2/13/20
Socialists were winning U.S. elections long before Bernie Sanders and AOC
Breaking Newstags: political history, socialism, Bernie Sanders, election 2020, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) won the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, days after shrugging off concerns from other candidates at the Democratic debates that his self-described democratic socialism would be disastrous in the general election.
During President Trump’s State of the Union address earlier this month, he said “socialism destroys nations” and vowed to stop the lawmakers who want to “impose a socialist takeover of our health care system” — i.e. have endorsed Sanders’s Medicare-for-all plan.
But if it seems that the rise of socialist politicians such as Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is something new to American politics, well, it isn’t. The “Pledge of Allegiance” was written by a Christian socialist in 1892. Eugene V. Debs ran for president on a socialist ticket five times; in 1912, he got nearly a million votes.
In fact, dozens of socialists were elected to local offices across the country between 1910 and 1912. In Milwaukee, long a hub for socialist German immigrants, socialist mayors governed for decades.
Around the turn of the century, the country was rapidly moving from being agrarian to becoming industrialized, and interest in social movements such as women’s suffrage, temperance and civil rights began to take root.
comments powered by Disqus
News
- Law Prof: If Recent SCOTUS Decisions Relied on Bad History, Opponents Need to Come Up with a Better Version
- How Hitler's Favorite Passion Play Lost its Anti-Semitism
- Fighting Back Against Book Banners
- At CPAC, Trump Presents a Violent Blueprint for Taking Power
- Mario Fiorentini (1918-2022): The Last Surviving Italian Partisan
- Revisiting Lady Rochford and Her Alleged Betrayal of Anne Boleyn
- Walter Russell Mead: Non-Jewish Interest Groups, not "Israel Lobby" Drive Hawkish US Mideast Policy
- The Architecture of the Shopping Mall Shaped by Racism, Surveillance
- The Misuse of History in 2021 Documentary "The Business of Birth Control"
- It's Hard to Be God