They became increasingly open to the idea that the system was rigged against them and that incremental reform was not enough. As the profits and share prices of large corporations recovered from their recessionary lows, enriching executives and investors, many young adults began wondering whether they would ever share the fruits of 21 st century capitalism.
And particularly in the years immediately after the crash, many of them had trouble finding the jobs their degrees once promised. Students had to abandon college hopes or take out larger loans that that consumed a substantial portion of their incomes. And as revenues fell, many state governments slashed public support for higher education, forcing public colleges and universities to raise tuition sharply. The younger working class entered a job market that provided far fewer stable opportunities than their parents had enjoyed. The Great Recession especially shaped the outlook of young adults. The slow recovery from the Great Recession left many Americans wondering whether they would ever regain the income and wealth they had lost. Experts who had preached the virtues of self-regulation were forced to recant. The economic and financial collapse of 2008-2009 undermined the claim that the economy had entered a new era of stability and moderation. In recent decades, however, growth has been episodic and slow, wages have stagnated for working-class and many middle-class families, mobility has slowed, and inequality has soared. Galston Tuesday, March 13, 2018ĭuring the heyday of the industrial era, growth was rapid, its fruits were broadly shared across income and wage classes, and upward mobility was widespread.
One measure of her influence: As of early May, Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer had 1.7 million Twitter followers House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had 2.5 million Ocasio-Cortez had 4 million.Īlthough President Donald Trump declared war on socialism in his 2019 State of the Union address, its champions felt no pressure to back down. Their ranks included Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who quickly became one of the country’s best-known politicians. Bernie Sanders received 45 percent of the Democratic primary vote in 2016, and in the 2018 mid-term elections, members of Democratic Socialists of America were among the prominent Democratic victors. The crash of 2008, rising inequality, and an intensifying critique of how contemporary capitalism works has brought socialism back into the mainstream-in some ways even more powerfully than in Debs’ time, since those who use the label have become an influential force in the Democratic Party.
But when it came to electoral politics, socialism was largely shunned or irrelevant. The New Deal drew on proposals pioneered by socialists, and it was a young socialist named Michael Harrington whose book The Other America helped launch the war on poverty. Socialism never lost its intellectual influence, however. After the war ended, the Communist seizure of power in what became the Soviet Union contributed to a “red scare” that further weakened America’s indigenous socialist tradition. (Debs secured almost a million votes in the 1920 presidential election, running from a jail cell). Socialism declined after this peak and faced repression during World War I because of the party’s opposition to the war. In the 1912 presidential election, Debs secured six percent of the popular vote, and Socialists held 1,200 offices in 340 cities, their ranks including 79 mayors. It’s worth recalling how important socialism once was at the ballot box to understand that this tradition has deeper roots in our history than many imagine.
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