Running against socialism failed in the 2026 midterms, historian says

New York Mayor Mamdani disavows DSA platform planks its co-chair confirmed

Six socialists won election to Congress and three won mayoralties in last week’s midterms, host Terry Gross said in introducing Wednesday’s interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, leaving New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Ann Arbor and Providence, Rhode Island, led by socialists. “American socialists are having their best year since 1912,” Gross said. Her guest, Jill Lepore — a professor of American history at Harvard University, a professor of law at Harvard Law School and a staff writer at The New Yorker — has written a New Yorker article on the moment titled “Can American Socialism Survive Its Success?” She has also recently written about whether the president has the power to declare war. Her books include the New York Times bestsellers “These Truths: A History Of The United States” and “We The People: A History Of The U.S. Constitution,” which won a 2026 Pulitzer Prize.

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, appeared on “Fox News Sunday” the weekend after the election, according to Fresh Air, and told host Shannon Bream that candidates across the country “no matter how they describe themselves” had run on policies that would “transform working people’s lives.” “James Talarico ran on universal pre-K. Annie Andrews ran on ending endless wars. Keisha Lance Bottoms ran on streamlining the production of affordable housing. Jocelyn Benson ran on a data-center moratorium,” Mamdani said. “These are the kinds of things that also characterize what we’ve been doing right here in New York City. And yes. I’m proud to be doing so as a mayor who’s a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.” Pressed on whether the country should “get rid of borders,” “get rid of SCOTUS” or “get rid of jails,” Mamdani said “No” to each — and “No” again when Bream asked whether he thought the DSA would kick him out. What unites the organization’s members, he said, is “a belief in the dignity of working-class people” and an understanding “that democracy, for it to be meaningful, can’t just be at the ballot box.” Gross framed the contrast plainly: it is Mamdani’s style and points of view that are “really catching on,” not the national DSA’s platform.

The national organization’s own agenda drew wide attention in July, when DSA co-chair Megan Romer appeared on the same program and, at Bream’s prompting, confirmed planks of the platform item by item. Romer answered “True” on abolishing the Senate, “Yep” on replacing the presidency and Supreme Court as they now operate, “Absolutely” on abolishing ICE and on defunding the Pentagon, and “Yeah, absolutely” on government or public ownership of most large corporations. She endorsed abolishing borders and granting amnesty to people in the United States illegally as “a long-term plan,” and largely abolishing prisons as part of a “long-term program.”

Lepore called that July 26 interview “notorious.” The quiz format “doesn’t serve Megan Romer well,” she said, but Romer’s tone — an “edge of laughter” as she certified “that these are the formal positions of the platform of the DSA” — struck her as “quite glib” and “exacerbated the perception of the extremism of the DSA.” The platform, published this past summer, drew specific denunciations from many leading Democrats, she said, and Republicans were “thrilled” to run against it. “Running against socialism didn’t work at all for the Republicans,” Lepore said, calling the 2026 attacks “a kind of little Red Scare of 2026” that “completely failed.” What has changed, she argued, is that socialism “no longer means you’re beyond the political pale”: candidates can run as democratic socialists and win mayors’ offices — in Los Angeles, Providence and Ann Arbor, as well as New York.

Some candidates who consider themselves democratic socialists stay out of the DSA precisely because of platform elements they do not support, Lepore said. The platform itself is in large part a recycling project: many items Bream listed also appeared on the formal 1912 platform of the Socialist Party of America, which was a political party — the DSA, she noted, is not one. Reading the proceedings of the Socialists’ 1912 national convention in Indianapolis, she found a durable rule of socialist politics: “If you have two socialists in a room, you’re going to have at least three political opinions.”

Abolishing the Senate, Lepore said, is actually “one of the more mainstream positions” on the DSA list, with roots outside socialism. Until 1913, senators were chosen by state legislatures in a chamber she said was called “the millionaires lobby,” and direct-election amendments first proposed after the Civil War “kept passing the House,” only to die in a Senate whose members “knew they couldn’t win a popular vote.” The Senate was itself a founding compromise — “the other half of the compromise” embodied in the three-fifths clause, which granted the slave states enormous political power — and both arrangements sit in Article 5, which places the Senate’s equal suffrage beyond amendment. That compromise, she said, helped produce four of the nation’s first five presidents from Virginia. The DSA’s calls to replace the presidency and Supreme Court, likewise present in 1912, recycle what she called “antique socialist positions” — the view that the Court is “inherently aristocratic” and must be reinvented rather than reformed, and that the presidency has accumulated too much power — in service of a direct democracy in which the House of Representatives, the only truly representative branch, would hold predominant power, a preference she noted the framers partly shared.

People had called themselves socialists before 1901, Lepore said: 19th-century utopian communities such as the Oneidans considered themselves socialists in opposition to the capitalism that emerged from the Industrial Revolution, aligning with a spirit of communalism in American life that she traced back to the Puritans and the Christian commonwealth — the notion that people live together in community and in the interests of their commonwealth — leaving what she called a “Thoreauvian spirit of socialism.” But socialism “in its kind of recognizable form doesn’t emerge in American political discourse until the 1890s,” Lepore said, at the height of the Gilded Age, when robber barons, trusts and oligarchs controlled the American economy and held outsized political power while the labor movement advanced workers’ interests and called for strikes.

The Socialist Party of America was founded in 1901 by Eugene Victor Debs and Victor Berger, a Milwaukee socialist. Debs, the Terre Haute, Indiana-based head of the Railway Union — the country’s most important union, in Lepore’s telling — was jailed in the 1890s for his role in organizing a strike against George Pullman’s railroad company after Pullman cut workers’ wages in the wake of the Panic of 1893. Berger brought Debs a copy of Marx’s “Das Kapital” in prison, Lepore said, but Debs — then a Democrat opposed to socialism — converted only after the “famously corrupt” 1896 election of William McKinley, in which moneyed interests were thought to have played the decisive role. Berger became the first socialist elected to Congress, in 1910, on a platform that included abolishing the Senate.

Lepore called 1912 “socialism’s last best year” because the party’s agenda was absorbed by the Democrats, who came to power that year. The platform’s demand for collective ownership of railroads, telegraph lines, mines, forests, oil wells, banks and the currency system never arrived, she said, but the labor items — a workweek of no more than five and a half days, a minimum wage, old-age pensions, workers’ and unemployment insurance and abolition of child labor — were positions the Democratic Party took on and instituted, though not all right away, with many as New Deal measures. Women’s suffrage, a separate item on the same platform, Gross checked off as another that arrived. The socialists of 1912 welcomed the reforms but had wanted a revolution, she said, believing America was destined to become a socialist country — in practice, something like Western Europe’s social welfare states.

One plank remains live: abolishing the Electoral College. Amending the Constitution to do it is “arguably impossible,” Lepore said, but the National Popular Vote Compact — under which states pledge their electors to the winner of the national popular vote, taking effect only once the signatories control an Electoral College majority — could accomplish the same result. She noted “a real question whether that’s constitutional,” one she believes has not been tested, and said that with Democrats holding governor’s offices and both legislative chambers in enough states, “it seems like there are enough Democratic votes to make this happen.”

The Democratic Socialists of America, founded in 1982 by Michael Harrington, had “limped along” for decades, Lepore said, until Sanders’ 2015 and 2016 campaigns drew members and support for socialism across the Trump years. Harrington, who took a vow of poverty in Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker Movement and became famous with “The Other America,” his profile of the country’s unseen poverty, helped set the War on Poverty in motion after Dwight MacDonald’s 13,000-word New Yorker review of the book — the longest the magazine had published — “The Invisible Poor,” caught the Kennedy administration’s attention. Concluding that a separate party no longer worked for American socialism, Harrington left the Socialist Party in 1972 and led an organization known as DSOC, wagering — as the DSA has since the 1980s, Lepore said — on pressuring the Democratic Party from within, the strategy he drew from socialism’s 1912 peak.

Gross also worked through what Mamdani promised in office and how far he has gotten. Mamdani pushed for universal daycare and, Gross said, is “delivering that to some New Yorkers. Not all of them, but it’s a work in progress.” His goal of adding a tax on very expensive second homes, when the owner lives out of state, neither lives in that second home nor rents it, ran into the courts: “He lost in court. That was overturned,” Gross said, and Mamdani now faces “a couple of other lawsuits” on the question. His plan for city-owned discount grocery stores “is running into obstacles,” Gross said, while Mamdani “succeeded in filling a lot of potholes, which is no small thing, whether you drive, bicycle or are a pedestrian.” These are all very popular, Gross said, though she added, “Well, I’m not sure about the second homes. I don’t know how popular that is,” and “he is moving forward.” Lepore added that Mamdani “himself remains very popular,” calling his “charm and charisma and his youth” a “really important part of Mamdani’s success.”

Sanders, who defines himself as a socialist but is not a DSA member, had come to political power earlier as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, where he governed a struggling city, in Lepore’s account, with an “unbelievably successful” and “very market-forward kind of socialism” that “ushered in a spirit of civic renewal” — evidence, she said, that local governance is historically where socialism works best in the United States.

The conditions favoring it now are economic, she argued: socialism does best in the United States “when we are not enjoying shared prosperity,” and although the country has seen “a lot of economic growth, real wages have been stagnant or have fallen,” while income inequality runs higher than at any point in the recorded quantitative history of the measure. The DSA has deliberately redefined its constituency — “If you work for a living, you’re a member of the working class,” she said — a frame fitted to nurses whose algorithms set their schedules, workers who cannot afford child care and people holding extra jobs to cover housing costs. Lepore said “the socialist critique of the state of American capitalism is spot on,” that an economy “designed around the interests of corporations has not served the American people well,” and that polls this fall found about 50% of Americans ages 18 to 34 view socialism favorably. The data-center moratorium championed by Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, she said, has proven “meaningful to voters.”

Lepore said two-thirds of Americans support Medicare for All, a position Sanders has campaigned on, and she argued that the old tactic of sinking such proposals by branding them socialist — deployed against Harry Truman’s national health insurance program in the 1940s and early 1950s by a campaign consulting company hired to depict national health programs as “socialized medicine,” and later against the Clinton and Obama administration health plans — “might not work anymore” after 2026. “I don’t know that the DSA will survive its success,” she said, while adding that she cannot speak to the organization’s health and that support for items advocated by democratic socialists — including, despite attacks from the right, the Green New Deal — is “at an all-time high.” The measure of success, she said, as in 1912, is whether the proposals prove “supported by large numbers of Americans” and likely to be implemented.

Lepore ended on what she called a convergence of “socialist utopianism” with “techno-utopianism.” The DSA’s 2026 platform, following a socialist habit of imagining a day without capitalism that she traced to Marx in 1845, sketches a postcapitalist day of school runs, errands, doctors’ visits and movies — the same leisure promised by Sam Altman and Elon Musk, who foresee no need for anyone to work, with income supplied as universal basic income or, in Altman’s formulation, “universal basic compute.” In her latest book, “The Rise And Fall Of The Artificial State,” about AI’s effects on politics and government, she described an arrangement in which six AI corporations run all production and pay people to live, with universal income functioning as “a hedge against revolution.” “I find this dystopian in the extreme,” she said, “but that is actually the vision.”

Asked why the AI vision of leisure has grown dystopian for so many people, Lepore pointed to what people describe as the “purpose problem”: she asked what happens “if all the nurses are robots and nobody nurses anymore” — “What are you doing with your day?” AI has already solved many math problems, she said, leaving mathematicians in “a crisis of meaningless- and purposelessness,” a condition she said she sees in her own college students, who feel that machines can already do better much of what they are training to do and ask what their meaning and purpose in life is. The fantasy that the best thing would be a world in which no one has anything to do and machines do it all goes way back, she said — a lot of the socialist vision of the 19-teens, and also a 1930s alternative to socialism called technocracy, led by Elon Musk’s grandfather Joshua Haldeman, national chairman of the organization called Technocracy Incorporated, who proposed getting rid of “the nation state and democracy and banks and elections and prices and work” so that everybody would live in a technate.

Lepore also described what she called a fearsome moment for history itself. Citing a Sandra Day O’Connor Institute study published last year, she said “teachers now approach subjects like elections, the economy or Civil Rights with caution, if at all”; more than three out of four civics teachers surveyed reported censoring themselves out of fear of pushback or controversy, more than one in three had removed or altered lesson plans and more than one in four had considered quitting. She has considered it herself, she told Gross — “I think about it a lot” — citing a textbook edition of her book “These Truths” that requires “Gulf of America” stickers in some states, and a planned Boise, Idaho, gathering of roughly 9,000 students for her Constitution lecture that became an opt-in event after parents objected to it as purported “liberal indoctrination.” Pressure, she said, has come from both directions: students who refused during the racial-reckoning period to read the 1857 Dred Scott decision because it would “cause them harm,” faculty made to apologize, and then campaigns against teachers of slavery, segregation and immigration that she compared to the 1930s and 1950s efforts in which young people posed as students to report on professors. Public schools, she said, should be held up “as the guardians of our democracy.”