A Spectre, Haunting, Returns

On the rise of socialism in US politics

On August 12, the moon’s shadow crossed Greenland and Iceland, swept down the Atlantic and reached the Iberian Peninsula, briefly extinguishing the sun along its path. Viewed from northern Spain, the eclipse lasted approximately 150 seconds.

Nothing about it was unexpected. Eclipses are readily explicable by orbital patterns, and the moon’s path had been calculated years before. Yet the event still awakened old human reflexes: awe mingled with an underlying sense of unease; an impulse to see in the sun’s disappearance some fateful portent of the future. 

There is an echo of this reflex in the political realm. Many are startled by events whose causes have been visible for years. So it is with the evolving US political landscape. There is, to borrow Marx's language, a spectre haunting US politics. Socialism has returned.

Recent polling finds that four in 10 US citizens now view socialism favorably. Among democrats the figure is roughly two thirds. Capitalism is viewed favorably by barely more than half the country. The largest US city, New York, now has a democratic socialist mayor, and socialist candidates are competing in multiple state elections.

While a citizen teleported from 1985 might find this astonishing, the rise of socialism is as predictable as the moon’s orbital rotation. For two generations wealth and economic power have become more concentrated. The top one percent now owns a third of household wealth. In 1980 the typical chief executive of a public company earned nearly 30 times what the typical employee earned. Today it is closer to 300.

It is not just a matter of surging wealth inequality. The financial crisis showed how major corporations could behave recklessly, nearly destroy themselves, be rescued by the state, and emerge larger still. Ordinary citizens endured lost jobs, homes or savings while executives of many bailed out companies were richly rewarded. Then came inflation, housing scarcity, rising healthcare costs, and increasingly unaffordable higher education.

The peculiar arithmetic of 21^st century American prosperity sees the country grow richer while many citizens find the basic elements of the American dream – owning your own home, affording education for your children – ever more difficult to achieve.

In this context, the surprise is not that four in ten Americans are sympathetic to socialism. The surprise is that six are not.

Yet the same polls reveal that Americans remain overwhelmingly supportive of free enterprise and small businesses. They have not repudiated commerce, private property or markets. What appears to be weakening is their attachment to the particular system they have come to associate with the word capitalism.

The distinction is revealing. A society genuinely turning against capitalism might be expected to turn against private enterprise. Americans have not. The discontent is directed at the concentration of wealth, and a system in which rewards appear disproportionate, institutions whose failures are socialized while gains remain private, and forms of ownership increasingly beyond the reach of ordinary families.

The new socialist constituency looks little like Marx’s industrial proletariat — it is mostly young, educated and urban; frustrated college graduates in areas the likes of Brooklyn, Minneapolis, and West Hollywood. Peter Turchin’s thesis of the dangers of elite overproduction is useful here: increasing numbers of educated aspirants are competing for a finite supply of higher status positions. Increasingly, their expectations exceed the available opportunities. And the expanding impact of artificial intelligence may further contract the number of junior professional opportunities.

The universities many of these young graduates attended supplied an intellectual grammar for their agitation. A generation steeped in the leftist critiques of US society common in many university departments unsurprisingly finds Marxism an accessible framework through which to articulate its frustrations.

Dismissing Marx out of hand is therefore too quick. China Mieville´s recent reconsideration of Marx's Communist Manifesto is helpful precisely because Marx's diagnosis of capitalism remains recognizable. Capitalism is enormously productive, but also restless and disruptive. It continuously subverts the arrangements it has itself created, and concentrates power while dispersing opportunity in unpredictable ways. The pressure of markets is unrelenting.

Marx's diagnosis remains forcefully prescient. His prescription of what follows is less so.

The 20^th century provides a vast and terrible laboratory of communism’s inherent dangers. The collective experience of the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Cuba, and Venezuela is one of economic stagnation, political repression, and mass immiseration at the hands of a concentrated political elite. Given this history, Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and China’s Bloody Century, by the political scientist R.J. Rummel, are rightful complementary texts to The Communist Manifesto.

The new American socialists are not Bolsheviks. Many of the policies that make them electorally attractive — higher taxes for the extremely wealthy, public healthcare, rent controls, subsidized public transport — are familiar in European social democracies. The Democratic Socialists of America do, however, explicitly call for public ownership of major corporations and essential industries. The electoral program of a given candidate may be largely social democratic; the movement they belong to could well be more genuinely socialist.

There is also another historical lesson which is at least as important: capitalism in the early 20th century survived in part because political leaders were willing to address significant imbalances in the associated economic system. Theodore Roosevelt confronted concentrated corporate power. Franklin Roosevelt responded to the Great Depression with new financial regulations, social insurance and labor protections. Both are profound examples of constraining capitalism through active federal government, and, by so doing, preserving the underlying legitimacy of the American economic system. This led, following the war, to several decades of broad economic growth, rising wages, expanded home ownership, and a credible expectation that the next generation would be more prosperous than the last. These crucial historical precedents are largely absent from the present debate.

For now, the movement provides an ideological banner broad enough to encompass the founding grievances of “Occupy Wall Street”, “Black Lives Matter”, and MAGA. But its true lasting significance may prove to be less the arrival of a worked-out economic doctrine than in the explicit withdrawal of assent from an economic order that increasing numbers of citizens regard as unfair and controlled by self-serving elites.

The problem for Democrats and Republicans who oppose the new socialists is that, to paraphrase Shakespeare, the vehemence of their protest may itself be revealing: the people most alarmed by demands to change the economic system are often the same people who governed while dissatisfaction with it accumulated. The effectual truth is the establishments of both parties have failed to deliver what more and more Americans feel they deserve.

The same logic applies to Trump's re-election. He returned to power by telling the voters the system was rigged, its institutions captured, its elites corrupt. His enemies and remedies differ sharply from those of the democratic socialists. Trumpism assigns blame to bureaucrats, immigrants, universities, globalists and a disloyal governing class. The socialists blame billionaires, technology corporations, private equity landlords, and inherited structures of privilege.

Both organize around resentment for their enemies. Both are rival children of the same loss of confidence.

Well into his second term, Trump has not yet supplied a convincing answer to the underlying economic question. Housing remains unaffordable for many younger Americans. His administration has generally favored accelerated development of artificial intelligence while resisting stronger government oversight. His presidency has also become enmeshed in controversy surrounding extraordinary family profits from cryptocurrency ventures, while leading the US into another war in the Middle East.

Neither of the emerging replacements for Trump is much more persuasive. Vice President J.D. Vance, the most likely Republican nominee at this point, in his recently published book Communion, reaches to Catholic social thought and its concern with work, family, community and the obligations of wealth. Yet he stops well short of elucidating a vision of how he would translate these principles into a governing program. California Governor Gavin Newsom, a strong contender for the Democratic nomination, has just published Young Man in a Hurry. Despite eight years of governing California, arguably the most important US state, it is striking how little he says about why and how the US economic framework should be reformed.

At the precise moment that younger Americans are showing increasing openness to socialism, no senior US politician is offering a persuasive non-socialist account of property, work, inequality and concentrated power. That is the vacuum in which both socialist and populist movements are growing.

The endgame has not yet arrived. The democratic socialists need not become communists, nor need MAGA culminate in authoritarian rule. Movements have a tendency to change when they acquire power. Institutions, budgets, courts, markets, and popular resistance impose constraints. Sometimes governing moderates movements. Sometimes frustrations with constraints persuade supporters that the problem is insufficient power. The political evolution of the democratic socialists is worth watching, particularly in New York.

The deeper question is whether the American political system can reform the economic order sufficiently to restore confidence in it without abandoning the liberty, enterprise and dispersed ownership that made the system so productive and enduring in the first place.

The spectre haunting America is not communism. It is something more elemental: the weakening conviction that the existing order deserves to continue in its existing form.

Socialism has returned because the ground was prepared for it. Trump returned for much the same reason. Each side now regards the other as the approaching catastrophe, while remaining curiously vague about how to address the underlying conditions that summoned both.

An eclipse is terrifying only if one has ignored the wholly predictable orbits of the sun and the moon. On August 12 the shadow arrived exactly when the calculations predicted it would. Then it quickly passed. Whether the political shadow now crossing America will do the same is considerably less certain.

“It is by its force of negation that utopia seduces, much more than by its positive formulas.”

— E. M. Cioran, History and Utopia