The Democratic Base Is Social Democratic

Bernie Sanders with supporters | by Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0)

In Socialism, his 1972 magnum opus, Michael Harrington termed the American labor movement an “invisible” mass social democratic movement. Even as he noted that its language, its forms, and its foreign policy (at least at the AFL-CIO) suggested nothing like social democratic beliefs, it had been the leading force behind such landmark Great Society legislation as Medicare and Medicaid, and remained the leading force behind expanding such social welfare policies in the years thereafter. Most commentators and scholars of American politics had missed this transformation, Harrington wrote, because it had happened gradually and incrementally, with no ideological proclamations or even much in the way of discussions to herald this transformation. Hence, its invisibility.

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In much the same way that Harrington called U.S. unions an invisible social democracy half a century ago, I’m inclined to slap that label on the Democratic Party today. If not all its elected officials—certainly not all its elected officials—then the term not only describes, but best describes, rank-and-file Democrats today.

Last month, Rep. Pramila Jayapal shared with Politico a GQR poll taken in November that showed fully 90 percent of Democrats favored Medicare for All—which would be tantamount to nationalizing the entire health insurance industry. This followed an Economist/YouGov poll from last summer that showed 85 percent of Democrats (and 57 percent of independents) favored Medicare for All, while just 7 percent of Democrats (and 24 percent of independents) opposed it. It’s also in accord with a Data for Progress survey from November that showed that even when informed that Medicare for All would eliminate most private insurance and be funded through higher taxes, 78 percent of Democrats (plus 64 percent of independents and 47 percent of Republicans) would nonetheless support Medicare for All.

Were this an ideological one-off—a reaction only to our steadily less affordable and steadily more dysfunctional system of private insurance, even as Democrats otherwise affirmed their belief in other sectors’ markets—it wouldn’t in itself make the Democrats a social democratic party. But it’s not. As I’ve noted throughout the past year, polling the Democrats on virtually any topic in 2025 revealed a consistent belief in social democracy. A Gallup poll from September showed that 66 percent of Democrats had a favorable view of socialism, while just 42 percent had a favorable view of capitalism. A YouGov poll from November showed that 66 percent of Americans—not just Democrats—supported socialist Zohran Mamdani’s proposal to provide free universal child care, while 57 percent even favored his proposal to establish city-owned grocery stores.

None of these findings suggest that all Democratic candidates should be beating the hustings while touting, say, collective farms. The immense amounts of money that corporations and oligarchs will throw against these and other such proposals, and the candidates who make them, will doubtless affect voter behavior, as it has in the past. But where the political space is there, as it clearly is in virtually every American city and many American suburbs, Democratic candidates shouldn’t shy away from conforming their proposals to the beliefs of their fellow Democrats, particularly if the independents in their states or districts affirm those beliefs as well.

Harrington’s invisible social democrats of the 1970s were the leaders and staffers of America’s unions, and the direct beneficiaries of some social democratic programs, chiefly Medicare. Today, the roll call of America’s social democrats has grown exponentially, not due to anything resembling socialist propaganda, but rather, to the economy’s thousand unnatural shocks— deunionization, financialization, globalization, deregulation, and steadily more regressive taxation, for starters—that have enriched our nation’s wealthiest 10 percent while plunging everyone else into either problems or crises of unaffordability, whether of homes, health care, or tuition. As I documented in my article in the Prospect’s December print issue, had that 90 percent of American workers retained the same share of the nation’s income that they had before Ronald Reagan began breaking unions and dismantling the tax and regulatory policies created by the New Deal, they would have earned $79 trillion more than they did in the years since Reagan was elected president in 1980. In 2025 alone, each of the roughly 140 million American workers in the bottom 90 percent would have earned an additional $28,000.

That upward redistribution of income, wealth, and political power amounts to a systemic crisis for which rank-and-file Democrats now favor systemic solutions, whether they call them socialist or social democratic or not. I can understand why a Democrat in a conservative district might not go whole hog on an immediate transformation to, say, Medicare for All, but at the very least, where Democrats should draw the line is accepting contributions from people and institutions opposed to the fundamentals of workers’ rights and social democracy. That includes the tech behemoths behind AI and their culturally liberal but economically oligopolistic board members and executives.

I recently noted that in attendance at a D.C. fundraiser for Luke Bronin, who is mounting a primary challenge to longtime liberal Democrat Rep. John Larson for his central Connecticut House seat, was Jamie Gorelick, who’d been the deputy attorney general in Bill Clinton’s Justice Department. Gorelick has been a board member of Amazon for the past 14 years, where her legal expertise has doubtless come in handy. During those years, Amazon has gone to court to argue that the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the National Labor Relations Board are unconstitutional, refused to bargain with the Staten Island warehouse workers who voted to go union in 2022, and shuttered all seven of its warehouses in Quebec after workers in one of those warehouses had voted to unionize.

Even as the base of the Democratic Party is an increasingly visible force for social democracy, the least we should expect of Democratic candidates is that they don’t owe their careers to dismantlers of the New Deal. Nor do they have to be socialists themselves, but they at least should understand that their fellow Democrats seek a decidedly more social democratic America, and act accordingly.

Up to now, the media have generally treated the most prominent democratic socialists in the Democratic Party’s ranks—Bernie Sanders, AOC, and Zohran Mamdani—as outliers within a party that has long existed comfortably within a capitalist economy. Much as the media in Harrington’s time couldn’t see how the labor movement was evolving, today’s media is correspondingly slow to note why there’s such enthusiasm, spilling well beyond the still small ranks of avowed socialists, for Bernie and Zohran and AOC. To be sure, the social democratic transformation of the Democratic Party, beginning at the level of its rank and file, is internally contested every day; significant elements of the party continually push back, and the central role that money plays in electoral politics gives those elements their power and their sway.

But it took a profound transformation of Americans’ social and economic lives, at the hands of a deregulated and financialized capitalism, that pushed the Democrats left, and it’s time that the media reconsidered what constitutes the party’s new mainstream. The “party,” whatever that may be (the DNC? the Democratic campaign committees?) has issued no manifestos, and such big-money-beholden party entities will be the last to acknowledge this change. Rather, this is a transformation that began with the rank and file and required Bernie Sanders’s first presidential campaign to make it visible even to left activists. That, however, was a full decade ago. And whatever this social democratic force now may have become, it certainly shouldn’t be viewed as marginal—much less, invisible. Today, it is the base of the Democratic Party.

Portside

The Democratic Base Is Social Democratic

It took profound transformation of Americans’ social and economic lives by deregulated and financialized capitalism to push Democrats left. It’s time that the media reconsider what constitutes the party’s new mainstream.

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