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THE DEMOCRATIC BASE IS SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC  
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Harold Meyerson
January 7, 2026
The American Prospect
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_ 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. _

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.

_MORE FROM HAROLD MEYERSON_
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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_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
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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.

_Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect. __More
by Harold Meyerson_ [[link removed]]_._

_Click here to support the Prospect's brand of independent impact
journalism._ [[link removed]]_ __Read the original
article_
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at Prospect.org._

_Used with the permission. The American Prospect, Prospect.org, 2025.
All rights reserved._

* Democratic Party
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* social democracy
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* Michael Harrington
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