Socialist advance in US has global significance

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However, the elections last week showed not merely a revulsion against Trumpism but the growth of socialism as a force in US politics, something that would have seemed most improbable just 20 years ago.

At least five newly elected congressmen and women are affiliated with Democratic Socialists of America, constituting the largest bloc of socialists ever to serve in Congress.

They are part of more than one hundred DSA-backed candidates holding elected office across the country.

The DSA is itself a heterogeneous organisation, uniting Marxists, Scandanavian-style social democrats and much in between among its 130,000 members – itself the largest socialist organisation in the heartland of world imperialism for over a century.

It responded to last week’s advances by pledging “to lead the fight for working-class issues by winning Medicare for All, an arms embargo of Israel, and the abolition of Ice,” targeting Trump’s fascist goon squad.

“We will fight side-by-side with organised labour and community activists to achieve these goals,” the DSA pledged, challenging both “the complacent centre and the fascist right.”

This speaks to a deeper shift in the US, particularly since the 2008 crash exposed the real nature of neoliberal capitalism and its centrist political advocates.

A recent poll reported in the New York Times showed that more than 40 per cent of Americans now had a positive view of socialism, the highest level ever recorded.

The same number – 43 per cent – hold a negative view of capitalism. It is not yet a majority, but these figures indicate a very significant shift in political consciousness in the US, where support for capitalism has been axiomatic in both political parties and the mass media for decades.

Of course, what people understand by socialism differs widely in the US, as elsewhere. But even those definitions which come up short  – expanded welfare for example – indicate a serious break with the prevailing political consensus.

Two-thirds of US voters now favour a system of national healthcare and publicly provided pre-school childcare, a majority believe the state should cover college tuition for all students. 71 per cent believe the government should act to reduce wealth inequality.

This goes beyond a simple repudiation of Trump and his coterie of the ultra-rich and the ultra-right. It speaks to a wider desire for a reordering of society.

Of course, the argument is far from won. More people in the US still state they prefer capitalism to socialism.

And the electoral advances for the DSA and its candidates, like New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders, are all won under the umbrella of the Democratic Party, an institutionally pro-capitalist party with a bourgeois and largely pro-imperialist leadership in Washington. This will doubtless be a cause of vacillation and even betrayal on occasions going forward.

Attempts to establish a national independent working-class political party with its own electoral base have not borne fruit, and the US system is heavily stacked against any such initiative.

But with all these caveats the fact that support for socialist ideas is growing so strongly in the US, and that red-baiting attacks on left candidates no longer resonate as they once did, is of global significance.

The situation in Britain is different, with a long-established socialist left in the Labour Party and the unions.

But there is a common point – the deepening crisis of capitalism is daily opening up new space for the advocates of a different social system.

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United States / 20 October 2026 The menu is not the meal — US socialism 100 years after the death of Eugene Debs 20 October 2026 JOE DYWER looks at the life of a legendary pioneer of the US left, who not only fought epic election campaigns, but also ran strikes and chose jail rather than support an imperialist war

United States / 23 September 2026 ‘He has become a global superstar’: behind the rise of Zohran Mamdani 23 September 2026 Ian Sinclair talks to THEODORE HAMM, the author of a new book that charts the rise of New York City’s first Muslim and avowedly socialist mayor

Book Review / 2 September 2026 Mamdani’s landmark victory 2 September 2026 IAN SINCLAIR recommends a readable, if partisan, account of the astonishing campaign of New York's new mayor