Why is socialism a growing force in American politics for the first time in over a century?
It’s not happenstance. Socialism meets the historical moment.
The Socialist Party of America founded in 1901 reached its apex of organizational strength, membership, electoral success and national visibility just before World War I, during the 1912 election.
The SPA had well over 100,000 dues-paying members, but perennial socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs received about 900,000 votes (6% of the popular vote) in 1912, indicating significant penetration into the broader electorate. Socialist candidates were elected to over a thousand local and state offices, including dozens of mayors, in more than 300 cities—and two U.S. House seats.
Why then? The Gilded Age was American capitalism at its worst. Underpaid workers and exploited immigrants joined a socialist movement that drove a wedge through a civil war in the Republican Party caused by Teddy Roosevelt’s third-party run against his protégé, incumbent President William Howard Taft. Child labor was widespread, especially in agriculture, textile mills, mining and factories.
Today, of course, the civil war creating openings for the Democratic Socialists of America is in the Democratic Party. Immigrants are again being brutalized. And workers, particularly the young Gen Zers who can’t even find a job to begin with, are seething more than ever.
Child labor is back. Underage worker violations are up fivefold over the last decade, with a shockingly rising number of hazardous occupation cases. States are working to eliminate youth work permits, reduce minimum or “training” wages for teenagers, extend work hours during the school year, and lower age limits for serving and selling alcohol.
When the ruling class go 19th century, their victims go 19th century socialism.
Economic divisions of our time are eerily reminiscent of the stark chasm between idle rich and working poor that prompted Karl Marx to bang out the Paris Manuscripts and, four years later, co-author the 1848 Communist Manifesto. The top 1% and top 0.01% of income “earners” collect shares of national wealth rivaling those of the late 1800s to 1920s. The 19th century transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy looked much like the current disruption caused by big tech, automation and AI, which rewards Wall Street and tech bros while leaving the vast majority of Americans behind. Both the Gilded Age and ours saw unions crushed, financial regulations gutted, and tax codes restructured to benefit the rich.
DSA co-chair Megan Romer recently observed: “People are seeing that capitalism is not working for them, that these unchecked, unfettered big businesses—the oil companies getting richer during a war, like they see that, they see it over and over and over again. People my age—I’m about to turn 43—my whole adult life has been this: just less and less, you know, the wages just basically the same and cost of everything going up.”
Everything bad is new again.
Think up a notorious evil of the 19th century and odds are, it has been revived in whole or in part in recent years.
Slavery ended in 1865—on paper—yet the International Labour Organization and Anti-Slavery International estimate that 50 million people around the world, and over a million in the U.S., are trapped in contemporary forms of effective bondage, including forced labor, human trafficking and forced marriage.
Indentured servitude is no more. But 500,000 to 1.7 million Americans work as unpaid interns—not because they enjoy the zen economics of white-collar slavery but because employers pressure them into it for the chance at a “real” job.
Roughly 760,000 American workers earn less than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, a rock-bottom sum frozen since 2009. Most “sub-minimum wage” workers (an absurd oxymoron) are restaurant workers who are supposed to get tips, full-time students and workers with certain disabilities.
Meanwhile, robber barons are back. A small group of tech, media and finance billionaires (and at least one trillionaire) controls economic sectors whose valuations rival the GDPs of small nations. Unlike O.G. robber barons like Carnegie and Rockefeller, however, mega-corporations dominate data, digital platforms and algorithmic networks that operate across international borders instantaneously, giving them access to markets on a planetary scale that magnifies their ability to extract wealth from everybody else.
It’s not just the economy. In many ways that matter and feel equally awful, 19th century vibes are reverberating through our culture. In the same way that the Sears Roebuck catalog disrupted and drove small general stores out of business in the 1800s, while delighting consumers, Amazon undercuts local outlets with deep distribution, low employee wages and reduced prices. Social-media-popularized “tradwives” feel like a new version of retro; here too, the 19th century got here first with the “Cult of True Womanhood,” a cultural ideal that taught that a woman’s natural and sacred domain was her home, where she could focus on her primary values: piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity.
Victorian-era moralists and doctors warned that sexual activity and even romantic love drained vital energy and led to physical and mental ruin. Men were told by prudes that sex was “animal lust” and women were ordered to avoid “carnal passion.” New emotional and moral structures extended courtship before marriage, causing people to marry later and have fewer children. Now we have delayed marriage due to cultural and economic pressures, young adults forced by the jobs shortage to stay home with their parents longer and a “sex recession” and an epidemic of physical and emotional loneliness exacerbated by iPhone addiction.
Tens of millions of American voters are starting to turn toward a new way of life, one in which hard work is fairly paid, piggishness is reined in, and life is fun—and sexy: socialism. If there’s anything surprising about this development, it’s that it has taken us so long to get here.
(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas.”)
