The following article stub for “Can the Democratic Party become Democratic Socialist?” by John B. Judis, author of numerous works of political analysis, is cross-posted from johnbjudis.substack.com:

Socialism, once given up for dead as a politics, is having a banner year. After November, the House will have at least six Democrats who call themselves democratic socialists and perhaps eight. New York, Washington DC, Seattle, and perhaps even Los Angeles will be run by socialists. Most of these politicians and scores of local and city officials are members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which has a hundred thousand members, and has become an election powerhouse in big cities

These successes have prompted a harsh reaction not just from the Trump White House who warned that “communists” were going to “completely destroy the American way of life,” but also from established Democrats. Former Clinton campaign manager James Carville and former Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison called for the DSA’s candidates to leave the Democratic Party and form their own party. “Let’s negotiate a terms of schism,” Carville suggested. Rep. Josh Gottenheimer charged that DSA and the left were “using Tea Party tactics and trying to divide up the country and pray to socialist ideals.”

I have some things to say about DSA’s brand of socialism and about the candidates they have promoted, but I want to say something first about the Democratic Party and democratic socialism, which some of the established Democrats believe are incompatible. In ten or fifteen years, it is very possible that the Democratic Party will be known as “democratic socialist” in the same way it is now known widely as “liberal.” My reasoning follows an argument I made in The Socialist Awakening in 2020.

We are in what I’d call a “Polanyi moment” in the United States and globally. In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi argued that in the 1920s and 1930s, the West faced a backlash to the capital-dominated political economy that was based on the gold standard internationally and minimal business regulation and the suppression of labor income and power nationally. The United States and Europe responded by reasserting the power of government over the economy — through creating command economies. In the United States, Franklin Roosevelt’s government moved left to create a New Deal and a new balance between capital and labor. In Germany, Italy and Eastern Europe, including Stalin’s Russia, countries moved right to fascism or totalitarian communism.

More here.