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.