The Left Wing of the Possible?

"In recent polls, about 40 percent of Americans say they have a 'positive image' of socialism. A clear majority of people under 30 feel that way. But for most of them the term evokes what Mamdani and other social democrats who have actually managed to win elections try to achieve: a more secure life in a society that narrows class differences without preventing some individuals from becoming rich as long as they create products or services that ordinary people value. Four decades ago, the great social-democratic author Irving Howe described those 'socialists' who managed to gain influence in capitalist countries: 'They engage themselves with the needs of the moment, struggling for betterment in matters large and small, reforms major and modest: They do not sit and wait for the millennium.'"

At The New Republic, Michael Kazin says that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is "not a democratic socialist but a social democrat."

But Ruy Teixeira at The Liberal Patriot offers caution about "The Future of the Left in the 21st Century."

"This Is Not Michael Harrington's DSA Anymore"

"Millennial recruits influenced by Jacobin's version of the socialist program—a suite of ambitious and uncompromising proposals that would anticipate many of the redistributive policies of the Sanders movement—began trickling into the orbit of DSA's leadership circle. The magazine helped stoke interest in socialism among a cohort who'd come of age during the Great Recession. These new supporters—call them the Jacobinites—knew from bitter experience that the neoliberal case for a trickle-down recovery was something close to farcical: Coming of age amid the savage 2008 recession made them highly suspicious of the promise of capitalist opportunity as they faced down a long-term descent into crippling debt, punctuated by a series of too many crappy jobs in the gig economy."

Doug Henwood at The New Republic discusses the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America.

"If You Seek a Culprit, Blame Capitalism"

"It took more than 40 years in the political desert, however, until Harrington's strategy was so decisively vindicated—40 years in which the economy grew steadily harsher. In the 1970s and '80s, the constraints that unions and New Deal legislation had placed on corporate conduct had yet to fully erode. During that time, the Los Angeles DSA chapter, in which I was active, never had more than roughly 350 members (one of them a spy from the Ed Davis-Daryl Gates-era Los Angeles Police Department). Today, the L.A. chapter has close to 1,500 members, campaigning for rent control, for shuttering ICE, for single-payer health insurance. Most are millennials, who need no instruction in how our economic system curtails prosperity and breeds plutocracy."

Harold Meyerson in the Los Angeles Times writes that "American socialism is having one hot summer."

"The Most Eloquent Manifesto in the History of the American Left"

"But by invoking the spirit of John Dewey, Albert Camus, C. Wright Mills, Michael Harrington and Pope John XXIII, by at once championing and chiding organized labor as a victim of its own success (the S.D.S. began as the student arm of the League for Industrial Democracy), by elevating the university to the apex of activism and by validating liberalism and the two-party system, Tom Hayden and his colleagues forged a manifesto that still reverberates."

Sam Roberts in The New York Times marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Port Huron Statement.

"An Appeal to Americans to Live Up to Their Better Instincts"

"Harrington had initially been drawn to the concept of the culture of poverty because he thought it would serve as a prod to federal action on housing, medical care, education and jobs. What he did not anticipate was that the theory could cut in other ways, antithetical to his values and policy preferences. Conservatives took the attitudes and behaviors Harrington saw as symptoms of poverty and portrayed them as its direct causes."

Maurice Isserman in The New York Times marks the fiftieth anniversary of Michael Harrington's The Other America.