik Siddique took during a recent grilling on CNN about Cuba: “Many decades of US policy at this point have shown that if we want to expand democracy across the world, military regime change and economic blockades are not the way to do it.”
The consistent thread running through all these particular examples is a simple one. We have a chance to rally broad support behind our short-term social democratic agenda, and to slowly and steadily build support for a more radical socialist horizon. But we can only do that if we think seriously at every stage about exactly what we want, how to get it, and how to assemble a popular majority behind it. This is a completely different mindset than one where we spend our time trying to reassure one another of our radical commitment.
We need to act like America is watching, because it is.