BRITTANY LUSE, HOST:
It’s no secret that our country has grown increasingly polarized over the past decade. One way that shows up is in our ongoing culture wars, where our worldviews collide amidst a crumbling social contract. What in the past might have been considered third-rail topics are now everyday conversation, and it can be a lot to take in. So for the next few weeks, we’re breaking down the history, subtext and evolving meanings of the buzzwords you hear all over the news and social media. This is The ABCs of the Culture Wars.
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LUSE: Today is S for socialism. If you listened to last week’s episode, you may remember this comment from NPR political correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben.
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DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN: There’s one thing we haven’t touched on yet that I think is important here as well, which is the fading specter of the Cold War. You had the U.S. and the USSR – the two great powers – constantly locked in battle.
LUSE: The USSR was governed by the Communist Party, but it was founded on socialist principles, hence the name USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. During the Cold War and for generations after, socialism was associated with government ownership and control. And according to Gallup, Americans have consistently viewed socialism more negatively than positively. But that’s changing. In September of this year, Gallup found that 66% of Democrats view socialism positively, and young people in particular have been leading that change for some time now. So what happened?
HOLLY OTTERBEIN: I was not surprised, to be honest with you.
LUSE: That is Holly Otterbein. She’s a senior politics reporter for Axios.
OTTERBEIN: I have covered the rise of socialism within the United States since 2017. If I were to ask you what has caused the rise of socialism, you would probably say Bernie Sanders is the No. 1 reason, right?
LUSE: You would be well within your rights to make that assumption. Senator Bernie Sanders is an independent but describes himself as a Democratic socialist, and the kinds of policies he champions are often associated with socialism. For example, in 2018, the Public Religion Research Institute did a survey on Americans’ views of socialism. Fifty-four percent of respondents identified socialism as, quote, “a system of government that provides citizens with health insurance, retirement support and access to free higher education.” But there’s more.
OTTERBEIN: What I found was that the Democratic Socialists of America, they saw their biggest increase at that time in 2017 after Donald Trump won. So when I’ve talked to people who have become members of the DSA or DSA leaders, they felt like that 2016 election sort of discredited the Democratic Party in their eyes.
LUSE: That disconnection from the Democratic Party may have started in 2017, but with the turbulence caused by COVID, inflation, economic uncertainty and everything else going on all the time, young people have felt more and more dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party.
LEX MCMENAMIN: There’s more disaffected apathy than anything else. Current young people – teenagers, early 20-somethings – watched what they felt was, like, not a very ethical primary process in 2020 result in Biden becoming the nominee, which was the first round of lesser of two evils of this decade.
LUSE: That’s Lex McMenamin, head of the politics section at Teen Vogue. And they’ve been following the popularity of socialism among young people.
MCMENAMIN: So in 2022, we ran this poll of, like, 1,100 people under the age of 35. Ninety percent felt that corporations have too much power, and 82% felt that the economic system favors the wealthy. Seventy-four percent said that the American dream is dead. Seventy-three percent said that their college degree no longer feels worth it. Eighty-three percent said that because of the financial responsibilities of college, student loans, rent and health care, they can’t imagine raising a family financially.
LUSE: They still overwhelmingly vote Democrat, and some of them have found relief in Democratic socialism.
MCMENAMIN: Socialism is a recurring talking point for people that still can’t find ways to get out of the, like, economic precarity that their generation and the immediately prior generations couldn’t get out of.
LUSE: Today on the show, Lex McMenamin joins me to get into how a generation who grew up without the shadow of the Cold War interprets socialism and what that could mean for the future of the Democratic Party.
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LUSE: Hello, hello. I’m Brittany Luse, and you’re listening to IT’S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR, a show about what’s going on in culture and why it doesn’t happen by accident.
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MCMENAMIN: For the amount that we talk about people, like, not wanting to read the news, not wanting to know what’s going on, which is real – things are bad and people don’t want to pay attention – there is still a sense that at a bipartisan level, both parties are very closely interlinked with big corporations, like, that money is a driving factor in the decisions they make.
LUSE: I mean, and a lot of people have been examining both parties’ relationships to a very wealthy billionaire donor class.
MCMENAMIN: And so, like, if they have that level of assessment – right? – if you can find politicians who are very anti-corporation, anti-billionaire – like, that’s why Elizabeth Warren always has people kind of circling back to her. Something I’ve found valuable about Zohran Mamdani’s campaign to witness, just in contrast to what, like, the Democratic, like, pundit class has been arguing since, like, spring 2024, is that he’s been very strident on trans rights, very strident on LGBTQ rights.
LUSE: Yeah.
MCMENAMIN: He has not shied away from talking about issues of identity in the context of economics because it’s simply true that being trans makes you pretty broke a lot of the time (laughter). Like, that’s also an economic problem. If you can’t, like, live in your family’s home and you have to become transient, it’s a dollars-and-cents issue, as opposed to how, frankly, in the last year you’ve seen a ton of Democrats, including Gavin Newsom, give ground to the idea that there are certain issues on the basis of identity that we should be letting go in hopes of having a big Democratic win in 2026…
LUSE: Oh, yeah.
MCMENAMIN: …When, in fact, those populations did come out really strongly from the Democrats in 2024. And the only population that voted heavily for Harris in 2024, other than LGBTQ voters, was Black women.
LUSE: Yeah. You know, another economic, I think, minefield for many Americans is college – how you pay for it, the college experience. It’s also become a pretty potent site for these so-called culture wars. I wonder, how has the climate on America’s college campuses contributed to this rise in progressive interest in socialism?
MCMENAMIN: Let me just start by saying being a higher ed reporter is, like, reporting on some of the bummerous (ph) developments in our times for real. ‘Cause in the last, like, couple years, you’re looking at an environment that’s been shaped by 2020 COVID shutdowns, simultaneously students doing tuition strikes around, like, racial justice calls…
LUSE: Right.
MCMENAMIN: …In 2020 at the same time they were doing tuition strikes over the COVID policies that were underway. And then, you know, 2024 was a year of college students getting arrested…
LUSE: Yeah.
MCMENAMIN: …Because of Palestine protests on campuses, something that the Democratic Party kind of championed.
LUSE: I imagine it’s been really hard being a college student these past few years.
MCMENAMIN: They’re looking out at the prospects and being like, obviously, I need an alternative. Nothing is working. And things weren’t working for people 10 years older than me. They’re not working for people 20 years older than me. All they can do is look for alternatives ’cause what is going on clearly is not functional.
LUSE: Jeez. There’s also this whole other angle coming from, like, conservatives that’s like, college is dangerous, and some conservative – not just elected officials or politicians but pundits alike, who have been able to lean on that concept of college as this dangerous place where dangerous ideas are being shared. And that also feels like it might have had some type of effect on our culture and the way that young people are thinking about socialism.
MCMENAMIN: A hundred percent. I think part of what I’ve been thinking a lot about is that since 2020, like, college enrollment rates have kind of dropped, you know? Like, there were a lot of people that had to drop out of school in 2020, either to become caregivers, like, to their family, to go full-time to work because other people in their family were immunocompromised and couldn’t…
LUSE: Yeah.
MCMENAMIN: …And then, frankly, just never went back and so are, like, navigating this system of no options of where to go, for the most part, without college. But there are plenty of people who are coming to these ideas not through college.
LUSE: And also, there are plenty of people that go to colleges, whether it’s the Ivy League state schools or Southeastern Conference or something like that…
MCMENAMIN: Yeah.
LUSE: …Lean more conservatively. There are still plenty of pathways for young people to continue to move forward into conservative thought.
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LUSE: Coming up…
MCMENAMIN: I don’t know that my family would ever be like, that bad guy’s a capitalist. But they certainly would be like, that guy is part of why I get exploited at work. That guy is part of why, like, we can’t afford groceries the same way.
LUSE: More when we come back.
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LUSE: You know, at the same time, there’s been this rise in curiosity about socialism among young people. Nazi fetishism and white supremacy seem to have become more mainstream among young people as well. What do these simultaneous patterns indicate to you?
MCMENAMIN: Totally. What smart people I know have been observing is that the right has taken ownership of the idea of, like, being edgy. But then if you think about 2015 Leftbook and Bernie memes (laughter), like, it’s actually – like, they’re kind of just ripping what online leftists were doing…
LUSE: Ah.
MCMENAMIN: …A decade before for strategic reasons.
LUSE: I haven’t heard that. OK.
MCMENAMIN: It does feel like a format of the sort of, like, edgelord memes…
LUSE: Absurd.
MCMENAMIN: …That we see.
LUSE: Yeah.
MCMENAMIN: Popular right-wing figures that are now getting more and more power through the Trump administration are replicating that type of edgy humor that, honestly, I feel like kind of came through the left…
LUSE: Interesting.
MCMENAMIN: …The online left when the Bernie campaign was being built out, which part of the fallout of that campaign, as we keep saying, is that it did kind of create, like, further distrust with electoral politics from socialists.
LUSE: But I also wonder, though, ’cause at – around the same time that you’re talking about, the leftist memes were popping off. I mean, Pepe the Frog…
MCMENAMIN: Yeah.
LUSE: …Was hot.
MCMENAMIN: TBT.
LUSE: He was everywhere.
MCMENAMIN: I think that some folks saw the way that the left was creating something, quote-unquote, like, “cutting edge” because socialism was such a bad word.
LUSE: Yeah. I wonder – over the past 10 years, there’s been politicians being elected into office who are being open about, like, being Democratic socialists or at the very least progressive. How does this change the relationship between what’s supposed to be the future of the Democratic Party and its current leadership or establishment Democrats?
MCMENAMIN: Right. The relationship between what I would call, like, the electoral left, which is, you know, the Democratic Socialists of America, the Working Families Party, some, like, smaller parties and localities that maybe are running concurrent campaigns with Democrats or trying to work with the local Democratic machine to get things up – it often feels like two steps forward, one step back. Because they’ll get so close to coalition building, and then all of a sudden, they’ll find something to beef over.
LUSE: There’s, like, some breakdown. Yeah.
MCMENAMIN: I’m thinking about, like, both Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman losing office last year…
LUSE: Sure.
MCMENAMIN: …After being longtime parts of, quote-unquote, “the squad.” So even though when they were coming to ascendancy there was this rhetoric from the media mostly of socialism’s becoming normalized again, it still was at a point where they could not find consensus at the congressional level about what policies they were willing to go to bat for and see as their red line, right? And as a result, those two candidates did get pushed out of office, and so – or at least in part they got pushed out of office because of those, like, disagreements ideologically around things that were supposed to be creating party consensus. I think right now feels like a really prime moment for people who are looking at 2024 and then looking at, like, someone like Zohran Mamdani, who has successfully been able to coalesce power behind him, even from the party itself, right? He’s got Barack Obama behind him. He’s got, like, sort of the faces…
LUSE: Yeah.
MCMENAMIN: …Of the Democratic Party, with some limited exceptions…
LUSE: True.
MCMENAMIN: …Like Chuck Schumer…
LUSE: True. True.
MCMENAMIN: …Like, really rallying behind him. But I do think moving forward, the Democrats know what they’re doing isn’t working. And so while some people are going to propose cutting trans people out of the electorate, other people are going to propose acknowledging that DSA has something going on right now that might work for them. And so you’re seeing both of these things happening concurrently, and it kind of feels like the party is waiting to see which one will go further…
LUSE: Yeah.
MCMENAMIN: …And not die of its own accord and then what will, like, pan out to something. Obviously, people are thinking about 2026. Like, they’re all thinking about the midterms.
LUSE: I think one of the things that’s kind of bugged me about sometimes the way people have interpreted this conversation recently is they’re like, oh, well, this is just happening in New York. And I’m like, there are plenty also of centrist and establishment Democratic candidates running in elections this fall…
MCMENAMIN: Yeah.
LUSE: …And also – you know, and will be next year as well during the midterms. But there are still plenty of very left-leaning Democrat or Democratic socialist candidates that are running progressive campaigns and elections, local elections around the country.
MCMENAMIN: Right.
LUSE: I wonder, if Zohran Mamdani wins tomorrow’s election, how do you anticipate the conversation around socialism changing?
MCMENAMIN: Yeah. I mean, I feel like I’ve said Bernie Sanders about 17,000 times…
LUSE: (Laughter).
MCMENAMIN: …On this episode. But I do think that it – for me personally, as a person who doesn’t come from, like, the political pundit class, all the people in my family never cared about politics ever. And then Bernie ran, and they were like, wow, that’s the one person I’ve ever thought, like, I’m going to go vote. I don’t know that my family would ever be like, that bad guy’s a capitalist. But they certainly would be like, that guy’s part of why I get exploited at work. That guy is part of why, like, we can’t afford groceries the same way.
LUSE: Yeah.
MCMENAMIN: Like, they have that sense. Like, there is, like, class consciousness, even though we don’t talk about it in those terms, going back to the higher-end dimension of how this all gets metered out. But – so I think with Zohran, there’s real issues with having, like, the individual as the face of a movement, but it is very possible for one individual campaign to shape how someone perceives of politics for years afterwards. And we’ve seen that with Bernie. Like, I think it’s impossible to say that what we’re seeing with the DSA would have even been possible if the folks that were politicized on Bernie’s campaign did not move into organizing through the DSA to build a movement after his campaign ended in 2016 because they didn’t just all jump onto the Hillary campaign. They all decided to find other ways to organize, and it led them to the DSA, or it led them to WFP. And so I think with Zohran, depending on how well this campaign does, I think people would love an opportunity to take something and run with it. I do think it’s hard to overstate that, like, one big success can power people’s political imaginations for years.
LUSE: I wonder, also, though, about, like, the colloquial way that we refer to socialism. What do you think a Mamdani win, if he wins tomorrow, would do for the social, colloquial, everyday meaning of socialism for people?
MCMENAMIN: I think it would remain to be seen based on how he governed because I think that people that have closely watched his campaign over the last few months since he won the primary have watched him move to the center.
LUSE: On certain issues. Yeah.
MCMENAMIN: Yeah. On certain issues has – have softened the language that he’s used in public, have – particularly, he’s met with New York City business leaders to calm the sense that he’s going to come in and throw over the…
LUSE: Like a wrecking ball or something like that.
MCMENAMIN: …Yeah – and toss out the billionaire class. Obviously, I think everybody can agree that there’s an element of political strategy to what he’s doing. If in that first year he does actually, like – it’s free bus time, I think socialism is going to be a very good word for New Yorkers (laughter). I think people are going to really want to talk about socialism if some of these policy changes actually…
LUSE: Right.
MCMENAMIN: …Start coming into effect. And so what could happen in New York over the next year could make a big change for people in all 50 states.
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LUSE: Lex, I really appreciate the conversation we had today. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
MCMENAMIN: Thank you for having me. It was fun.
LUSE: That was the head of the politics section for Teen Vogue, Lex McMenamin, and Axios reporter Holly Otterbein.
And I’m going to put on my influencer hat for a second and ask you to please subscribe to this show on Spotify, Apple or wherever you’re listening. Click follow so you know the latest in culture while it’s still hot.
This episode of IT’S BEEN A MINUTE was produced by…
ALEXIS WILLIAMS, BYLINE: Alexis Williams.
LUSE: This episode was edited by…
NEENA PATHAK, BYLINE: Neena Pathak.
LUSE: Our supervising producer is…
BARTON GIRDWOOD, BYLINE: Barton Girdwood.
LUSE: Our executive producer is…
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YOLANDA SANGWENI, BYLINE: Yolanda Sangweni.
LUSE: All right. That’s all for this episode of IT’S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR. I’m Brittany Luse. Talk soon.
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