Ihad a strange, flattering discovery recently, which is that I’m on Wikipedia’s list of historical socialists in its “Socialism in the United States” category: 

On the one hand, this felt like a great honor. To be listed alongside such greats as Eugene Debs, Phil Ochs, Emma Goldman, Pete Seeger, and Angela Davis! On the other hand, even as someone fairly well-versed in socialism I hadn’t heard of a bunch of people on the list (e.g. Abern, Bisbane, Lum) so a fair number of these are figures forgotten by all except serious scholars of obscure parts of the left. And the list is clearly a bit scattershot (John Reed but not Adolph Reed? Hasan Piker but not Michael Albert? No Barbara Smith or Robin Kelley?), which makes you wonder who on Earth selected these particular names. As much as I love Wikipedia, the verdicts of its hive mind can feel a bit arbitrary. 

Nevertheless, looking at this list led me to reflect a bit on how strange it is to be a person who lives through, and takes part in, history. It’s eerie to find yourself listed alongside deceased historical figures, because it makes you realize that you, just like them, are a person who found themselves thrust into a particular political context at a particular moment in time, and you, just like them, will ultimately end up dead. I was also a little depressed and anxious realizing that the contemporary left seems to be a pale shadow of its predecessors. I mean, I think we have some excellent streamers and I admire Rashida Tlaib’s courage and integrity, but the deep social analysis produced by writers like W.E.B. Du Bois, Emma Goldman, and Rudolf Rocker has little equivalent in our own time. What’s more, we are losing some of our leading lights. Barbara Ehrenreich, Michael Brooks, Mike Davis, and David Graeber died within the last few years, and Noam Chomsky is no longer able to produce new work after a major stroke last year.

To look over this list of great figures like Helen Keller, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., and Howard Zinn is to realize how impossible it is to fill their shoes, and to realize how much work we have to do to build a vibrant new socialist movement in our time. Because this list also reminds me how necessary socialists are to the health of society. Many of the people on this list were at the forefront of the struggle for labor rights, Black civil rights, and the anti-war movement. They helped to keep their country moral. Without them, some of the worst injustices in our history would have met much less resistance. 

We are at a dark and menacing moment in our country’s history. Donald Trump is currently the favorite to win next week’s presidential election. Trump has promised that he will begin a massive deportation program on Day 1, building giant concentration camps to house millions of people. He has promised to crack down on “internal enemies,” use the military against protesters, revive the infamous 18th-century Alien Enemies Act, and deport pro-Palestinian activists. His Vice Presidential nominee, my old law school colleague J.D. Vance, has made it clear that his preferred model would draw inspiration from the fascist dictatorship of Franco or the authoritarian brutality of Augusto Pinochet, squashing teachers’ unions and treating the left as inhuman monsters. Trump believes that leftists pose a major threat to the social order, one that must be dealt with forcefully. Perhaps even worse, he is in full denial about the climate crisis, and has promised to worsen it, driving us full speed ahead toward a future of drought, wildfires, heatwaves, and other spiraling calamities. Trump and his supporters are rabid and hateful, disdainful of learning, and paranoid about bogeymen. Trump, while he pretends to be a friend to workers, will in fact do everything he can to help the rich screw the poor, keeping the minimum wage low, ripping up workplace safety regulations, and eliminating more of America’s already stingy social safety net. I do not know what they are capable of, but I do not want to spend the next four years trying to fight it.

A Harris presidency will likely be less overtly authoritarian (she has not vowed to build concentration camps and begin a mass deportation program, for instance), but I have a whole different set of worries about it. For one thing, Harris is clearly going to do little about the major problems facing the country. She seems uninterested in a fair healthcare system, fighting the fossil fuel industry, and taking on corporate power. I worry that her presidency will be full of fake reforms that make the American people feel lied to, because the reforms do not actually meaningfully improve their lives, and that this fake change will make her presidency unpopular, opening the door for a right-wing candidate like Vance in 2028. (This is, after all, precisely what happened with Obama, who bailed out the banks that caused the 2008 financial meltdown, refused to pursue single-payer healthcare, continued and expanded the War on Terror, and gave us Trump in the first place through his failure to deliver real change.) Harris’s foreign policy will probably be a horror, judging by her refusal to make any commitment to stop the crimes being committed against the Palestinians and her embrace of the odious Cheney family. Worse, policies that would meet liberal opposition under Trump (such as cutting Social Security) may be enacted with less protest under Harris. Many Democrats are loyal to party over principle, which explains why the separation of immigrant families caused such a massive stir when the Trump administration did it, but met with hardly a peep when Biden continued the practice. Harris is worryingly open to suggestions from plutocrats (Mark Cuban has praised her for abandoning the Democratic Party’s remaining commitments to progressive values), and I have no confidence that the lives of the worst off will get better under her presidency. The hawkish foreign policy establishment will continue to push us toward potential disastrous nuclear wars with Russia and China, and the fossil fuel industry will continue to block meaningful climate action.

We therefore urgently need a powerful socialist movement. We need thinkers, activists, candidates, union organizers. We need many more climate activists right now. We need a force that can fight back against the dark, violent, threatening politics of the right, and that can articulate a vision for a robust social democracy where people take care of each other rather than living in a perpetual war of all against all, with a small coterie of billionaires ruling over the rest of us, deciding what we see and what we will discuss. We must build and build quickly.

Looking at the list of historic socialists is an inspiring place to start. These are people who worked under even more challenging conditions (Jim Crow, for instance, or the Pinkerton era of labor repression). They pressed forward with a vision for a more egalitarian and humane world. They thought deeply and they committed themselves to action. 

Frankly, I don’t want to be on that shortlist of notable socialists, because I want there to be a much longer list, one much harder to get on. I am always very concerned when I realize that Current Affairs is probably the second-largest socialist magazine in the United States, after Jacobin. We only have a few thousand subscribers! There should be a much larger movement, with much bigger magazines. We have our work cut out for us.