As the impact of the coronavirus continues to sweep across the country, the failures of capitalism are again on view. Yet socialism, as both a critique of capitalism and an alternative political and economic system, has long remained outside the narrow limits of U.S. electoral politics. Even well before the anti-communist fervor of the Cold War, socialist Eugene Victor Debs ran for president against three candidates—Democrat Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt on the Progressive Party ticket, and Republican William Howard Taft. Debs won a meager six percent of the electorate, or just under a million votes. That was, nevertheless, an all-time high for a Socialist Party candidate. For a hundred years afterward, socialism was virtually dormant in American politics. The tide began to turn in September 2011, when Occupy Wall Street protesters massed in Zuccotti Park, and subsequently in other public spaces around the nation, raising a banner for the 99 percent. The shift was triggered by twenty-first century capitalism’s extreme corruption on full display in the 2008 global financial meltdown, and in response to the surge of big money into politics made possible by the Citizens United Supreme Court decision in 2010 and the fossil fuel industry’s unabated despoiling of our planet. Occupy Wall Street, and then the 2016 Sanders campaign, began to alter the American political landscape. Comparing the outcome of the Debs candidacy to the tens of millions who voted for Bernie in the current round of Democratic primaries, it’s obvious that socialism, or Democratic Socialism, has achieved a measure of influence and reached a number of adherents previously unthinkable. According to a recent Gallup poll, 43 percent of Americans now view “socialism as a good thing for the country”; and fully 61 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 hold a positive view of socialism, with capitalism trailing at 58 percent.

Click here to read the full Editorial Team statement