Red Tide Rising

What if the only way to make America great again is to embrace the political system it has historically feared most?

- Adam Skolnick

Last October, President Trump wrote a USA Today op-ed in which he argued that Democrats have become “radical socialists who want to model America’s economy after Venezuela. If Democrats win control of Congress, they will come dangerously closer to socialism in America.” Well, Democrats won the House and fell short in the Senate. So what happens if they conjure a clean sweep in 2020? Should America fear economic collapse at the hands of socialists in Democratic pantsuits?

It’s worth asking, because at this moment all across America tens of thousands of socialists are working to take the reins of government — and when they run, they campaign largely as Democrats. The way Trump and the GOP spin it, socialism breeds economic doom. But what drives the new American socialist hustle is the counter intuitive idea, rooted in economic theory and hard data, that socialist policies could actually grow the economy. According to the numbers, if they really wanna MAGA, the smart move would be to embrace a political model America learned to loathe long ago.

The Democratic Socialists of America, the most visible socialist organisation in the country, launched in 1982 as a coalition of Marxist holdouts who had weathered the red scare of the 1950s — when Communist Party members were tracked by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, interrogated by Senator Joseph McCarthy, fired from jobs and blacklisted in Hollywood — and younger activists who emerged from the antiwar movement of the late 1960s. The DSA had 6,000 charter members but had been in the shadows for more than 30 years.

Then Bernie happened.