socialist experiments in america

15+ Socialism Examples in America (Principles+ History)

Today we're diving into a topic that's got a lot of people talking: socialism in America.

Socialism in America is often about programs and services that are paid for by everyone's taxes and are meant to benefit everyone in society. It's not full-blown socialism like you might find in some countries, but rather a mix of socialism and capitalism.

Some folks think it's a great way to make sure everyone gets a fair shot at success. Others worry that it could slow down hard work and innovation. Either way, it's a topic that sparks big debates.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, let's talk about what you'll find in this article. We'll start off by breaking down what socialism really means. Trust us, it's not as complicated as it sounds! Next, we'll take a trip back in time to see how socialism has made its mark on America. After that, we'll talk about the big ideas that helped shape America in the first place and how they fit into the conversation about socialism.

Ready to explore both sides of the debate? Great! We'll also share some real-life examples of socialism right here in the U.S., from the schools we learn in to the roads we drive on. Let's get started!

What is Socialism?

At its core, socialism is an economic and political idea. It's all about making sure wealth and power are shared more evenly among everyone. Think of it like a team sport—instead of just one superstar carrying the whole team, everyone works together and shares the glory (and the trophies!).

Simplified Definition of Socialism

In simple terms, socialism means that the community or government owns or controls some parts of the economy. This could be things like hospitals, schools, or even factories. Instead of a few rich folks owning everything, the idea is to spread it out so everyone has a piece of the pie. This is an attempt to fight against social injustices by giving everyone the same opportunities.

Capitalism vs. Socialism

You've probably heard of capitalism, too. It's another economic system but with a different game plan. In capitalism, individual people or companies own and run businesses. They aim to make as much money as possible, and there's a lot of competition. Imagine a race where everyone is sprinting to the finish line to grab a prize. That's a bit like capitalism.

Socialism, on the other hand, is more like a relay race. Everyone has to do their part, and the team wins or loses together. In socialism, the focus is less on racing to get rich and more on making sure everyone has what they need, like healthcare, education, and a safe place to live.

Core Principles

Some core ideas make socialism what it is. One big one is " collective ownership ." This means things like factories, farms, and even stores are owned by everyone in the community. Another important idea is " economic equality ."

In a socialist system, there's an effort to make sure nobody is super-rich while others are super-poor. In other words, the social and economic classes are supposed to level out, rather than having extreme rich people or extreme power next to very poor people who have no power. The goal is to level the playing field. Here are some common socialist principles:

• Public Ownership : One of the foundational principles of socialism is the belief in public or collective ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. This can manifest in various forms, from state ownership to worker cooperatives.
• Economic Equality : Socialism seeks to reduce or eliminate the disparities in wealth and income that exist in capitalist systems. This is often pursued through progressive taxation, wealth redistribution, and social welfare programs.
• Provision of Basic Needs : Many socialists believe that basic needs such as healthcare, education, and housing should be rights rather than commodities. As such, they advocate for these services to be provided universally, often by the state.
• Workers' Rights : Socialism emphasizes the rights of workers and often seeks to give them greater control over their workplaces and the means of production. This can be seen in the support for labor unions and worker cooperatives.
• Democratic Control : Many strains of socialism emphasize democratic control of economic and political institutions. This means that decisions about production, distribution, and other economic matters should be made democratically by those affected by them.
• Planning : Instead of relying solely on the market to allocate resources, many socialists believe in some form of planned economy where decisions about what to produce and how to distribute goods and services are made centrally.
• Internationalism : Socialists often emphasize solidarity between workers of all nations and oppose nationalism and imperialism. They advocate for international cooperation to address global issues.
• Environmental Stewardship : Many modern socialists incorporate environmental concerns into their ideology, arguing that socialism offers a framework for addressing climate change and other environmental issues in a way that capitalism does not.
• Anti-Discrimination : Socialism often incorporates principles of social justice, advocating for the rights of marginalized and oppressed groups. This includes opposition to racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination.
• Community and Cooperation : Socialism values the community over individualism and emphasizes cooperation over competition.

The Socialism Spectrum

Socialism isn't just one thing; it's like a rainbow with different shades. On one end, you have "pure socialism," where the government controls all parts of the economy. On the other end, there's "social democracy," which mixes some socialism with capitalism. Think of it like making a smoothie: you can add different fruits and flavors to make it just how you like it.

In America, we often talk about "Democratic Socialism." This is a kind of social democracy that focuses on democratic ways of making decisions and blending capitalism with more social programs, like free healthcare or tuition-free college.

History of Socialism

Early Influence: The European Connection

You might say that socialism in America had "pen pals" in Europe. It wasn't a homegrown idea but came from thinkers in Europe during the 19th century. Big names like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote a book called " The Communist Manifesto " in 1848. They dreamed of a world where workers were treated fairly, and everyone shared the goodies.

American Pioneers: Planting the Seed

Eugene v. debs: the locomotive of change.

It's impossible to talk about American socialism without mentioning Eugene V. Debs. Born in 1855 in Indiana, Debs was like the captain of the American socialist team. Not only did he co-found the American Socialist Party in 1901, but he also ran for President five times! Although he never won, Debs made a lasting impact. At his peak, he got almost a million votes in the 1912 election. That was a big deal!

Other Early Figures

But Debs wasn't the only one planting socialist seeds. People like Emma Goldman and Big Bill Haywood were also important in spreading the word. Goldman was big on women's rights and was known for her powerful speeches. Haywood was a labor leader who fought hard for workers.

The First Parties: Getting Organized

The socialist party of america.

Founded in 1901, the Socialist Party of America was like the first official team of socialists in the U.S. They started running candidates for local offices, and guess what? They won some! By 1912, over 1,000 socialists held office in 340 cities.

The Industrial Workers of the World

Also known as the " Wobblies ," this group was another early player in American socialism. Founded in 1905, they aimed to unite all workers into one big union and often staged strikes to get better conditions for workers.

The 20th Century: Ups and Downs

The great depression: a time for change.

The 1930s were tough. Families were suffering, and jobs were scarce. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) introduced the New Deal , and some of these ideas had a socialist flavor. Programs like Social Security started, which gives money to older people and others who can't work. Also, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was formed to give young men jobs and conserve natural resources.

World War II: Changing Perceptions

During World War II, the United States was an ally with the Soviet Union against a common enemy: Nazi Germany. But after the war, the friendship soured. The Cold War began, and America's feelings about socialism got complicated.

The Cold War: The Freeze on Socialism

From the late 1940s to the early 1990s, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were like two players in a never-ending chess game, each worried the other would make a wrong move. This period was called the Cold War. During this time, being a socialist in America was often viewed with suspicion.

The Modern Era: The Comeback Kids

Bernie sanders: a star is born.

Jump to the 2010s, and a senator from Vermont named Bernie Sanders brought socialism back into the spotlight. He ran for President in 2016 and 2020 and talked about ideas like "Medicare for All" and free college tuition.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: The New Face

AOC, as she's commonly called, is another big name in modern American socialism. Elected to Congress in 2018, she's part of a younger group bringing fresh energy to socialist ideas. She's known for the Green New Deal , a plan to fight climate change and create jobs at the same time.

The Squad: More Than One

AOC isn't alone. She's part of a group in Congress known as "The Squad," which includes Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley. Together, they push for socialist-leaning policies, like a higher minimum wage and more affordable housing.

The Public Opinion: What Do People Think Now?

Youth on board.

Recent polls show that younger Americans are pretty interested in socialism. According to a Gallup poll in 2020 , about 49% of adults aged 18-39 said they viewed socialism positively.

The Older Generation: Not So Fast

On the flip side, older Americans are generally not fans of socialism. According to the same Gallup poll, only about 28% of Americans over 55 viewed socialism in a good light.

America's Founding Principles and Socialism

Liberty and Justice for All

One of the big ideas when America was founded was "liberty." Liberty means having the freedom to live your life the way you want, as long as you're not hurting anyone else. Another important idea is "justice," or making sure everyone is treated fairly. These principles are written down in some of America's most important documents, like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Individualism: The American Dream

"Individualism" is another key part of America's founding ideas. The American Dream tells us that anyone can achieve success through hard work. But here's where the debate starts: some people say socialism goes against this by making everyone more equal instead of rewarding the "go-getters."

The Role of Government: To Help or Not to Help?

One of the biggest questions Americans have been asking since the country started is, "What should the government do?" Should it help people who are struggling, or should it take a step back and let individuals handle things? This is where socialism becomes a hot topic. Programs that aim to help everyone, like public schools and healthcare, often get called socialist.

Checks and Balances: Can Socialism Fit?

America's government was designed with a system called "checks and balances." This means no one person or group can have too much power. Some people argue that socialism gives too much power to the government, but others say that democratic forms of socialism still fit within America's system of checks and balances.

The First Amendment: Free to Discuss

Guess what? The fact that we're even talking about socialism is thanks to another founding principle: freedom of speech. The First Amendment allows us to discuss and debate all kinds of ideas, even ones that are super controversial, like socialism.

Equality vs. Equity: A Balancing Act

One last thing to consider is the difference between "equality" and "equity." Equality means treating everyone the same, while equity means giving everyone what they need to be successful. Socialism leans more towards the idea of equity, trying to level the playing field so that everyone has a fair shot.

Debates Around Socialism in America

Public Opinion: A House Divided

The word "socialism" can really get people talking! And guess what? Not everyone agrees. In fact, socialism is a topic that can divide a room into two sides faster than you can say "Uncle Sam." Polls show that younger people are warming up to it, while many older folks are not so keen.

Big Government or Big Problems?

One of the biggest debates about socialism is the role of the government. Critics say that socialism means Big Government, where the government gets to make lots of decisions for you. They argue this takes away your freedom to choose. Supporters say the government should help solve Big Problems, like poverty and healthcare.

Money Matters: Taxes and Spending

Let's talk about money. One argument against socialism is that it costs a lot. To pay for things like free healthcare and education, taxes would have to go up. Critics worry this could slow down the economy. Supporters argue that the benefits are worth the cost, and they point to countries like Sweden and Denmark as examples.

Healthcare: A Right or a Privilege?

The debate gets really heated when it comes to healthcare. Some people believe healthcare is a human right and should be available to all, just like public education. Others say it's a service that you should pay for, just like anything else.

Jobs and Wages: Fair or Unfair?

Socialism also sparks debates about jobs and pay. Should there be a minimum wage that's high enough to live on? Critics say higher wages mean businesses will hire fewer people. Supporters say a living wage is a matter of fairness.

A Global Look: Other Countries' Experiences

When talking about socialism, people often look at other countries for examples. Critics point to Venezuela as a warning of how socialism can go wrong. Supporters point to countries in Europe, like Sweden, where socialist policies seem to be working well.

The Role of Business: Free Market vs. Regulation

Last but not least, let's talk about businesses. In a capitalist system, businesses are free to do what they want to make a profit. In a socialist system, there are more rules to make sure businesses are fair to workers and customers. This is a big area of debate, too.

In the end, it doesn't have to be all one or the other. Socialism versus Capitalism isn't an ultimatum . Let's get into some examples of socialism in America, a traditionally capitalist country.

Examples of Socialism in America

1) social security: a safety net for the elderly.

The Social Security program, started in 1935 as part of FDR's New Deal, offers financial support to retired folks and others who can't work. You and your employer pay into it your whole working life, and then you get to benefit from it when you're older.

2) Medicare and Medicaid

Medicare and Medicaid are government-run programs that help people pay for healthcare. Medicare mostly helps people over 65, while Medicaid helps low-income families. These programs were created in the 1960s and are a big part of the healthcare system today.

3) Public Education

Public education in America is free because it's funded by the government. This allows kids from all backgrounds to get an education. That's a socialist idea: everyone chips in (through taxes), and everyone benefits.

4) Public Libraries

Libraries offer free access to books, computers, and other resources. Just like public schools, public libraries are funded by taxpayers, and they offer services that benefit everyone in the community.

5) Police and Fire Departments

Your local police and fire departments are funded by taxpayers and serve the public. In a purely capitalist system, these might be private services that you would have to pay for directly.

6) The Post Office

The United States Postal Service (USPS) is a government-run mail service. It delivers letters and packages across the country, often at lower rates than private companies because it's subsidized.

7) Public Transportation

Buses, trains, and subways are often run by the government and funded by taxes. Public transport makes it easier and cheaper for people to get around, especially those who can't afford a car.

8) Infrastructure

Ever drive on a highway or cross a bridge? Chances are, those were built with public money. Governments use tax dollars to build and maintain things like roads, bridges, and public buildings.

9) Food Assistance Programs

Programs like SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) help low-income families buy groceries. These are funded by tax dollars and aim to reduce hunger and poverty.

10) Unemployment Benefits

If you lose your job and it's not your fault, you might qualify for unemployment benefits. These payments, funded by taxes, help people get by while they look for a new job.

11) National Parks and Museums

Places like Yellowstone National Park or the Smithsonian Museums are open to the public and often subsidized by taxpayer money. This gives more people the opportunity to learn and enjoy nature and culture.

12) Veterans Benefits

Veterans who serve in the military often receive benefits like healthcare, education, and housing assistance. These programs are funded by the government to help veterans transition back to civilian life.

13) Affordable Housing Programs

Programs like Section 8 offer financial help so low-income families can afford to rent or buy a home. These are funded by taxes and aim to reduce homelessness.

14) Pell Grants

Pell Grants are government-funded grants that help low-income students pay for college. Unlike loans, they don't have to be paid back.

15) Federal Student Loans

These are government-backed loans with lower interest rates to help students afford higher education. They have to be paid back, but the terms are often more favorable than private loans.

16) Agricultural Subsidies

The government often gives money to farmers to help them produce food more affordably. This helps stabilize food prices and keeps farming jobs in place.

17) Public Broadcasting

Channels like PBS and NPR are partially funded by the government to provide educational and cultural programming.

And there you have it—a comprehensive list of socialist elements or programs that have been part of the American fabric for years, some even since the country's founding. These examples show that while the United States is primarily a capitalist country, socialist ideas have found their way into various aspects of American life.

Wow, we've covered a lot of ground! From the history of socialism to America's founding principles, and all the debates and examples in between, it's clear that socialism is a topic that gets people talking—and sometimes even arguing.

What we've learned is that socialism isn't a simple "yes or no" question in America. Our country was built on principles like liberty and justice, but that doesn't mean everyone agrees on how to put those ideas into action.

Some folks think socialist programs, like public schools and healthcare, fit right in with America's goals. Others worry that these kinds of programs might change what America is all about.

And let's not forget all the examples we talked about! Even if you've never used the word "socialism," you've probably been part of a socialist program at some point. Ever mailed a letter at the post office? Taken out a library book? Ridden a public bus? Then you've experienced a little bit of socialism right here in the U.S.A.

So, the next time someone brings up socialism, remember: it's not a one-size-fits-all idea. It's a complex tapestry that's woven into many parts of American life, whether we notice it or not. And as long as we keep talking, debating, and voting, that tapestry will keep changing and growing, just like America itself.

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• 2020 Election

Bernie Sanders’ New Hampshire Victory Is a Big Deal for Socialism in America. Here’s What to Know About the History of the Idea

Bernie Sanders , the sole democratic socialist in the 2020 presidential race, came out on top in the Democratic Party’s primary in New Hampshire , winning about 26% of the vote. His victory followed a neck and neck race with former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg in the Iowa caucuses. The Vermont senator’s primary success is the latest development in a long and bumpy history of political socialism in the United States.

The contentious political philosophy has had a presence in the U.S. since the 19th century. Early utopian communal experiments beginning in the 1830s laid the groundwork for a golden era of political socialism in the early 20th century, a period punctuated by Eugene Debs’ historic presidential run and the elections of socialist candidates across the nation. A series of factors, including the political persecution of socialists, an unsavory global image of socialist revolutionaries, and the rise of Communism combined to push socialism to the political fringe in the early 1900s, where it remained for almost a century.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, politicians identifying as socialist enjoyed a groundswell of renewed support. In the 2018 midterm elections, dozens of members of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) were elected to state and local offices, and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib were elected to the U.S. House. While Sanders is not a member of DSA, he has long identified as a democratic socialist, a philosophy that he describes as part and parcel to his support for large, taxpayer-funded programs, like Medicare for All .

Sanders’ success in both Iowa and New Hampshire may signal that a version of American socialism is again on the rise.

Watch the video to learn more about America’s nuanced history with socialism.

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What is the history of socialism in the United States

Socialism, in the United States at least, has often been seen as a negative term or been associated with other countries, usually dictatorships or Marxist states. Nevertheless, socialism has a long political history in the United States and has been, at times, influential in American politics.

Early Socialism in the United States

Brook Farm in Massachusetts and the town of Bethel, Missouri are two such examples. Some of these communities were inspired by Christian beliefs and socialism of collective action, while others were inspired by German Idealism philosophy, such as that supported by Immanuel Kant, and the Romanticism movement in Europe which viewed individuals and institutions having been corrupted by society and social change, in part caused by industrialism.

Edward Bellamy, a relatively unknown author, wrote what would become perhaps the second highest selling book in the United States in the 19th century, surpassed only by Uncle Tom's Cabin . The book ( Looking Backward: 2000–1887 ), published in 1888, describes a socialist United State in the year 2000. The book was still part of the Utopian Socialism ideals but now began to tackle what would become core aspects of socialism as it discussed labor and production, including equal distribution of goods across the United States. The hero of the novel wakes up in 2000 to see the United States in a socialist Utopian state where everyone retires at 45 and production is distributed equally [2] .

Other movements began to emerge, including Eugene Debs and others who founded the Socialist Party of America in 1901. The party would nominate Debbs for president between the 1904-1920 elections, where they were able to get about 3% of the vote and often finished third. Debs would go one to influence some left-wing politicians in the United States even though his own movement failed to materialize. His speaking style and compassion have been cited as being influential on left-leaning American politician in the 20th century and later social democratic movements (see below). [3]

The US and Socialism in Europe

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, it was clear that socialism in the United States began to develop differently. Mostly this was because socialism was less influential politically in the United States, even though indirectly it did influence the major parties through campaigns and strikes for better working conditions. This included the development of unions and other labor activities (Figure 2). Nevertheless, politically, Europe's experience was different due to a much stronger influence of socialism on political action, stemming from revolutions (e.g,. 1848) that had occurred on the continent that led to new political parties that had far greater power. Political parties did well under a socialism banner, in particular the SPD in Germany where it could obtain between 4-5 million votes and run about 90 newspapers by the late 1800s.

In France, the UK, and other smaller European countries, most Marxist movements began to evolve into reformist parties that influenced and led to the development of left-leaning parties, such as Labour in the United Kingdom. These parties, particularly as they achieved power, focused on legislative reforms that included worker benefits and rights. In Germany, a system of social security arose in 1889. This was enacted by Bismarck, who opposed the socialist SDP party, but Bismarck understood the influence the party had on Germany and promoted the policy as a way to stem their political rise. In effect, even when socialist policies were not directly elected, indirectly they began to influence legislative actions throughout Europe. Norway in 1912 developed the first universal healthcare system, which still is present in the country today. Other states began to create welfare programs either directly through social democratic actions or indirectly as ways to counter those parties by more right-wing parties. In effect, many western European governments had shifted more to the left, particularly in domestic policy, as the socialist-leaning parties began to agitate for change. [5]

Recent Socialism or Democratic Socialism

The 1950s was the period of another 'Red Scare'; this time driving left-leaning groups to less popularity, including socialists, particularly during the period of Mccarthyism and the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was only in the 1960s, with the New Left movement, that socialists in the United States reemerged. The Progressive Labor Party was one political party that emerged in 1962, where it helped lead and organize on more local scales, including organizing demonstrations against the Vietnam War. Michael Harrington became a well known author of socialist ideals, including a book ( The Other America ) that helped redefine socialism in the post-war era. He became a founding member of the Democratic Socialist of America (DSA) and that party still exists to this day.

Socialism has a long history in the United States, where it has manifested itself in different forms. This has included how socialism can be achieved, whether through small-scale legislative policies, such as that espoused by most social democrats, or larger societal shifts that are supported by Marxist socialists. The Utopian socialists were the first movement in the United States that emerged, where they focused on creating separate communities that led a life where labor and resources would be shared in an attempt to create a more utopian society, at least in small communities.

America's Socialist Experiment

Airs Monday, Aug. 17, 2020 at 11 p.m. on KPBS TV

Over a nearly 50-year period, one of the largest cities in America was run by socialists.

Between 1910 and 1960, the people of Milwaukee, Wisconsin elected three socialist mayors and the country's first socialist U.S. Congressman.

The documentary “America’s Socialist Experiment” recounts both the victories and failures of a unique brand of socialism in this historically conservative city. 

Milwaukee’s socialist mayors were widely respected for ending corruption, improving conditions for working people, and cleaning up the environment. Socialist Mayor Dan Hoan was put on the cover of TIME, which touted Milwaukee as one of the best run cities in the country. 

These socialist mayors established the nation's first municipal public housing project, pressed for an 8-hour work day, and enacted the first workers' compensation law, as well as the first iterations of what would later become Social Security . 

Working with the private sector, they created an extensive public parks system, appointed the country's first director of parks and recreation, and left a legacy of government support for its citizens' quality of life.

They also established a public health strategy that doubled life expectancy in the city, which was one of the reasons Milwaukee escaped the worst of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic that ravaged other American cities.

Despite their many initiatives, the Milwaukee socialists always ran balanced budgets. But their socialist experiment was not without its failures: some programs were too optimistic and others created unintended consequences for their citizens.

Their decades-long rule in Milwaukee — the longest tenure of socialists in office anywhere in America — ended only when their once-radical plans were absorbed and incorporated into the mainstream Democratic platform. Today, both Democrats and Republicans lay claim to parts of their legacy.

What can this 20th-century experiment tell us about how socialism works in practice?

With renewed debate approaching the 2020 presidential election about the potential impact of socialist influenced policies in America, the successes and failures of Milwaukee's "Sewer Socialists" profiled in America’s Socialist Experiment offer some real-world examples for those who only know socialism as a philosophy or label. 

Boettcher + Trinklein Television Inc. Distributed by American Public Television .

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A Brief History of American Socialism

Michael kazin on the socialism’s far-reaching influence on american thought.

“America will never be a socialist country,” declared Donald Trump in his 2019 State of the Union Address, given to a joint session of Congress. The president clearly believed that fear of such a radical transformation would help him win reelection against a Democratic Party in which socialists like Bernie Sanders were growing in numbers and influence. [1]

The former president and most of his political allies are probably unaware that nearly two centuries earlier, a wealthy socialist from abroad spoke before the same body. The friendly reception he received suggests that the philosophy of economic equality and cooperation instead of competition may not be “un-American” at all.

During the winter of 1825, Robert Owen, a rich manufacturer from Wales, gave two addresses, each about three hours long, to joint sessions of Congress. There was, he told the lawmakers, an urgent need to establish “a New System of Society,” one that would be based “upon principles of strict justice and impartial kindness.” Owen condemned the reigning economic order, which he called “the trading system,” as selfish and inhumane at its core. It trained people “to obtain advantages over others,” he argued, and gave “a very injurious surplus of wealth and power to the few” while exacting “poverty and subjection on the many.”

Owen predicted the coming of a new order that would liberate Americans from their plight. An economy organized for “mutual benefit” would enable men and women to leave the irrationality of relentless, often violent, competition behind them. “In the new system,” he promised, “union and cooperation will supersede individual interest.” [2]

The legislators treated Owen and his ideas with great respect. Several Supreme Court justices came to hear him; so did the outgoing president, James Monroe, and the incoming president, John Quincy Adams. Because neither Thomas Jefferson nor James Madison, who were then quite elderly, could leave their Virginia estates, Owen brought his message to them. He paid a visit to John Adams up in Massachusetts as well. [3]

Every living president at the time was thus willing to hear the visionary radical’s  sharp critique of the capitalist society emerging both in the United States and across the Atlantic. Their curiosity was a sign that the market system, for all its promise of plenty, was not yet a settled reality defended by all men of wealth and standing.

Robert Owen soon gave a name to the new system he advocated. He called it “socialism,” and the term quickly caught on across the globe. Although future socialists would never enjoy such an elite audience in the United States, their ideas and the movements they built remained part of the mainstream of American history. Most have been committed to democracy, both as an electoral system and as the vision of a future in which ordinary people, in all their diversity, would make the key decisions in their workplaces and communities, as well as at the polling booth, that affected their lives and the fate of their society.

Like it or not, socialism has been as impossible to separate from the narrative of the nation’s history as the capitalist economy itself—and often posed the most prominent alternative to it. Socialists were also energetic advocates of federal and state policies such as Social Security, on which most Americans have come to rely.

Conservative politicians and commentators take quite a different view. For them, socialism has meant only a hankering for state tyranny and brazen assaults on property rights that, together, threaten the beliefs every patriotic citizen holds dear. For the Right, socialists are the sworn enemies of freedom and democracy; according to Representative Tom Cole, a Republican from Oklahoma, they defy the national creed that “the ultimate sovereign power [in the US] lies with the people.” [4]

The congressman might be surprised to learn that, a little more than a century ago, his own state had been home to one of the strongest contingents of socialists in America. In 1912 one-sixth of Oklahoma voters cast their ballots for Eugene Debs, a former railroad union leader, who ran for president on the Socialist Party (SP) ticket. Debs drew a little less than half as many votes in Oklahoma that year as did William Howard Taft—the White House incumbent. Soon there were then six Socialists in the state legislature; more than three thousand Sooners belonged to the party—one of every three hundred adults in the state.

Part of their attraction to socialism was practical: the Oklahoma party appealed to small farmers, then the majority of residents, with a program that featured a plan for the state government to purchase arable land for the use of those willing to cultivate it and vowed to remove all property taxes on farms worth less than $1,000. State banks and warehouses would help growers stay in business. And nearly all socialists, like most other Oklahomans, were devout Christians. They flocked to yearly encampments that blended a faith in Jesus with a belief in socialism. At one gathering, a preacher proclaimed, “Christ’s church was a working class church” and cited the verse from Ecclesiastes that decrees “the Profit of the Earth is for all.” [5]

The passion for reform that moved many Oklahomans to vote for socialists or look favorably on their ideas was not unique to that prairie state. Socialists, then and later, played a major role in initiating and rallying support for changes that most Americans have no desire to reverse. These include women’s right to vote, Medicare, the minimum wage, workplace safety laws, universal health insurance, and civil rights for all races and genders. All were once considered radical ideas. But vast majorities now consider them the cornerstones of a decent society.

Americans also overwhelmingly favor curbs on the power of big business that conservatives since the nineteenth century have condemned as socialist. Most citizens believe that the superrich should pay much higher taxes than the middle class. They believe that businesses should be subject to rules that require them to act responsibly and that banks shouldn’t engage in predatory lending. They also agree that energy corporations shouldn’t endanger the planet and public health by emitting carbon-based pollution. Companies, they believe, should be required to guarantee that consumer products like cars, food, and toys are safe and that companies pay decent wages and provide safe workplaces.

Another way to gauge the influence of socialism in US history is to list some of the prominent American writers, artists, intellectuals, activists, and scientists who either publicly embraced the label or favored a socialist blueprint for the nation. It’s quite a distinguished roster. At various times it has included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walter Lippmann, John Dewey, Charles and Mary Beard, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jack London, Carl Sandburg, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, Helen Keller, John Reed, Eugene O’Neill, Randolph Bourne, Florence Kelley, Isadora Duncan, Thorstein Veblen, Walter Rauschenbusch, Clarence Darrow, Max Eastman, George Bellows, John Sloan, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Orson Welles, Norman Mailer, Woody Guthrie, and Jacob Lawrence. Two of the most influential labor leaders in US history—Walter Reuther and A. Philip Randolph—were also open about their sympathy for socialism. So, at some points in their lives, were Margaret Sanger, Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem—a trio who did much to create the modern feminist movement. Several of these people remain controversial today.

But it would be impossible to write a history of American culture that did not devote attention to nearly every one of them. And conservatives who view socialism as unpatriotic might also ponder why Francis Bellamy, author of the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag in 1892, was an avowed Christian socialist.

The world-famous physicist Albert Einstein and Charles Steinmetz, who developed the alternating current vital to machines that run on electricity, also expressed a fondness for the socialist vision. “I am convinced,” wrote Einstein in 1949, that “there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils” of capitalism, “namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion.” [6]

What’s more, the only nonpresident to have a federal holiday named after him favored both “a massive program by the government” to create a job for every citizen who could not find one in the private sector and the abolition of poverty in the entire nation—as well as complete equality of the races. In a 1961 speech to the Negro American Labor Council, he proclaimed, “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.” [7] Such views help explain why conservatives opposed a holiday dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr. as long as they did.

So if individual socialists and their proposals gained a good deal of popularity throughout American history, why didn’t socialist parties fare better in the electoral arena?

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, several thousand members of the Socialist Party of America did win a share of local power—from the mayor of Milwaukee to the mayor of the little town of Antlers, Oklahoma. Yet only two Socialists became members of the House of Representatives, and none came close to winning a seat in the US Senate or a high executive office in any state.

The charismatic Debs ran fives times for president on a socialist ticket, but he never won more than 6 percent of the vote, with about a million ballots in 1912. At that point the socialist movement had managed, wrote the critic and historian Irving Howe, to escape “the isolation of the left-wing sect” without becoming a mass movement of enduring size and power. In the end, the “working class party” was unable to woo more than a small minority of workers away from voting for politicians beholden to the “capitalist class.” [8]

For over a century, scholars and activists have been arguing about why it failed to make that leap. Serious debate began in 1906 with a short book, Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? by the German academic Werner Sombart. At the time, anyone who visited the hungry coal towns of Appalachia or the fire-prone sweatshops of the Lower East Side could have refuted Sombart’s contention that incomparable prosperity—what he called “reefs of roast beef and apple pie”—prevented American workers from emulating their European counterparts. So the question remained alive among historians and political scientists through the twentieth century, even as the program of most Socialist and Labor parties on the continent came to resemble that of liberal Democrats in the United States and vice versa.

Some prominent critics blamed American socialists for their own marginality or viewed their cause as doomed by conditions particular to the nation’s history. Thus, Daniel Bell contended that socialists “could not relate to the specific problems” of the “give-and-take, political world.” Aileen Kraditor claimed they spoke to working people as if they were the ignorant dupes of capitalism, with no ideas or cultures of their own. Louis Hartz maintained that the hegemony of liberal thought, with its vaunting of the classless individual, made Marxists politically superfluous. Many commentators have focused on the absence of a feudal past, with its deep class feelings; on ethnic and racial and religious divisions in the United States; or on the ideological flexibility of the two-party system. [9]

In recent years, scholars on the left have altered the terms of discussion. They defend the achievements of socialists as the deeds of prophets without honor in an unjust society. Nick Salvatore portrayed Debs as a union leader who gradually came to believe that monopoly capitalism was betraying the American Dream. Mari Jo Buhle paid tribute to “the tens of thousands of rank-and-file women who formed the Socialist women’s movement… the defeated and now forgotten warriors against triumphant capitalism.”

Such views echo a remark by Mr. Dooley, the fictional Irish American bartender created by Finley Peter Dunne, who delighted newspaper readers at the turn of the twentieth century. Dooley disdained the kind of historians who, like physicians, “are always lookin’ f’r symptoms” and making “a post-mortem examination.” “It tells ye what a countrhy died iv,” he complained. “But I’d like to know what it lived iv.” [10]

Even the minority of American radicals who admired dictatorial regimes abroad spent most of their time fighting for the same causes as did the nation’s scrupulously democratic socialists. The Communist Party, formed in 1919, yoked its reputation to the Soviet Union run by Vladimir Lenin and then Joseph Stalin, one of the most repressive regimes in modern history. But their party went into swift decline during the Cold War that began in the late 1940s and barely exists today.

But in their brief heyday in the 1930s and early 1940s, most rank-and file American communists were busy advocating badly needed changes at home. During the Great Depression, they mobilized jobless men and women to demand immediate aid from the government. They organized low-paid industrial workers into such unions as the Electrical Workers and Auto Workers. They battled discrimination by race and religion and national origin. And they advocated for a good education, health care, and access to cultural resources for every American.

Communists were also the most vigorous foes of fascism—except for twenty-two notorious months beginning in late August 1939, when the USSR signed a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany. Knowing that the tyrants in the Kremlin approved all these activities does not negate their positive impact on American society. Ordinary members of the Communist Party helped make the US a more tolerant, more democratic society—and put pressure on liberals to dismantle barriers between people deemed worthy of government help and those who were not.

As part of mass movements, socialists have followed the same pattern throughout American history: they do all they can to compel elites to make reforms in the existing order. The paradox of their success is that it often limits the growth of socialism itself. Perceptive politicians understand that a rising opposition force that aims to replace the entire system has to be co-opted, not simply repressed.

* [1] I have adapted some parts of this essay from Michael Kazin, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), and from Peter Dreier and Michael Kazin, “How Socialists Changed America,” in We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism, American Style , ed. Kate Aronoff, Peter Dreier, and Michael Kazin (New York: New Press, 2020), 15‒45. Thanks to Peter for giving me permission to do that. Donald Trump, 2019 State of the Union address, quoted in Jacob Pramuk, “Expect Trump to Make More ‘Socialism’ Jabs as He Faces Tough 2020 Re-election Fight,” CNBC, February 6, 2019, www.cnbc.com/2019/02/06/trump-warns-of-socialism-in-state-of-the-union-as-2020-election-starts.html.

[2] Robert Owen, “First Discourse on a New System of Society,” in Socialism in America: From the Shakers to the Third International, A Documentary History , ed. Albert Fried (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1970), 94‒111.

[3] On the presidents who heard Owen speak and/or spoke to him, see Elizabeth Johnson, “A Welcome Attack on American Values: How the Doctrines of Robert Owen Attracted American Society,” Constructing the Past 8, no. 1, article 9 (2007), https://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/constructing/vol8/iss1/9.

[4] Tom Cole, “Socialism Is Un-American,” April 30, 2019, https://cole.house.gov/media-center/weekly-columns/socialism-un-american.

[5] Quoted in Kazin, American Dreamers , 116.

[6] Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?,” Monthly Review , May 1949, https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism.

[7] Adam Howard, “Don’t Let Politicians Use MLK’s Name in Vain,” Grio , January 17, 2022, https://thegrio.com/2022/01/17/dont-let-politicians-use-mlks-name-in-vain.

[8] Irving Howe, Socialism and America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), On the electoral fortunes of socialists in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, see Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States</em (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 188. For a list of where Socialist Party members won local office in the United States, see James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912‒1925 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 116‒118. Socialists also occupied 150 seats in state legislatures at some time from 1910 to 1920. See Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America , 118.</small?

[9] For references to these quotations, see my article “The Agony and Romance of the American Left,” American Historical Review 100 (December 1995): 1488‒1512. The best summary and analysis of the question is Lipset and Marks, It Didn’t Happen Here . But also see Eric Foner, “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?,” in Foner, Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 110‒145.

[10] Quoted in Kazin, “Agony and Romance.”

____________________________________

Adapted from Myth America: Historian Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies about Our Past , edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer. Copyright © 2023. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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Pro and Con: Socialism in the United States

To access extended pro and con arguments, sources, and discussion questions, go to ProCon.org .

Socialism in the United States is an increasingly popular topic. Some argue that the country should actively move toward socialism to spur social progress and greater equity, while others demand that the country prevent this by any and all means necessary. This subject is often brought up in connection with universal healthcare and free college education, ideas that are socialist by definition, or as a general warning against leftist politics.

While some politicians openly promote socialism or socialist policies (Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example), others reject the socialist label (now Vice President Kamala Harris said she was “not a Democratic Socialist” during the 2020 presidential campaign) or invoke it as a dirty word that is contrary to American ideals (in the 2019 State of the Union , President Trump stated the United States would “never be a socialist country ” because “We are born free, and we will stay free”).

To consider whether the United States should adopt socialism or at least more socialist policies, the relevant terms must first be defined.

Socialism is an economic and social policy in which the public owns industry and products, rather than private individuals or corporations. Under socialism, the government controls most means of production and natural resources, among other industries, and everyone in the country is entitled to an equitable share according to their contribution to society. Individual private ownership is encouraged.

Politically, socialist countries tend to be multi-party with democratic elections. Currently no country operates under a 100% socialist policy. Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, while heavily socialist, all combine socialism with capitalism.

Capitalism, the United States’ current economic model, is a policy in which private individuals and corporations control production that is guided through markets, not by the government. Capitalism is also called a free market economy or free enterprise economy. Capitalism functions on private property, profit motive, and market competition.

Politically, capitalist countries range from democracies to monarchies to oligarchies to despotisms. Most western countries are capitalist, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Switzerland, Australia, and New Zealand. Also capitalist are Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and the United Arab Emirates. However, many of these countries, including the United States, have implemented socialist policies within their capitalist systems, such as social security, minimum wages, and energy subsidies.

Communism is frequently used as a synonym for socialism and the exact differences between the two are heavily debated. One difference is that communism provides everyone in the country with an equal share, rather than the equitable share promised by socialism. Communism is commonly summarized by the Karl Marx slogan, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” and was believed by Marx to be the step beyond socialism. Individual private ownership is illegal in most communist countries.

Politically, communist countries tend to be led by one communist party, and elections are only within that party. Frequently, the military has significant political power. Historically, a secret police has also shared that power, as in the former Soviet Union, the largest communist country in history. Civil liberties (such as freedom of the press, speech, and assembly) are publicly embraced, but frequently limited in practice, often by force. Countries that are currently communist include China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam. Worth noting is that some of these countries, including the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, label themselves as democratic or socialist though they meet the definition of communism and are run by communist parties. Additionally, some communist countries, such as China and Vietnam, operate with partial free market economies, which is a cornerstone of capitalism, and some socialist policies.

Given those definitions, should the United States adopt more socialist policies such as free college, medicare-for-all, and the Green New Deal?

• The US already has many successful and popular socialist policies.
• The job of the US government is to enable and protect all of its citizens. More socialist policies can work with capitalist structures to undo the harm done by unfettered capitalism.
• The American public supports the implementation of more socialist policies.
• The US already has too many costly socialist entitlements.
• The job of the US government is to enable free enterprise and then get out of the way of individual ingenuity and hard work. The government should promote equal opportunity, not promise equal results.
• The American public supports a capitalist economy.

This article was published on January 21, 2022, at Britannica’s ProCon.org, a nonpartisan issue-information source . Go to  ProCon.org  to learn more.

PBS Documentary Explores Why Milwaukee Was 'America's Socialist Experiment'

Throughout United States history, Milwaukee and Wisconsin have been politically significant. And Milwaukee has an interesting political past you may not know about: socialists ran the city for nearly half of the 20th century. One of the most notable was Mayor Daniel Hoan, who served for a consecutive 24 years — the longest socialist administration in U.S. history.

The new PBS documentary  America’s Socialist Experiment  looks at what made Milwaukee an ideal place for the Socialist Party to have such an impact. The film tells Milwaukee's socialist story through local historians, political observers, family members of past socialist leaders, and life-long residents. It will air at 8 p.m. Monday on PBS Wisconsin and Tuesday on Milwaukee PBS.

Socialism in Milwaukee was a "European experience," according to Mike Gousha, one of the film's producers. He's a distinguished fellow in law and public policy at Marquette University Law School, and former Milwaukee television news anchor and reporter. 

He says these key elements allowed the political movement to take hold: a wave of immigrants in the late 1800s, an explosion of the labor movement in an industrial city, and poor health and sanitary conditions along with corruption that allowed the socialist platform to excel.

"The socialists swept into power in 1910 running essentially as reformers — we will clean up government, and we will clean up the city," says Gousha. "The thing that the socialists tapped into was the public's desire for honesty and integrity in government, and that was a hallmark of the socialist years."

READ: How Socialist Mayors Impacted Milwaukee

Part of the Socialist Party's lasting success in Milwaukee can also be attributed to their pragmatism, Gousha says. Daniel Hoan made a point to exist within a capitalist free market system, they were fiscally conservative, and they worked with other parties to accomplish their goals. 

Their pragmatism drew criticism from other socialists around the country, who called Milwaukeeans "sewer socialists" for not being revolutionary enough, according to Gousha. 

"As Gene Zeidler said, 'The socialists of Milwaukee took that as a badge of honor. And they said, well you may think we need to be more revolutionary but you could not be elected dog catcher and we’re winning elections,' " Gousha notes. 

As time went on, socialism became equated with communism and couldn't survive in the political atmosphere in America. Gousha notes that the Democratic Party also adopted many socialist ideals and as the city became more prosperous, people didn't see as big a need for socialist leaders. 

Milwaukee's socialist leaders restored honor and integrity to city and government, created the parks system, and created a second lakefront for the working class to access. Those are just a few of their lasting impacts we can still see today.

"The socialists succeeded for a time because they listened to the needs of the people," says Gousha. 

More From Forbes

Socialism: the failed idea that never dies.

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Bernie Sanders is a self-avowed socialist—but why is an idea that has failed throughout history ... [+] still so popular?

Why have socialist ideas become so attractive again, despite the fact that, without exception, every socialist experiment over the past 100 years has ended in dismal failure? In this interview, Kristian Niemietz, author of Socialism. The Failed Idea That Never Dies and Head of Political Economy at the Institute for Economic Affairs London, has the answers.

More Than Two Dozen Failed Experiments

Rainer Zitelmann: In your book, you write that socialism has always failed. Looking back through human history, are there really no examples of socialist systems that have actually worked?

Kristian Niemietz: No. Over the past hundred years, there have been more than two dozen attempts to build a socialist society. It has been tried in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Albania, Poland, Vietnam, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, North Korea, Hungary, China, East Germany, Cuba, Tanzania, Laos, South Yemen, Somalia, the Congo, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola, Nicaragua and Venezuela, among others—not counting the very short-lived ones. All of these attempts have ended in varying degrees of failure.

Zitelmann: How can an idea that has failed so many times, in so many different variants and in so many radically different settings, still be so popular? After all, one of the remaining candidates for the presidential nomination in the United States is a self-avowed socialist.

Niemietz: Indeed, and organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have been experiencing a huge influx of new members—predominantly young people—over the past five years or so. The organization has not just become much larger, but also much younger: the median age among its members has dropped from 68 years to 33 years. Socialism has become a young people’s movement. Socialism has become hip and trendy.

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Socialists have successfully managed to distance themselves from all real-world examples of failed socialist experiments. Whenever you confront socialists with any such example, they always offer the following response: “These examples don’t prove anything at all! None of these models were ever truly socialist. This is a straw man. You just don’t understand socialism.”

Zitelmann: And isn’t it interesting that you only ever hear such pronouncements once a socialist experiment has quite obviously failed? In the early days of any new socialist experiment, it is enthusiastically greeted by huge numbers of intellectuals.

Niemietz: Precisely. This has happened many times. The most recent example is Venezuela, which, just a few years ago, was being hailed by leading intellectuals and left-wing politicians as a model for “Socialism of the 21st Century.” One leading left-wing intellectual, the Princeton Professor Cornell West, proclaimed: “I love that Hugo Chávez has made poverty a major priority. I wish America would make poverty a priority.” And the high-profile journalist Barbara Walters enthused: “He cares very much about poverty, he is a socialist. What he’s trying to do for all of Latin America, they have been trying to do for years, eliminate poverty. But he is not the crazy man we’ve heard… This is a very intelligent man.” From Noam Chomsky to Naomi Klein—all the fashionable intellectuals were at it.

Now that the failure of Venezuela’s socialist experiment is obvious to all and sundry, left-wing intellectuals scramble for excuses, coming up with extremely convoluted ways of claiming that what we saw in Venezuela was never “really” socialism at all.

Zitelmann: You also write that even mass murderers such as Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong were enthusiastically celebrated by leading intellectuals of their time. How widespread was this admiration for dictators like Mao and Stalin among intellectuals?

Niemietz: It was very widespread. There were literally thousands of Westerners who travelled to those places and returned full of praise. Most of them did not leave written testimonies, but you can still easily find hundreds of quotes from Western intellectuals who extolled Stalin und Mao. More importantly, the people who did so were not outsiders. We are not talking about the members of some obscure fringe party. We are talking about well-established mainstream intellectuals, including some of the most renowned writers and scholars of the time.

They were convinced that they saw a better society in the making. Even the concentration camps in the Soviet Union and China, the Gulags and Laogai, were admired: they were presented as places of rehabilitation, not punishment, where inmates were given a chance to engage in useful activities, while reflecting upon their mistakes. Even journalists and intellectuals who didn’t completely turn a blind eye to the regime’s crimes found arguments to justify what was happening: “But—to put it brutally—you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs and the Bolshevist leaders are just as indifferent to the casualties that may be involved in their drive toward socialization as any General during the World War who ordered a costly attack.” Those were the famous words of Walter Duranty, who was the New York Times’ Moscow correspondent from 1922 to 1936.

When The Experiment Fails: ‘That Was Never True Socialism’

Zitelmann: You say that every socialist experiment to date has gone through three phases. What are these three phases?

Niemietz: During the first phase, the honeymoon period, intellectuals around the world are enthusiastic about the system and praise it to the heavens. This enthusiasm is always followed by a second phase, the “excuses-and-whataboutery period,” which sets in when the system’s failings become more widely known. During this phase, intellectuals still uphold the system, but their tone becomes angry and defensive, probably because they are suffering from cognitive dissonance. They grudgingly admit some of the system’s deficiencies, but try to blame them on capitalist saboteurs, foreign forces or boycotts by U.S. imperialists. Or they try to relativize those failings by talking about unrelated bad things happening elsewhere: “What about…?”

Finally, the third phase sees intellectuals deny that it was ever truly a form of socialism, the “not-real-socialism” stage. This is the stage at which intellectuals claim that the country in question—for example the Soviet Union, Maoist China, or now also Venezuela—was never “really” a socialist country.

Zitelmann: People who call themselves socialists today usually acknowledge the fact that socialist experiments have failed in the past. But do they also draw the right lessons from these failures?

Niemietz: Absolutely not. Socialists who criticize Stalinism and other forms of real-world, historical socialism always fail to analyze the economic reasons for the failure of these systems. Their analyses attack the paucity of democratic rights and freedoms in these systems, but the alternatives they formulate are based on a vague vision of all-encompassing “democratization of the economy” or “worker control.” But these are exactly the same principles that initially underpinned the failed socialist systems in the Soviet Union and other countries. When contemporary socialists talk about a non-autocratic, non-authoritarian, participatory and humanitarian version of socialism, they are not being as original as they think they are. That was always the idea. This is what socialists have always said. It is not for a lack of trying that it has never turned out that way.

Socialist projects do not start out with totalitarian aspirations—they just end up that way. Lenin’s 1917 manifesto “The State and Revolution” does not at all read like a blueprint for a totalitarian society. It reads like a blueprint for, to use the currently fashionable term, “democratic socialism.” Socialism is always democratic and emancipatory in its aspirations, but oppressive and authoritarian in its actual practice.

Zitelmann: In your book you do not mention “democratic socialism.” Yet these are precisely the models socialists like Bernie Sanders highlight, for example when he references Sweden.

Niemietz: Sanders has long been oscillating rhetorically between “democratic socialism” and “social democracy.” This is not a difference in degree. It is a fundamental difference and you cannot have it both ways.

“Democratic socialism” is just socialism, with a meaningless, but nice-sounding modifier attached. “Social democracy,” on the other hand, is a capitalist market economy with high taxes, generously funded public services and a generous welfare state. That is how you could describe Scandinavia, or indeed most of Western Europe, today.

There was indeed a time, in the 1970s and 1980s, when Sweden was moving dangerously close to “democratic” socialism. For Sweden, this was a period of relative economic decline, which culminated in the crisis of the early 1990s. That model was abandoned for good reason. Sweden is now, once again, a relatively liberal market economy, albeit with a heavy tax burden. In terms of their overall score on the various Economic Freedom indices, they are not that far behind the U.S.

There are people who confuse “democratic socialism” with “social democracy.” These are usually the same people who would, erroneously, claim that the system of the Soviet Union was “not socialism, but communism”.

Nonetheless, the return of socialism as a mass movement is not the result of such semantic confusions. The more articulate and outspoken figures within the new socialist movement are very clear about what they mean by “socialism,” and that is definitely not “being a bit more like Sweden or Denmark.” Some of them specifically define their idea of socialism in contrast to, and in opposition to, Nordic-style social democracy, because they want nothing to do with the latter. To them, “socialism” means public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. And at least on that—I agree with them.

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TURN OUT THE LIGHTS, THE PARTY’S OVER: Why Socialism Didn’t Happen in the United States

Why did socialism fail to become a major force in American society? Every major first world country has been governed by a socialist or social democratic party at some point in the past century...except the United States. Does socialism’s failure in the United States stem from strategic mistakes made by socialist leaders? Or has socialism always been fundamentally incompatible with American culture?

View the discussion thread.

Join the Hoover Institution’s community of supporters in ideas advancing freedom.

America’s Wildly Successful Socialist Experiment

In sports, and in life, Europe and the United States see their societies differently—just not in the ways you might expect.

Memphis, Tennessee, is known for lots of things: Elvis Presley and B. B. King, the blues and barbecue. All these things, and more. But not Grizzly bears.

I did not think much of this while on holiday from London when my wife and I escaped the city’s steaming, unbearable heat to look through the Memphis Grizzlies’ (gloriously air-conditioned) fan store. The Grizzlies are the city’s professional basketball team. Their mascot is Griz the Grizzly Bear. Their crest is a Grizzly bear. It’s all about the bear.

Puzzlingly, in one corner of the store were shirts and other merchandise for a team called the Vancouver Grizzlies—one whose name made much more sense. In fact, the two teams were the same franchise, which in 2001 relocated 1,900 miles, across an international border and three time zones. Vancouver had not been able to support a professional basketball team, so the Grizzlies left for Tennessee. This is not unique in American sports—even in Tennessee. In 1997, American football’s Houston Oilers moved to Nashville, where they played, incongruously, as the Tennessee Oilers before becoming the Tennessee Titans. The most absurd example remains the Jazz: a perfect name for a basketball team from New Orleans, where it was based; less so from Utah, where it now resides.

As we returned to Britain, the annual soccer-transfer frenzy was reaching its usual fever pitch. Would Neymar Jr., the Brazilian superstar, move back to Barcelona from Paris Saint-Germain? How much would he cost—$200 million? More? At the same time, two small but famous clubs in England, Bury FC and Bolton Wanderers, were—like the Vancouver Grizzlies—facing the end of the road. They were losing money and could not find a buyer. Yet this did not mean relocating to a different city, but the prospect of bankruptcy and ejection. The contrast between American and European professional sports could not be more stark. In the United States, teams live on, just in a new location, and failure offers the opportunity for a reprieve. In the brutal world of European soccer, strength and success are rewarded, weakness punished.

In sports, the U.S. and Europe are different worlds, each revealing wider truths about the societies in which they operate—though perhaps not the ones the casual observer might assume.

Europe is oft-seen, and derided, across the Atlantic as America’s technocratic mother continent where collectivism and do-goodery reign. Yet it has developed a soccer model that is a form of hyper-capitalism, in which the strongest teams are businesses that live and die on their ability to win. Those at the top grab enormous amounts of prize money, allowing them to secure the best players on the best wages. The three highest-earning sports stars in the world this year are all soccer players: Lional Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Neymar, who each earn more than $100 million a year.

In European soccer, there is no salary cap or overall spending cap; players are traded as commodities—literally forming a part of the business’s balance sheet. You “buy” players in Europe; you do not trade them. Those clubs that spend too much go bankrupt. Those that fail competitively, finishing in the bottom few positions in the league, are relegated, removed entirely from the top tier and forced to play with another, lower echelon before they prove themselves worthy of returning. (This holds true for Europe’s elite too. If they do not perform well enough, even for just one season, they cannot compete in the Continent’s preeminent competition: the Champions League, a contest open only to the teams that finish near the top of their domestic league.)

The United States, by contrast, holds a reputation in large parts of Europe as the epitome of winner-takes-all capitalism, yet it operates variants of a proto-socialist model for all of its major sports. Success is hailed, yet curtailed, and failure rewarded: The worst-placed teams get the first pick in the following season’s draft of new players, allowing them to restock on talent, a form of redistribution rejected elsewhere in the American economy. There is no relegation for those who finish last. Salary caps ensure something of a level playing field each year, and rules are collectively agreed upon by the franchises. There is even, in some cases, a salary floor to ensure that clubs remain competitive.

If American and European sports leagues were politicians, Europe would be Donald Trump, and the U.S. would be Bernie Sanders.

American sports are not so because they like socialism—they are simply taking the best path to making money.

“In the U.S., they figured out earlier that a league is more profitable if people work together,” Gabriele Marcotti, a senior soccer writer at the sports broadcaster and news site ESPN, told me. “League owners are business partners.”

While American sports are collectivist in structure—competition controlled, talent and money redistributed—they remain deeply, exceptionally American. Basketball, football, and baseball were created in the United States, designed for the United States, and packaged for the United States. They cater to American sensibilities—for television and commercial breaks, cheerleaders and half-time shows, and are designed to be consumed, competing not with other leagues offering the same product, but with Hollywood and prime-time TV.

That they should want to make money is also less controversial in the United States. The Chicago White Sox, for example, signed a contract in 2006 to change the start time of their baseball games to 7:11 p.m. as part of a sponsorship deal with the convenience-store chain 7-Eleven. In Europe this would be sacrilege.

Read: What the U.S. women’s soccer team needs more than equal pay

Fundamentally, U.S. sports reveal something that is as true in world affairs as anything else: American exceptionalism. The United States can—and does—do things in the world that others cannot. Its size, wealth, and geography simply make it so.

Look at how American sports were born. There were no other leagues to compete with—they were American sports, not global sports. This gave the organizers more control to shape the way the leagues were run than is the case in soccer, which is buffeted by worldwide, competitive forces. In sports, as in life, the U.S. is big enough and different enough to play its own games, by its own rules. The rest of the world cannot.

Soccer, Europe’s dominant sport, began in an amateur era and regards itself as more than entertainment: something communal, even tribal. Clubs were set up by churches or minority groups, to represent a class or interest, town or region, even political affiliation and religion. It’s not just about entertainment.

A quick visit to any country in Europe illustrates the point. In Glasgow, Scotland, the soccer club Celtic was founded by an Irish Catholic priest with the aim of raising money for a charity set up to alleviate poverty. Its city rivals, Rangers, founded by four brothers in the west end of the city, are traditionally Protestant. Today, Celtic remains the Catholic team—it plays in green and white, and the tricolor of Ireland, a Catholic country, is flown at its games. The Rangers play in blue, and U.K. flags are flown at their games. To wear one jersey or the other in Belfast, across the Irish Sea in Northern Ireland, is almost to indicate which sectarian tribe you belong to. One Catholic friend of mine who grew up in Belfast ruefully recalls the day when, as a child, playing with a Protestant friend, he was punched in the face outside a cinema by a boy in a Celtic top because he was wearing a Rangers tracksuit. His friend’s dad had given the boys the outfits—they were crazy about soccer and too young to care about the team colors.

There are countless other examples: Lazio in Rome is infamous for links to fascism and Mussolini. Livorno, 150 miles up the coast, was where the Italian Communist Party was founded, and its supporters have celebrated Joseph Stalin’s birthday. Russia has teams whose roots go back to divisions in the Soviet era: the people (Spartak), the police (Dynamo), and the army (CSKA). In Spain, clubs represent separatism, monarchy, or class. FC Barcelona’s motto—emblazoned on its stadium, the Camp Nou—is “ Més que un club ,” or “More than a club.” Despite its globalized brand, FC Barcelona remains a club owned by its supporters and a potent symbol of Catalan identity. In the Basque Country, Athletic Club Bilbao employs only players from the Basque region. Real Madrid—Royal Madrid—is the king’s team, complete with a royal crest (and controversial government financial dealings ).

Perhaps the most striking example is from Austria. In 1909, two Austrian Zionists, Fritz “Beda” Löhner and Ignaz Herman Körner, founded the club Hakoah Vienna to raise funds for Zionism. Hakoah—the name means “strength” in Hebrew—won the Austrian championship in 1925, before touring the U.S. the following year, drawing enormous crowds. In New York City, the club played in front of more than 40,000 fans—the biggest crowd for a soccer game in the U.S. for decades to come.

Read: American meritocracy is killing youth sports

To some extent, the notion that soccer is more than just a sport is a myth Europe tells itself—one based in some truth, but not the whole story. In England, for instance, successful early clubs in Preston, Sunderland, and Birmingham all spent wildly to bring in the best players, the soccer writer Jonathan Wilson told me. Today, soccer clubs’ jerseys are emblazoned with sponsors’ logos, while the owners of one team, Liverpool, are even trying to trademark the city’s name .

Still, Wilson says, there is a difference between the sporting traditions on either side of the Atlantic. “The idea of sport as a moneymaking tool, a part of the entertainment business, has always underlined U.S. sport,” Wilson said. “Whereas in Europe, there’s a sense of sport as part of the greater good.”

Before Memphis, my wife and I spent time in Atlanta. In the Inman Park neighborhood where we stayed, east of the city center, the red-and-black flag of Atlanta United FC was flown at house after house, as often as the Stars and Stripes, and more so even than the flag of the Atlanta Falcons, the city’s American football team. Atlanta United’s average attendance—more than 50,000—puts it at No. 10 in the global-attendance rankings, above some of Europe’s aristocratic giants, such as Italy’s Juventus, Inter Milan, and AC Milan. And yet, Atlanta United did not exist until 2014.

There are few, if any, equivalent stories in European soccer. In 2004, Wimbledon FC, a team from south London, was relocated to Milton Keynes, a town built in the decades after World War II. The move sparked national headlines and condemnation, and while the club, renamed MK Dons, has since established itself in the third tier of English football, with an average attendance of 9,000, it’s not at all on the scale of Atlanta United.

Even when well-established but middle-rung teams experience a sudden run of success here, they are disparaged by their more aristocratic brethren. Fans of Liverpool, a dominant club with a decades-long history of success, taunt its upstart rival Manchester City, bought by an Emirati organization in 2008, as lacking the same pedigree. “You can’t buy class,” they shout.

Of course, the United States is not averse to hierarchy and sporting birthright rooted in city and state, but this is reserved for college sports, another exclusively American concept, separate from—and, to some extent, more popular than—the pro leagues. In the American travel writer Paul Theroux’s book Deep South, he reflected on Alabama’s obsession with its dominant college football team, which plays its home games at the 101,821-person-capacity Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa—the eighth-largest sports field in the world and bigger than any soccer stadium in Europe. Game day in Alabama is a statewide event, Theroux wrote; cars carry the italicized A of the team on bumper stickers, and fans have the letter tattooed on their necks.

“That is a scenario where you have entrenched, historical superpowers,” Marcotti, the ESPN writer, told me of American college sports. “They are good every year, because they recruit the best players. They recruit the best players—and bear in mind they can’t pay them—because they throw other things at them: visibility and status and having great facilities and being in a great conference and being part of the tradition.”

In sports, the United States operates largely alone, unchallenged. Its sports, professional and amateur, reflect the society in which they have grown; largely separate, it can create its own rules and avoid competition from the rest of the world. Up to a point.

The U.S. is exceptional—but not entirely so. It may even be becoming less exceptional as the rest of the world becomes more American, and the U.S. becomes more like the rest of the world.

Take soccer. Hyper-capitalist competition, money, and commercialization have produced dynasties. The big five European soccer leagues—England, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy—are dominated by a small number of clubs, which are far richer than the rest. In Italy, Juventus has won the league eight times in a row . In Germany, Bayern the past seven. In France, Paris St. Germain has won six of the past seven.

But that is domestically. In the Champions League, no club has been able to dominate—Real Madrid is the only team ever to have won in successive years. In the past 15 years, the competition has been won by eight different teams.

And because simply participating in the Champions League is so lucrative, the giants of European soccer are now exploring ways to ensure that they cannot be easily eliminated from the competition by expanding it. “A step closer to the franchise model,” as Marcotti puts it. “The top 10 to 12 clubs, they aren’t professional clubs; they are playing a different sport. They are in the entertainment business.”

Read: What is the most significant sports victory of all time?

As with politics and culture, Europe is adapting to an American world, copying its successes and wealth. European soccer clubs are becoming American: franchises in a global entertainment industry, fueled by wealth pouring in from around the world. That makes European soccer a rival of its American competitors in the global entertainment market, with contracts to beam its product into the U.S. market.

Recommended Reading

Why Americans Call Soccer 'Soccer'

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Britain’s Political Chaos Shows Everything Is Okay

American soccer, meanwhile, is still unable to compete with Europe—decades after its Major League Soccer championship was created, despite the wealth and growing popularity of soccer in the United States. Those struggles offer a lesson: The U.S. is exceptional in areas where it sets the rules, but less so elsewhere, when it must play by those devised by others. (Indeed, the MLS is showing signs of trying to adapt to the rest of the world, as Europe has adapted to the U.S.: The MLS’s salary cap now has a special loophole to allow American clubs to sign global superstars at much higher salaries.)

In Theroux’s book, he lamented the poverty and desperation of Alabama and Mississippi, Arkansas and South Carolina, likening them to the locales of his travels through sub-Saharan Africa and India. “Though America in its greatness is singular,” he wrote, “it resembles the rest of the world in its failures.”

Equally, the U.S. is singular in the sports it has created, but not in anyone else’s. Outside sports, for much of the past 30 years, the U.S. has been playing its own game—economically, militarily, and politically. But now, even in these realms, it is no longer purely an American game.

In sports, as in life, the world is becoming more American—and so America is becoming less exceptional.

About the Author

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Revenge of the Brits

The Dark Side of Paradise: A Brief History of America’s Utopian Experiments in Communal Living

What brook farm and other utopian communities of the 19th century sought is essentially unachievable. yet the idea of a collectivist paradise remains alluring to many even today..

This is an article about a famous utopian community that flopped. But for context, let me first relate a story from my younger days.

More than half a century ago, I had a friend in junior high school I could never figure out or drum much common sense into. He was quite the dreamer. He loved science fiction. His nickname was “Angus”—derived from the fact that he was rather rotund, and our school was surrounded by farm fields. When we grazed at the same lunch table, he would speculate endlessly about what life on other planets might be like. He was very earnest, and very entertaining.

One day I suggested facetiously that Angus stop speculating and go find out for himself. “Build a spaceship someday and fly to the planet of your choice,” I recommended. To my surprise, he took me seriously.

Some days later, Angus excitedly told me he had it all worked out. He had designed the spaceship and even brought the plans to show me. Then he unfolded a large sheet of brown wrapping paper. There it was—the entire cockpit control panel of the craft that would take Angus to the cosmos. There was a button for everything.

“This is not a plan!” I declared with a laugh. “It’s just a bunch of buttons with labels on them.”

“But it’s all here,” Angus insisted. “I’ve thought of everything—Start, Stop, Land, Take-off, Dodge Asteroids, you name it, everything you need to know.” He even had an all-purpose button to take care of anything unexpected, which he thought was a genius innovation.

What I remember most vividly about this experience was not the fine detail of my friend’s sketch. It was my frustrating inability to convince him he was delusional, that his plan was no plan at all, that as a 14-year-old he wasn’t yet ready for a senior position at NASA. He was what philosopher Eric Hoffer might call a “true believer”—convinced beyond any hope of convincing otherwise that his plan was thorough, perfect, and sure to work.

I lost track of Angus after graduation, but I am quite certain his spaceship never left the ground.

True story, and a fitting metaphor that encapsulates the experiences of dozens of communal, utopian experiments in early American history. In his book, Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia , historian Sterling F. Delano reveals that there were at least 119 of them established between 1800 and 1859.

Those experimental colonies were typically founded by disgruntled idealists, well-intentioned people unhappy about life as they observed it. They were invariably confident they could personally create a new and better society. Some were avowedly socialist or communist. Nearly all sought some sort of blissful harmony in which capitalism, class distinctions, individualism, private property and competition were erased by a fanciful, collectivist “cooperation.” Some were religious, most were secular.

In a superb 1972 essay titled Utopia: Dream Into Nightmare , Alexander Winston summarized these communitarian dreams:

The utopian pictures a static society in which careful planning solves every major problem of human life. Faith is placed in a collectivity that owns or controls all property. Competition for markets or jobs vanishes. Family ties diminish, and the rearing of children by the state is taken for granted. Everything is rationally ordered by those most capable of doing so… In utopia everyone works, the women on equal terms with the men. Hours are short—four to six daily—and retirement as early as age fifty, but the wants of the people have a stoic simplicity, and all enjoy a decent living. There is little to quarrel over, the atmosphere is uniformly brotherly, crime is almost unknown and disease rare—a perfect whole of perfect parts, all supremely content… But how to get there? Utopians had no answer to that and avoided the question. They sprang their flawless states fully-armed from the inkpot, always somewhere else—a distant island, an obscure wilderness, another planet—or at a dim future time.

Some utopians are content to remain theorists, their inkpot being as real as they ever get. But others—such as the creators of the 119 or so utopian communities of early 19th century America—went a step further and tried to build in reality what they dreamed on paper. I give them credit at least for putting their time and money where their mouths and inkpots were, though the results were depressingly dismal.

British industrialist Robert Owen is among the better known of 19th century utopian communitarians. He earned his fortune spinning wool in Britain, then came to America and blew a lot of it on his grand plan for “cooperative” communes. Alexander Winston explains that Owen’s failure derived in part from the kind of people his communities attracted:

Robert Owen’s communal system gave full vent to their shabby ways. They couldn’t run anything properly—flour mill, sawmill, tannery or smithy—and their only solution to problems of production was to write another constitution or make another speech. The industrious soon tired of supporting the idle. From the Nashoba, Tennessee Owenite settlement, leader Frances Wright informed Owen that “cooperation has nigh killed us all,” and departed. Within two years every Owenite venture, fourteen in all, disintegrated.

If any of the numerous utopian experiments had a chance of succeeding, surely it was Brook Farm , begun in 1841 by the transcendentalist Charles Ripley just a few miles west of Boston. It attracted interest from notable literary figures of the day, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson . In a very capitalist fashion, it raised $12,000 by selling stock. It started a school that earned an excellent reputation rather quickly. “Our ulterior aim,” said Ripley associate Charles Dana, “is nothing less than heaven on earth.”

Ripley and his team neatly divided the work at Brook Farm into six activities: school teaching, domestic tasks in and around living quarters, buildings and grounds, farming, manufacturing, and recreation. With very few exceptions, everyone was paid the same wage regardless of which of the six categories of work they fell into. Why six instead of seven, ten or twenty-two? Remember, these were self-anointed central planners, but being human at the same time, they did not want to make their society too complicated. Planning one’s own life is a full-time chore; planning everybody’s , ironically, requires a certain degree of simplicity (like Angus’s spaceship “design”).

In a selfless “spirit of community” and a “brotherly cooperation instead of competition,” there would be virtually no divisions of class or income. Everybody would then live happily ever after (which, as readers know, is a popular final line of many a fairy tale).

Brook Farm was never a full-blown socialist or communist enterprise. To his credit, Ripley allowed freedom of choice in work. You could choose which of the designated activities you wanted to engage in. If that meant too many people chose one line of work over the others (wage rates were the same), the community would cross that bridge when it came to it. They would talk it through. Ripley also opposed the slightest restriction on freedom of speech, as well as the complete abolition of private property. In his own fuzzy-headed way of thinking, individualism and collectivism would strike some sort of perfect balance at Brook Farm.

Nonetheless, at the center of the communitarian life that Ripley sought was a flight from personal responsibility. There was a certain amount of homogenizing of people in this regard, so that no one would fully bear the brunt of his own poor choices. Crowe cites journalist J. T. Codman’s description of the “inner essence of Ripley’s Brook Farm dream”:

The doctrine they taught above all others was the solidarity of the race. This was ever repeated. It was their religion that the human race was one creation, bound together by indissoluble ties, links stronger than iron and unbreakable. It was one body. It should be of one heart, one brain, one purpose. Whenever one of its members suffered, all suffered. When there was a criminal, all had part in his crime; when there was a debauchee, all partook in his debasement; when there was one diseased, all were afflicted by it; when one was poor, all bore the sting of his poverty.

On the one hand, it may be comforting to know that one’s poor choices will be absorbed by everybody; but on the other, the actual effect of socializing personal irresponsibility is to produce more of it and to sap the strength of responsible people simultaneously. Sorry, but like most humans, I’ll only pick up the tab so many times before I say, “Enough is enough!”

There’s something about these utopian experiments that appeal to the eccentric, the misfits and the oddballs of society. Like Owen’s communities, Brook Farm came to possess more of its fair share of them. It attracted ex-ministers who couldn’t handle the duties of the pulpit, bankrupt merchants who resented the market’s verdict on their efforts, flaky artsy-types who hoped to paint or draw or dance their way to a livelihood, young people “out for a lark,” at least one “professional reformer” who decided to eschew the use of money (perhaps because he couldn’t figure out how to earn it), and a motley crew of starry-eyed malcontents.

George Ripley’s wife described a former Unitarian minister who joined Brook Farm this way: “He could not be happy in Heaven unless he could see his way out.” Another oddball utopian who took up residence is described by historian Charles Crowe in George Ripley: Transcendentalist and Utopian Socialist as “one of the most fanatical faddists.” Named Samuel Larned, he “refused to join in the exploitation of the cow by drinking milk—and spent much time and thought in searching for a ‘socially acceptable’ substitute for shoe leather.”

Ripley himself came to realize early that his attempt to blend individualism with collectivism was untenable. Within three years of the community’s inception, he decided to go all in for collectivism—in other words, to go from the frying pan into the fire. With Brook Farm facing internal dissension and mounting financial challenges by 1844, he opted to turn the whole operation into a playground for the crackpot notions of the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier .

Fourier (1772-1837) postulated a “scientific reorganization” of society. The ideal, he argued, would be communities (he called them “phalanxes”) of fewer than 2,000 persons in which people would “cooperate” for cooperation’s sake. Daily life would be so arranged that everybody would do everything in groups—meals, work, leisure, etc. They would even reside in one massive dwelling he called the “Phalanstery” where they shared virtually everything, even the rearing of the community’s children. This “communitarianism” would promote harmony, prevent exploitation, end the “isolation” of family life, and focus every person’s attention on the whole instead of the self.

In Fourier’s utopia, one would presumably never hear anyone utter the words, “None of your business!” because everything was everybody’s business. Evening lectures would reinforce this presumptuous, altruistic ethic. Fourier never explained what was “scientific” about all this. I think Fourier and his scheme were a lot like my friend Angus and his spaceship. Certainly, Fourier shared with Angus a limitless confidence in his own design. The Frenchman wrote that once the world was organized according to his contrivance, “Men will live to the age of 144, the sea will become lemonade; a new aurora borealis will heat the poles… Wars will be replaced by great cake-eating contests between gas­tronomic armies.”

No kidding. Alexander Winston elaborates:

Disciples of the unsmiling Frenchman Charles Fourier set up no less than twenty-seven American experiments [of which Brook Farm was one]. Fourier based his utopian ideal less on man’s malleability than on his fundamental goodness…Let people gather into phalanxes” of some 2,000 members, housed communally in one huge “phalanstery” lying in a spread of 1,600 acres owned in common…Bring all goods produced to a single warehouse, where they could be purchased with work tickets. In Fourier’s ample vision all mankind would finally be gathered into three million phalanxes, coordinated by an Omniarch in Constantinople. Fourier-inspired communes quickly died of dissension, ineptitude, and sheer tomfoolery.

It was Fourierism that took a failing Brook Farm and in less than three years, killed it outright. The quasi-socialism of the Farm’s early years became more rigid and doctrinaire. Drowning in rules and mandates, the residents began to drift away. Even the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, briefly an investor in the project, ended up filing a lawsuit to get his money back. He cost Brook Farm a lot of money in the process.

As Fourierism required, Brook Farm aimed to build a massive structure (its own “Phalanstery”) for communal living. It was to incorporate, according to one author, “parlors, reading rooms, reception rooms, a general assembly hall, dining rooms capable of seating over 300 people, and a kitchen with attached bakery carefully planned for common use.” But Ripley’s socialist views apparently included a low regard for insurance companies. Nearly complete, the uninsured Brook Farm Phalanstery burned to the ground in March 1846. A year later, a financially insolvent Brook Farm was sold to the highest bidder. It had lasted longer than almost every other utopian community—just six years.

There are indications in George Ripley’s later life that he may have learned something about the seductive allure of utopian schemes. Charles Crowe writes,

By 1869 the energetic reformer with plans for the total reformation of the social world had become a tired, indifferent old man who had “no faith in external panaceas,” who would entertain no “Utopian ideal” except “that of contributing to the improvement of mankind by leading an upright life.”

It required years of costly failure for Ripley to discover what far more astute observers of life could have told him for free, and in a single sentence: Reforming the world starts with reforming yourself, and that’s a full-time, lifelong task.

What Brook Farm and other utopian (and especially socialist) communities seek is essentially unachievable in light of human nature: They want a triumph of exhortation over incentive, of intentions over results, of wishful thinking over actual performance. It’s the difference between an actual, working spaceship and a teenager’s drawing of one.

Socialists of today are a reasonable facsimile of 19th century utopian communitarians. They possess similar, anti-capitalist and anti-individualist motivations. They have big plans for a better world, if only it will conform to those plans. But unlike their utopian kinfolk of the 19th century, they aren’t setting up experimental villages and trying through voluntary means to make them work. Perhaps they know that none of the previous attempts succeeded, so they propose to accomplish similar objectives through the political process and coercion.

Imagine a Brook Farm with a Berlin Wall and a command economy enforced by a police state. It makes me think of Angus with a gun.

What could possibly go wrong?

For additional information, see:

Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia by Sterling F. Delano

George Ripley: Transcendentalist and Utopian Socialist by Charles Robert Crowe

Utopia: Dream Into Nightmare by Alexander Winston

Robert Owen: The Wooly-Minded Cotton Spinner by Melvin D. Barger

The Failure of a Socialist Dreamer by Richard Gunderman

The Strange Adventures of the Word “Socialism” by Max Eastman

The Icarian Community of Nauvoo by Paul M. Angle

Experiments in Collectivism by Melvin D. Barger

F. A. Hayek on the Supreme Rule that Separates Collectivism from Individualism by Lawrence W. Reed

Brook Farm Utopian Community (video)

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Of Course Americans Are Turning to Social Democracy

They can no longer afford the luxury of a smaller, less expensive welfare state.

By Jorge G. Castañeda

Professor Castañeda is a specialist in Latin American affairs.

MEXICO CITY — There is a debate underway within the Democratic Party over what kind of candidate can beat Donald Trump in 2020. A centrist candidate will attract moderate Republican voters, but perhaps demobilize young, minority, college-educated Democrats. A more exciting, perhaps more radical candidate, will mobilize Democrats but scare away moderate Republicans.

From the perspective of a citizen of the country that has probably suffered most under the Trump administration’s policies, the debate signals a historic shift. The rooting of a more Social Democratic identity for the Democratic Party may mean more, in the long run, than defeating Donald Trump in 2020. This is the most interesting and seductive aspect of this presidential campaign. The last two Democratic debates revealed how the party’s center of gravity has shifted to the left: the more liberal members seem increasingly Social Democratic and the more moderate ones, increasingly liberal.

The Social Democratic movement first emerged in Germany in the late 1800s under Otto von Bismarck, the country’s first chancellor. It proliferated and flourished in Western Europe as an antidote to the violence of the Russian Revolution, the emergence of totalitarian Communism and the destruction wrought by two world wars.

In Europe, and later in Latin America, governments placed a greater emphasis on the role of the state in regulating market economies, protecting the weakest sectors of society, seeking to reduce poverty and inequality as much as possible under a capitalist model, defending the environment and strengthening labor unions, workers’ parties and progressive institutions.

The United States missed that train, largely because it didn’t face the same challenges. The American, more deregulated, everyone-for-himself, free-market model delivered the goods for years, without labor parties or strong unions, with a distant and reduced role for the state in the market and society, and with the exclusion of important sectors of its inhabitants from that society.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal was a semi-Social Democratic response to the Great Depression, but it didn’t stick. Until Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, the economy’s steady growth kept inequality down, and the middle class thrived. Americans could afford the luxury of a smaller, less expensive welfare state because of its rich middle class. After the 80s, that began to change.

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The Golden Age of Wisconsin Socialism

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At its peak in the 1920s and early ’30s, the Socialist Party in Wisconsin used both confrontational tactics and pragmatic alliances with nonsocialists to make legislative advances. It’s a model that may hold promise for socialist legislators today.

Governor Philip La Follette signing the old-age pension bill in Madison, Wisconsin, June 12, 1931. (Angus B. McVicar / Wisconsin Historical Society / Getty Images)

The socialist movement in the United States finds itself in a conundrum. On the one hand, Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020 sparked a rebirth of socialist organizing. The number of elected socialist politicians, mostly members of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), has risen across the country to numbers not seen since the Socialist Party of America’s heyday prior to World War II. On the other hand, the inherently antidemocratic nature of American politics has placed various roadblocks in front of socialist proposals at all levels of government, ranging from the filibuster in the US Senate (itself an antimajoritarian institution) to a governor’s veto pen at the state level. And socialists have not expanded their base of support much outside urban liberal strongholds.

It would be easy for those of us who recognize the need for radical change to become discouraged about the lack of progress toward economic, racial, and environmental justice, or the Left’s failure to protect trans rights, access to abortions, and Palestinian lives in Gaza. There is a lot to be discouraged about. But it is essential to not let discouragement lead us into nihilism. If nihilism takes root, the project of building a more just and truly democratic society might be scuttled for another generation or two.

Where can we look for inspiration? Like the US left today, socialists in the early twentieth century had to overcome political obstacles, too — the US political system has never embraced socialism with open arms. Nevertheless, Wisconsin socialists achieved inspiring successes through their efforts in the state legislature. From 1905 to 1945, the Wisconsin legislature passed over five hundred pieces of socialist-authored legislation. They accomplished this despite never holding more than 20 percent of the seats in the state assembly or senate. (Wisconsin socialists had their largest caucus during the 1919 legislature, when they had sixteen assemblymen and five senators.)

How did they do it? Socialist state legislators achieved that success by adopting a pragmatic philosophy. They forged a political alliance with progressive allies in the Wisconsin Republican Party and built institutional power with which they could mold legislation in a socialist direction.

Wisconsin’s political conditions were very conducive for socialist advance in the early twentieth century. After World War I, the Wisconsin Democratic Party disappeared, for all intents and purposes, at the state level due to the party’s support for the war.

Wisconsin Republicans experienced constant ideological factionalism between a progressive wing, led by Robert La Follette Sr, and a conservative wing. Always on the lookout for opportunities, socialists frequently sided with the progressive wing of the Republican Party and brokered deals with their new allies to advance their agenda. Socialists and progressive Republicans created their own de facto caucus to seize control of the state’s legislative agenda from the more conservative members.

Wisconsin socialists found immediate success in the statehouse by being willing to work with their allies, as well as knowing when to play hardball. The first socialist-authored bills signed into law came in 1905. One bill mandated that married women receive their paychecks themselves, instead of employers sending them to husbands. The other bills focused on workplace safety, improving air quality in factories, and raising the number of workplace-safety inspectors.

These legislative achievements do not appear radical on their face, but they meant something to the socialists’ working-class constituents who called for those reforms. As socialists achieved tangible results, no matter how small, they proved to their supporters that they would fight for change. Socialist voters rewarded the effort by sending elected socialists to the statehouse for forty years.

Wisconsin socialists’ pragmatic governing style meant they would help shape and vote for Republican-authored bills as well. In 1911, socialists worked with progressive Republicans to approve sweeping reforms demanded by the state’s labor movement, including shorter working hours and a workmen’s compensation program. The creation of workmen’s compensation was notable because the idea started as a socialist bill written by Frederick Brockhausen, state representative and secretary of the Wisconsin State Federation of Labor (WSFL), in 1905. Six years later, Republicans embraced workmen’s compensation, which ensured its passage alongside socialist votes.

The socialists’ close relationship with progressive Republicans allowed the Socialist Party to apply political pressure through tangible threats. Socialists knew that progressive Republicans needed socialist votes to pass their proposals, so the socialist caucus would threaten to withhold their votes unless Republican leaders supported some socialist bills in return. For example, Republican governor John Blaine ran as a champion of the labor movement during the 1924 elections.

The Socialist Party called the governor’s bluff and made sure he lived up to his campaign promises once the legislative session began. During campaign rallies and speeches on the floor of the legislature, socialists lambasted Blaine as a politician who “had no labor program in mind and was extremely timid about taking a stand on any labor question.” In a shrewd political maneuver, the socialists offered a lifeline to Blaine and promised to stop criticizing the governor if he threw his support behind the WSFL’s major labor demands, which included a general eight-hour day, a ban on the use of private detectives during labor disputes, and the creation of old-age pensions.

The political pressure worked. The Wisconsin legislature approved, and Governor Blaine signed forty-five socialist-authored bills during the 1925 session. Most of the bills came from the labor movement’s demands, like the expansion of medical treatments covered under workmen’s compensation and the outlawing of private investigators during labor disputes.

Socialists flourished in Wisconsin during the 1920s because of the close-knit relationship between the Socialist caucus and progressive Republicans. Socialist proposals to strengthen child labor laws passed, and Wisconsin became one of the first states to approve the Child Labor Amendment to the US Constitution. Socialist Walter Polakowski successfully proposed reforms to the state’s prison system by expanding workmen’s compensation to prison labor and creating investigative committees to inspect living conditions throughout Wisconsin’s prison system. Wisconsin socialists also proposed more radical ideas like nationalizing the state’s railroad system, but that was a step too far for Republicans.

After the outbreak of the Great Depression in 1929, socialists unleashed a deluge of proposals aimed at bringing the power of government to the aid of workers across the state. During the 1931 legislative session, socialists were at the height of their influence due to the progressive Republicans’ precarious position. As an olive branch to the Socialist caucus, progressives appointed Thomas Duncan chairperson of the Joint Finance Committee (JFC).

Duncan had served as socialist state legislator since the early 1920s and previously worked as the secretary for Daniel Hoan, Milwaukee’s socialist mayor. The JFC was arguably the most important committee in the legislature because it oversaw approving a budget before presenting it to the entire legislature for a vote. In other words, socialists exercised great influence over the legislature’s purse strings and were prepared to unleash the spending necessary to tackle the Depression.

The Great Depression

By the end of the legislative session in the summer of 1931, progressive Republican governor Philip La Follette had signed fifty bills authored by members of the Socialist caucus, which ran the gamut of Socialist dreams dating back to before World War I. The approved legislation included a series of workmen’s compensation bills that strengthened and expanded the program. In addition, socialist bills further regulated the use of private detectives, expanded the power of cities to establish public utilities, and created a program for old-age assistance. The legislature also approved the socialists’ calls for increased penalties on the use of prison labor, as well as on hotels that violated regulations on working hours.

At the same time, socialists recognized when they needed to give ground to their allies to ensure a proposal could pass. The 1931 session’s most contentious moment revolved around the question of whether the legislature would create a state program of unemployment compensation. Both the Socialist and progressive caucus had their own proposals, and the debate raged for months over which version of the bill would pass.

Socialist representative George Hampel’s version proposed $12 (about $248 in 2024 dollars) a week in unemployment payments. It also included an eight-hour working day provision across all industries, which proved untenable for progressives during the negotiations. Progressives rallied behind Republican Harold Groves’s version, which called for $10 a week (about $207 in 2024 dollars) in payments, but did not have a cap on working hours.

Not surprisingly, the Socialist caucus derided the progressives for not limiting working hours, which they argued could have ensured full employment of workers around the state. Socialist representative George Tews summarized the caucus’s sentiment when he declared on the floor of the assembly that a progressive was “a socialist with their brains knocked out.”

Despite the tension, the socialists backed the progressives’ version of unemployment compensation, which was at risk of failing without their votes. Socialists believed that any version of unemployment compensation was better than ending the session with nothing. Their pragmatism allowed them to see the big picture and bring tangible victories to the people who needed it most: the state’s unemployed.

The Legacy of Wisconsin Socialists

Wisconsin socialist state legislators’ willingness to work pragmatically proved to be one of the group’s most potent weapons. They fostered alliances with other politicians because that is what was necessary to achieve political victories. Those alliances, paired with the caucus’s longevity in the legislature and strategic threats, resulted in a golden age of the socialist movement that has not been replicated since.

This golden age waned by the end of the 1930s. By that time, the conditions that allowed socialists to succeed had changed. The outbreak of World War II, and a conservative backlash to progressive policies at all levels of government, began to unravel the progressive-socialist alliance and its electoral opportunities.

There is no guarantee that socialists today can replicate the success of early-twentieth-century Wisconsin socialists. And even the Wisconsin Socialist Party at its peak was not able to parlay its considerable legislative victories into electoral dominance in the state, let alone carry out the more ambitious restructuring of the economy that is socialists’ ultimate horizon.

Still, the Wisconsin experience offers hopeful guideposts: it does not take a socialist majority in a statehouse to pass meaningful pro-worker reforms. It does require the willingness to ally with nonsocialist politicians to overcome the antidemocratic and conservative forces that routinely stifle socialist policies from the onset, as well as a willingness to strategically confront and criticize those allies when necessary.

Wisconsin socialists worked for forty years to cement their golden age; in many states today, the socialist movement is only beginning to see electoral results, so the possibilities for meaningfully productive political alliances are just starting to present themselves. What elected socialists and their supporters decide to do with those opportunities may decide whether another golden age is possible.