In the early 1970s, I was a founding member of the New American Movement, a socialist group that later merged with another (the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee) to create what is still the Democratic Socialists of America. Earlier, I had been a member of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), but after the organization went berserk in the summer of 1969 and opted for “bringing the war home” through terrorist activity, I had dropped out. In 1971, a bunch of us had come together to found NAM as a way of preserving what was sane and democratic in the earlier SDS.







Five years later, I was finished with NAM, too, and gave up on socialist organizing. By then, I felt like I was living in a parallel American universe populated by several thousand holdovers from the anti-war and civil-rights movements, but of no consequence anymore to American politics. My disillusionment peaked during a debate we had over whether to support SDS co-founder Tom Hayden, who was challenging a sitting U.S. senator in California. I was for it, but what seemed to carry the day was a speech by one of the Los Angeles comrades citing Lenin’s State and Revolution as grounds for supporting Hayden, who’d written the Port Huron Statement in 1962, a cri de coeur for “participatory democracy.” That epitomized for me the parallel universe.

My other problem was that nobody seemed to know how socialism—which meant, to me, democratic ownership and control of the “means of production”—would actually work in the post-World War II economy of the United States. Would it mean total nationalization of the economy? And, then, I wondered, wouldn’t that put too much political power in the state? The realization that a nationalized economy might also be profoundly inefficient, and disastrously slow to keep up with global markets, only surfaced later with the Soviet Union’s collapse. But even then, by the mid-1970s, I was wondering what being a socialist really meant in the United States.

Forty years later, much to my surprise, socialism is making a comeback. The key event has been the campaign of self-identified democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, who almost won the Democratic nomination and is now reputedly the most popular politician in America. Several opinion polls have also found that young people now think favorably of socialism and ill of capitalism—a result that would have been almost inconceivable in the 1970s, when socialism, in the words of historian Staughton Lynd, was still a “forbidden word” in American politics.

And now the DSA, which I had long given up on, has more than 25,000 dues-paying members, up from at best a thousand during its first decades. (That might sound paltry, but when the Tea Party rocked American politics in 2010, its various groups had an estimated 67,000 members.) DSA’s recent convention got favorable press just about everywhere—Vox, Slate, The Washington Post, The Nation, the New Republic, and The Daily Beast, which praised its political strategy of “Dreaming Big but Acting Locally.”