The Socialist Awakening

Dear Reader,

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 election and was no longer a factor in American politics. Then came Bernie Sanders’s 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.

John Judis, himself a veteran of socialist movements, has brought out a book with Columbia Global Reports during each of the last three national political seasons: The Populist Explosion in 2016, The Nationalist Revival in 2018, and now, The Socialist Awakening. Together these books chart the rise during the second decade of the twentieth century of a new and unexpected political mood produced by widespread dissatisfaction with the results of the free-market policies that emerged in the late twentieth century, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Today’s socialism, 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—Medicare for all, the Green New Deal, free college, and many more. It has already succeeded in pushing Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, farther to the left than he has ever been in his long career. All over the country, the streets are full of protesters in unprecedented numbers. The Socialist Awakening is an indispensable guide to this political moment.

Sincerely,

Nicholas Lemann
Director, Columbia Global Reports