Socialism in America

BOZEMAN, MONTANA is the birthplace of Ryan Zinke, the federal secretary of the interior, and the home of Steve Daines, Montana’s Republican junior senator, and Greg Gianforte, the state’s reporter-thumping Republican congressman. But the public-comments part of Bozeman’s city commission meeting on August 20th was dominated entirely by socialists. They did not sing the Internationale, or demand public ownership of the means of production. Instead, the ten members of the Bozeman Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) thanked the commission for raising city workers’ minimum wage to $13 an hour, and urged them to raise it to $15 over the next two years.

Republicans are using such people to stoke outrage. Newt Gingrich, eternally eager to pitch any disagreement as an eschatological conflict, warns that socialists are “demons” whom the Democrats are “unleashing to win elections”. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a DSA member likely to win election to Congress in November, has joined Nancy Pelosi in the right’s bogeyman pantheon (a Republican mailing called her “mini-Maduro”, referring to Nicolás Maduro, the tyranical president of Venezuela). Looking past the label, however, American socialists are more progressive Democrats than Castros in waiting—and their rise poses more of a challenge to the Democratic Party than to capitalism.