During the heyday of the American Socialist party, Socialist state legislators were always in the minority and usually outvoted. The party’s 1914 report on its legislative activities makes for fascinating reading, and documents a series of low-key socialist policy successes across different states. In Wisconsin, for example, “both major parties had adopted parts of the Socialist platform, and the legislature was passing bills that a decade before would never have been reported out of committee”.

The bills passed by Socialists in the Wisconsin legislature may not have been particularly radical, since they had to have support of non-socialists. But they flowed directly from the socialists’ fundamental conviction that the way economic life functions is deeply dysfunctional and harms ordinary workers. So they advocated for things like an eight-hour workday, ending child labor, and workplace safety regulations.

Today, these seem like standard-issue liberal policies, but it was radicals who made those issues mainstream. Socialists’ job is to put radical ideas in people’s heads. After a while, they become mainstream, then they get taken for granted, and finally everybody insists they believed in them all along.

The socialist left has a great heritage, both in the United States and everywhere else.