The following is an excerpt from the upcoming book “The American Road to Socialism: The Unfinished Struggle for Democracy”
Ask an American whether workers should own the results of their labor, and you will get a yes. Ask whether the economy is rigged in favor of corporations and the wealthy, and you will get a yes – 70 percent of respondents in a national poll last year, including 58 percent of Republicans, said the system is rigged and needs to be replaced. Ask whether your boss, your landlord, and your insurance company have too much control over your life, and you will get a yes. Then say the word “socialism,” and watch the yes turn into a maybe.
That gap is the central strategic problem we in the American left face. This is a challenge we socialists have faced for decades, but the political foundations are changing. Sixty-two percent of Americans under thirty now hold a favorable view of socialism. Among Democrats, favorable views have climbed from 50 percent in 2010 to 66 percent in 2025. Meanwhile Gallup found the approval rate of capitalism slipping to 54 percent, its worst showing in over a decade of polling. Roughly 15 percent of 2024 Trump voters — younger, more racially diverse, and largely disengaged from politics — told pollsters they prefer democratic socialism to capitalism. These results have been matched with equal intensity in the waves of socialist primary victories across the country this cycle. DSA endorsed roughly 150 candidates in 2026. By the end of June, thirty-five had won their primaries or gone unopposed.
These wins are only the beginning of building a durable socialist movement in this country. If we are to displace the political establishment rather than merely embarrass it, we have to build a movement that crosses the partisan spectrum. Closing the gap between what Americans already believe and what they think socialism is takes three things: understanding why the gap exists, learning to speak in a way that closes it, and building an organization disciplined enough to contest the communities where the gap will be closed.
Why Has America Not (Yet) Embraced Socialism?
We first have to address the elephant in the room: Why over the 250 years of this country’s existence has socialism failed to take root? There are four structural obstacles in this country that have historically prevented the United States of America from embracing socialism. First, the deliberate repression of the left by capital and the state cannot be ignored when answering this question. McCarthyism, COINTELPRO, the destruction of radical unions, elite-driven cultural backlash to eras of progressive political dominance, and the outright assassination of prominent leftist leaders in this country have all been tools used by the elite to prevent the destruction of capitalism.
Second is elite-driven racial divisiveness. In a multiracial society like ours, racism has been the most reliable instrument the political and economic elite have for keeping the working class divided against itself, deployed by reactionary coalitions from the founding of this country, through the end of Reconstruction, the Dixiecrats and the Southern Strategy, and present day racial divides. When workers are pitted against each other, they cannot organize alongside one other against the capitalist minority.
Third, unlike almost every other industrialized democracy, the United States has for most of its history lacked a durable labor or socialist party, leaving the working class without an independent political vehicle to organize. The Socialist Party, as well as the Democratic Party at certain points in its history, offered a space for working class political organization. But this wasn’t permanent. The structural explanation for this absence lies in the American electoral system itself. Winner-take-all elections, single-member congressional districts, and the Electoral College create nearly insurmountable barriers to third parties that simply do not exist in the proportional representation systems of Europe and Latin America.
The fourth obstacle is closely related to the third—the cultural identification of socialism with foreign ideologies and anti-Americanism. For a century, the right has successfully branded socialism as something alien to the American tradition: a European import at best and Soviet totalitarianism at worst. This branding has been reinforced by a corporate-controlled media apparatus that has consistently marginalized socialist voices from mainstream political discourse while amplifying the association between socialism and authoritarianism. This is the obstacle that matters most, because all others can be overcome through organizing, institution-building, and political strategy. If Americans continue to believe socialism is fundamentally un-American, no amount of doorknocking will overcome that barrier. The cultural and rhetorical reframing of socialism that we present to the masses is the foundation everything else rests on.
Speaking American: How We Talk About Socialism
The reason why socialism in this country has failed to take off isn’t because Americans reject its core premises, but because they reject its branding. When we describe the actual tenets of democratic socialism: workers controlling their workplaces, affordable housing, universal healthcare, strong communities, freedom from corporate domination, etc., polls consistently show majority support among Americans. What Americans reject is the word socialism and the cultural associations it carries. The task is therefore to show them that what they already want is socialism. We can achieve this goal through five cultural and rhetorical strategies.
The most effective brand of political communication is narrative rather than argumentative. People are not persuaded by policy papers, ideological frameworks, or abstract appeals to justice. What persuades voters are stories that connect political ideas to lived human experiences. When a worker describes watching the company they spent twenty years building get sold out from under them so that a private equity firm could extract its assets, that story makes the case for cooperative ownership more powerfully than any theoretical argument ever could. When a single mother describes choosing between filling a prescription and paying rent, that story makes the case for universal healthcare in terms no policy brief can match. Socialists must learn to lead with stories because stories create the emotional connection that opens people to ideas they might otherwise reject on ideological grounds. This is the basis of agitation as a political strategy—the simple act of using leading questions and “whose side are you on” to bring voters to your desired outcome—which then opens voters to political organizing.
The American Dream with Socialist Characteristics
Socialism isn’t a rejection of the American Dream, but is instead its ultimate fulfillment. The dream as originally conceived—that through hard work, anyone can build a good life in this country—has been hollowed out by capitalism. When wages stagnate, housing is unaffordable, healthcare bankrupts families, and student debt crushes an entire generation, the promise of a better life becomes a cruel joke for the working American. Socialism restores the American Dream by giving Americans the material security to actually turn their hard work into a higher standard of living. This is how we should communicate our vision to the American public—not as a radical departure from what they’ve been promised, but as a radical fulfillment of the promise they have known their whole lives. It is through socialism that the life of a happy family, a happy home, a good job, and a Fourth of July barbecue can be realized for the working majority of this country.
You Do the Work, You Own the Results
Producerism is the belief that those who produce wealth should get to control wealth. Producerism should be at the rhetorical and policy center of our movement. In a country where voters pride themselves on hard work, hard work should be rewarded. Socialism accomplishes this by giving workers control over their own labor. No longer is there surplus labor value for capitalists to extract. What you create is what you control. Producerism has deep roots in the American political tradition from Jefferson, Jackson, and the Populists all the way through the labor movement, the New Deal, and the Great Society. The twenty-first century version of this argument is simple: you produce the wealth, you should own it. Corporate executives, Wall Street traders, and trust fund inheritors produce nothing. Instead, they extract wealth from Americans who work for a living. Socialism—which is fundamentally the belief that workers should control the wealth they create—isn’t a foreign import. Cooperative ownership is the logical conclusion of the producerist principle that Americans have believed in for two centuries. When we talk to voters, we should frame our project as “we believe the people who do the work should own the results of their work.” That is a sentence that virtually every American will agree with, and it is the most basic definition of socialism.
Your Neighbor is Not Your Enemy
Americans have a deep attachment to community, whether religious, familial, neighborhood, or civic. Barn raisings, mutual aid societies, the labor union, and the tradition of neighbors helping neighbors were all core institutions of American culture hollowed out by capitalism. Capitalism has left the American worker small, isolated, and unable to defend themselves against either an abusive employer or an indifferent state. Cooperatives, tenant unions, and popular assemblies are the tools ordinary people use to rebuild that. Socialism is what happens when neighbors decide to look out for each other instead of leaving everyone to fend for themselves.
Us Against the Oligarchs
The defining feature of American politics right now is that voters across the spectrum are furious at elites. The right channels that fury at cultural figures, immigrants, and minorities. Our job is to channel it to the economic elites who actually control people’s lives. Democratic socialism is not “big government.” It is the opposite of oligarchy: a system where ordinary people hold power instead of billionaires. Every proposal we make should be framed as transferring power from elites to working people, not from the private sector to the state. Americans distrust both big business and big government, and our answer is therefore neither. Socialism is the democratic self-governance of working people, which is what the natural conclusion of the values most Americans ascribe to the founding of this country.
What Freedom Really Means
This is the framing we underuse most. The right insists socialism means the government running your life. In reality it is the capitalist class running it. Your boss controls your time, your wages, your conditions. Your landlord controls your housing. Your insurance company controls whether you get treatment. There is no meaningful freedom when every condition of your survival depends on the decisions of unaccountable private actors. Democratic socialism offers two freedoms at once: the freedom that comes from a baseline of material security, and the freedom that comes from actual control over your workplace, your building, and your neighborhood. What could be more American than that?
“The Party Within the Party”
That brings us to the question every American socialist has to answer: what do we do with the Democratic Party? Make a clean break and start a third party, or organize inside? The answer is both: the “party within the party.”
This strategy is not new or revolutionary for the DSA, but it could use some sharpening and clarity. Building a third party under current conditions is not possible given the design of our electoral system and the entrenchment of the duopoly. When those conditions change, likely through our own efforts, so should our approach. But working within the Democratic Party carries its own risks. Without an independent organizational base we will be absorbed and neutralized, which is exactly what happened to progressive movements throughout the twentieth century. I can’t say when the DSA will reach a state where it can truly break from the Democrats and its bourgeois politics, but our goal is not to become Democrats. Instead, we must use Democrats’ existing infrastructure to build our own power and base of support. What we therefore need is an independent socialist organization with its own membership, funding, discipline, and platform. We can and should use the Democratic ballot line as a vehicle to win elections, gain national publicity, and push for reforms to the political system. As we do so, we will win over the sympathy of left-leaning voters while retaining the independence to hold our own officials accountable, mobilize outside election cycles, and build working-class institutions that outlast any party.
In order to accomplish this, we must do three things: streamline our endorsement process, run for and win smaller local and state offices, and expand our fight to contest elections in more rural and conservative parts of the country.
The Endorsement Process
Ours should be an endorsement that candidates actively seek out, not one selectively and arbitrarily given. Right now the process is often slow, contentious, and dominated by factional dynamics that prioritize ideological alignment over strategic opportunity. Candidates substantively aligned with democratic socialist principles get denied because they fail to check a few boxes in our process, and races go uncontested by socialists because nobody clears the purity threshold. A strategically oriented process would test candidates against a short list of non-negotiables — economic democracy, racial justice, anti-militarism, labor rights — allow flexibility on secondary questions, and prioritize races we can actually win.
The Local Governance Gap
There are thousands of offices in this country decided by a few hundred or even a few dozen votes: city councils, county boards, township trustees, school boards, water reclamation districts, planning commissions. They are not glamorous. They generate no national press. They are also where the governance that shapes working people’s daily lives actually happens. A single organized chapter can win them with minimal resources. Winning them turns municipal and state governments into laboratories of socialist policy — and, just as importantly, makes voters comfortable with the idea of socialists governing, because they can see it working down the street. It is also how we build a bench. You do not produce candidates capable of competing at the highest level without officeholders who have already governed something. DSA’s habit of pouring electoral energy into high-profile congressional races while neglecting the offices where socialism can be practiced most tangibly is a strategic failure that caps our growth.
Purple & Red Territory
Fifty-eight percent of Republicans think the economy is rigged for the rich. Of the respondents who had never heard of DSA, 43 percent were more amenable to democratic socialism against 38 percent for capitalism — meaning our brand problem is, in a real sense, an introduction problem. Bernie Sanders and AOC draw enormous crowds in places where we currently have limited resources and support. These are communities where a candidate running the producerist message alongside concrete local issues — housing costs, healthcare access, job quality — can win, particularly in local and state races where national partisan dynamics matter least.
The proof of concept of the socialist electoral model is no longer hypothetical, and it is no longer only applicable in progressive areas like New York. Zohran Mamdani started at 1 percent in the polls and beat the entire New York establishment twice, winning 30 percent of the districts Trump carried in 2024 — not because those voters had a conversion experience, but because Mamdani was the only candidate talking about their rent. Donavan McKinney just won a congressional primary in Detroit with a fraction of his opponent’s money, running on working-class representation in government, taxing the wealthy, and getting corporate cash out of politics. Neither man asked anyone to become a socialist. Our candidates have won by speaking to material conditions and letting the label take care of itself. They are using their success in office to bring people into socialism by example. That is a replicable model, and we have been rationing it. Imagine every chapter with a few hundred members identifying one winnable local race, recruiting a candidate committed to the platform, and running a real field operation.
Expanding the Project
But how do we accomplish all of these goals? There are several ways in which we can go about expanding the reach of the DSA organization which mostly entail building upon already existing programs.
The Socialists in Office program (SIO) is a DSA-sponsored program that coordinates with and supports DSA officials in public office through a co-governance model. The organization works with SIOs on building coalitions with key communities, teaching our politicians the ropes of local governance, and on drafting and passing legislation. The SIO program has been incredibly effective at building a base of socialist politicians with strong constituent services and strong legislative skills, but the program could be significantly expanded.
Imagine if the SIO program was involved in the electoral process before candidates won their races? The program should be the primary vehicle by which we elect socialists across the country. It should work with candidates during their campaigns, providing media training, fundraising support, and organizing training. It should work to build coalitions between DSA candidates and key groups like labor, students’ groups, and tenants’ organizations. And it should be involved in identifying candidates across the country to run for office under the DSA banner.
But engaging in electoralism alone will not be enough to move the masses towards socialism. In essence, the DSA must break from the two-party tradition of only showing up in communities when it comes time for Americans to vote. DSA cadres must be continually present in communities, doing the work of building strong relations with local residents. As we expand our organizing capacity, we should engage in mutual-aid work, providing communities with key services that corporations and governments refuse to offer. From the public housing complex to the barn-house, we must be in the communities that will decide the future of this country, becoming a key resource for local residents without ever asking for a vote or donation in return. This is how we, and by extension socialism, can become the most trusted political project in this country.
The road to socialism here will not be paved by one election, one candidate, or one project. It will be built by the sustained, unglamorous work of people who refuse to accept that the richest country in human history cannot provide a dignified life for everyone in it. The framings and arguments above are a toolkit to be adapted to the conditions of communities across the country. The question is no longer whether socialism can win in America. It is whether we are willing to do the work to achieve that victory.
