As author Simon van Zuylen-Wood writes in a dryly biting essay in New York magazine, the spread of “socialist” politics is changing the way New York’s young people socialize, date, and badge themselves politically. It’s also changed how the word “socialism” gets used: “Until very recently, it wasn’t that socialism was toxic in a red-scare way. It was irrelevant, in a dustbin-of-history way. But then came Bernie Sanders’s 2016 candidacy, then the membership boom of DSA [from about 5,000 to about 56,000,] then the proliferation of socialist cultural products like Chapo, and then, finally, the spectacular rise of Ocasio-Cortez.”
Socialism has no agreed upon public definition in American parlance. One subject quoted in the story “asked that I not use his last name, because his parents fled the Soviet Union and hate socialism.” Presumably it does not mean to him what it does to his parents. But there’s little agreement anywhere.
Given the amorphousness of the definition of socialism, I think the new popularity of the DSA and socialist rhetoric raises another question not about how socialism is being used, but why it’s getting used by all these people at the same moment. And the answer is they like the frisson of the word. It still has a naughtiness, a cool. It was a bad word just a few years ago in a world where none of the old four-letter words have any edge left. So it’s exciting to use a word that until recently was a no-go. As Zuylen-Wood quotes then-state senate candidate Julia Salazar at a Brooklyn campaign event: “I’m a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and I have this team of fellow dirtbag leftists.”
Michael Harrington, who incidentally also started the insult “neoconservative” as something of an intra-Left joke, founded and named the DSA to create a gradualist but morally uncompromised socialism in America. He thought deeply about socialism. Today, the people flocking to his socialist badge are doing something more along the lines of Iceland’s Pirate Party as far as political rhetoric goes. It’s the mohawk and black leather jacket of political allegiances.
People used to stay away from socialism in their politics, because it was an edgy enough word that embracing it was like saying, “Screw you.” That’s why they’re using it now. The problem is, politics by its nature isn’t actually very rock-and-roll, and it takes more thought than fashion does.
