Democrats’ Hunt for Socialism’s Relevancy in a Trump Democracy
~Michael T. Ruhlman
By November 2025, the American left’s long romance with the word “socialism” lies in smoking ruins. The 2024 Harris campaign treated the term like radioactive waste—Bernie Sanders barely mentioned it on the trail, AOC muted the red-rose emojis, and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) watched their national membership fall from 94,000 in 2021 to under 62,000.
Yet, paradoxically, the actual policy terrain has shifted farther left than any self-described socialist could have scripted in 2019. Medicare expansion polls at 71 %, paid family leave at 78 %, and even wealth-tax proposals now clear 60 % in swing states. The electorate moved left on substance while sprinting right on branding.
In a Trump Democracy—where tariffs are “socialist” when they protect steelworkers, where Elon Musk runs a de-facto industrial policy through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and where “America First” has co-opted half the old labor-left agenda—the question is no longer whether socialist ideas have purchase, but whether anyone still needs the socialist label to enact them.
Trump’s second term has unintentionally created the cleanest laboratory imaginable for democratic socialism without the name. His 25 % universal tariff is the largest demand-side stimulus for domestic manufacturing since the New Deal. The forced on-shoring of semiconductor and battery plants—subsidized by the same CHIPS Act that progressives once called “corporate welfare”—has already created 180,000 unionized jobs in red and purple states.
The Administration’s war on private-equity nursing homes and pharmacy-benefit managers reads like Elizabeth Warren’s 2019 platform translated into executive orders. When Trump threatened to seize patents from drug companies that refuse price negotiations, the left’s response was not celebration but stunned silence: the capitalist bogeyman was implementing sectoral bargaining faster than any Democratic president ever dared.
This theft of the left’s homework has split the socialist current into three uneasy factions.
The first, the “accelerationists,” argue that Trump is doing the useful part of the revolution for them. Jacobin’s November cover declared “Let Trump Socialize the Means of Production.” Writers like Bhaskar Sunkara point out that a Republican president nationalizing supply chains while crushing cosmopolitan finance capital is materially closer to the old Debs program than anything Biden ever signed. Their conclusion: stay quiet, let the contradictions ripen, and prepare to inherit the statized economy when the racist scaffolding collapses.
The second faction, centered in the DSA’s Bread & Roses caucus and the Squad’s remaining insurgents, insists on open combat. They have rebranded themselves the “Fighting Socialists,” dropping the word “democratic” entirely. Their theory: Trumpism is the crisis that classical Marxism always said would radicalize the working class.
Rents up 38 % since 2021, real wages flat despite tariff jobs, mass deportations devastating construction and agriculture—these are textbook conditions for class consciousness. Their proof point is the explosive growth of Amazon Labor Union Mark II in the new Inland Empire logistics hubs, where dues-paying members tripled after ICE raids emptied half the warehouses in October 2025. “Trump is doing the organizing for us,” ALU organizer Christian Smalls told a crowd of 8,000 in San Bernardino. “Every raid is a union meeting.”
The third faction—the largest and most disoriented—are the institutional leftists inside the Democratic Party. Figures like Ro Khanna, Pramila Jayapal, and the 102-member Progressive Caucus now face a cruel dilemma: every time they introduce a “Medicare for All” bill, Republican Senator Josh Hawley co-sponsors a cheaper, cruder version that polls ten points better because it’s wrapped in the flag.
The numbers are brutal. A November 2025 Data for Progress survey found that 61 % of Americans now support “government ownership of critical industries” when the question does not use the word “socialism,” but support collapses to 34 % when the label is attached—the widest gap ever recorded.
In the end, Trump Democracy has done to American socialism what Reagan never could: it killed the brand while smuggling the content through the front door. The red rose wilts on lapels across Brooklyn and Berkeley, but the policies it once symbolized are being spray-painted in garish gold on the South Lawn.
Whether the left can reattach its ideas to a new fighting identity—or whether it will be permanently absorbed into a nationalist working-class formation wearing a different colored hat—remains the open question of the decade.
For now, the hunters have become the hunted: socialism’s ghosts stalk the corridors of power wearing MAGA hats, while its former champions wander the wilderness looking for a name that still scares someone.