‘When did everyone become a socialist?’ asks a New York magazine headline. It seems that for many young Americans ‘calling yourself a socialist sounds sexier than anything else out there’. Things certainly are getting strange. For most of the past half century, you had to be a masochist to call yourself a socialist in the US. It risked attracting disdain and ridicule, and put you on the political margins.
I joined the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) as a teenager in 2007. It was then the largest such organisation in the US and the country’s sole representative in the Socialist International (it left in 2017). But in the world’s most capitalist nation, with a population of more than 300 million, our socialist movement had just 5,000 members.
I went to tiny meetings, in private homes or community spaces offered for free. There were often fewer than a dozen people. Some, like me, were young; most were over 60. There was never anyone from the generations in between. We learned to sing the Internationale, we heard stories from red diaper babies (children of Communist Party or Socialist Party members) and veterans of the New Left of the 1960s and 70s, we kept the old language and the old fight alive, but we were irrelevant. When I worked one summer at DSA’s national office, we didn’t even have enough money for a water cooler. We carried our mugs to a shared restroom, shuffling past well-dressed professionals who were in the same building, and drew lukewarm New York tap water.
America’s handful of democratic socialists were survivors, a position not new to us. DSA was formed from the shattered remnants of the once mighty Socialist Party of America (SPA), whose most famous exponent was Eugene Debs. By the early 1970s, the SPA had just a few hundred members and was bitterly divided over how to relate to the New Left, whether to work within the Democratic Party, and even where to stand on the Vietnam war.
