Only five years ago, most of us still believed what we had been taught in school about socialism, that it had peaked in popularity in the 1912 presidential election and was no longer a factor in American politics. Then came Bernie Sanders’ two presidential campaigns, along with socialist surges in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe, and the emergence of significant organizations and younger political stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It turns out that socialism has a mass following.
Today’s socialism, John B. Judis argues, is best understood not as a program for government ownership of business enterprises, but as a broader youth-based movement that is impatient with the mainstream politics of recent decades and willing to experiment with a lot of ambitious new policies.
All over the country, the streets are full of protesters in unprecedented numbers. John’s new book, The Socialist Awakening: What’s Different Now About the Left, is an indispensable guide to this political moment.
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The Socialist Awakening
What’s Different Now About the Left
The Socialist Awakening chronicles the rebirth of an idea driven by a rising anti-capitalist resentment among those looking to reclaim public power over the direction of private enterprise—an idea that has become urgent in the wake of the pandemic and the economic depression.
“A person of the left, Judis specializes in speaking truth to liberals.” —E.J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post
The Socialist Awakening was published with support from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation