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socialism
The Disgrace of an Ex-Governor: Andrew Cuomo of New York
A story about another former Republican governor, Charles Evans Hughes—who defended the rights of socialists even though he was not one himself—offers an important contrast when it comes to Cuomo, as unprincipled as any man can be.
Nov 03, 2025
The entire country will be watching as New Yorkers go to the polls tomorrow to elect the new mayor of the city. Zohran Mamdani, the Muslim-American democratic socialist whose meteoric rise to the top of the Democratic field has made him the front runner, is a dynamic, young, and progressive candidate who symbolizes both vigorous resistance to Trumpism and the possibility of meaningful social democratic policy innovation. He has campaigned brilliantly, and his victory would be all but assured were it not for the sour grapes, independent candidacy of the disgraced ex-Governor, Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo, long a self-serving bully willing to practice gutter politics in order to win at all costs, has waged a ruthless campaign, seeking to link Mamdani to 9-11 and Hamas and red-baiting him as a “far-left” socialist who would destroy both the Democratic party and the city itself.
Cuomo’s current campaign would be pathetic if it weren’t so polarizing, toxic, and downright reactionary.
A little over a century ago, another New York ex-Governor also decided to enter the political fray to address the challenges posed to New York by socialists. But he was a man of principle willing to stand against red-baiting, at a time in which it was even more prevalent than it is today, in the age of Trump—and that is saying a lot.
Charles Evans Hughes, unlike Cuomo, had not been driven from office by scandal. Elected Governor in 1906, he chose to step down in 1910 to accept his nomination, quickly confirmed, as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, where he served for six years before stepping down again, this time to accept the 1916 Republican presidential nomination. It was after losing that election to Woodrow Wilson, and returning to private practice as an attorney, that Hughes came forward to vigorously defend the rights of socialists and of the Socialist Party.
In 1920, the Great War had recently ended, the Wilson administration had prosecuted and decimated the Socialist party, Gene Debs was behind bars—from where he ran for president–and the first Red Scare was in full swing. In New York state, the Lusk Committee—the Joint Legislative Committee to Investigate Seditious Activities—was working overtime to infiltrate, harass, and arrest a wide range of organizations on the left, including the Socialist party and the newly-formed Communist party. As Adam Hochschild has documented in American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis, it was a time of violent suppression of civil liberties and a hostility toward the left that severely compromised even the rudiments of constitutional democracy.
That year, five Socialists who had been elected to the New York State Assembly were summarily suspended by their peers, by a vote of 140 to 6, on the grounds that they were members of a dangerous organization that had opposed the war, supported the Russian Revolution, and was in thrall to an “invisible alien empire” bent on world revolution.
It was then that Hughes stepped forward to defend the Socialists in the name of the Constitution and democracy itself.
In an open letter addressed to the Assembly Speaker, Hughes declared that “It is not in accordance with the spirit of our institutions, but on the contrary, it is absolutely opposed to the fundamental principles of our Government, for a majority to undertake to deny representation to a minority through its representatives elected by ballots lawfully cast.” If individual members of the Socialist Party were considered guilty of actual crimes, Hughes held, then “let every resource of inquiry, of pursuit, of prosecution, be employed to ferret out and punish the guilty according to our laws.” But, noting that no such inquiry had been pursued, and the evidence of criminality was nonexistent, he insisted that to suppress “masses of our citizens combined for political action, by denying them the only resource of peaceful government,” is both foolish and wrong. Hughes continued: “I speak as one utterly opposed to Socialism and in entire sympathy with every effort to put down violence and crime. But it is because I am solicitous to maintain the peaceful processes essential to democracy that I am anxious to see Socialists as well as Republicans and Democrats enjoy their political rights.”
In response to widespread public outcry, Assembly leaders finally agreed to conduct an actual hearing, as the rules required, which quickly concluded with the official expulsion of the Socialists. (The proceedings are recorded in Albany: The Crisis in Government, edited by Louis Waldman, one of the five. This is a very interesting and important text that ought to be more widely known).
Hughes’s powerful appeal to democratic principle went unheeded, and when he sought to speak against the expulsions at the Assembly hearing–this time as head of a New York Bar Association committee established to challenge the expulsions–he was indeed prevented from speaking. But he had taken a principled stand against a politics of vituperation and demonization, and on behalf of freedom of expression and political pluralism.
Hughes had no personal stake in the controversy about the exclusion of the Socialist legislators and the veritable banning of their party. Yet he believed himself to have a stake in democracy. And taking the position that he did placed him at odds not only with many in his party, but with the propaganda-infused consensus of the society at large. For while he was not part of the “political minority” of Socialists whose rights he defended, he was very much in the minority for even taking the rights of the Socialists seriously.
Hughes was a man of principle. And while his challenge of the Socialists’ expulsion from the New York state Assembly failed, he went on to serve as US Secretary of State, from 1921-1925, in the Republican administration of Warren Harding (who commuted Debs’s prison sentence), and then as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court from 1930-1941.
Cuomo is as unprincipled as any man can be.
If he is able to win this week’s election, he will have joined his nemesis-turned-ally, Donald Trump, in furthering a politics of Know Nothing reaction and anti-socialist fear-mongering.
New York City deserves better, and American politics deserves better.
And Cuomo? He deserves to be remembered as a thug whose loss in tomorrow’s election was the final nail in the coffin of a career marked by arrogance, scandal and disgrace.
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Can Mamdani and Friends Revive Socialism in America? Our Future Depends on It
To build a society that actually serves its people, it is necessary to recover a long-marginalized tradition that understands democracy not simply as the holding of elections but as a genuine way of life focused on fighting for the many rather than the privileged few.
Nov 02, 2025
More than a century ago, from a Berlin prison cell where she was confined for her uncompromising opposition to the slaughter of the First World War, Rosa Luxemburg warned, “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.” Her diagnosis remains no less salient today.
In the United States, we long ago chose the path of barbarism. President Donald Trump and his enablers have proven major catalysts in hastening our descent, but they are symptoms as well as causes. The more thacompounding crises of our time, from ecological collapse to immense inequality to endless war, were hardly unforeseeable aberrations. They are the logical outgrowths of a capitalist system built on violent exploitation and rooted in the relentless pursuit of profits over people.
The unsustainable economic order that has defined our national life has corroded our democracy, eroded our shared sense of humanity, and propelled our institutions and our planet toward collapse. Today, we find ourselves perilously far down the highway leading to collective suicide. What the final autopsy will include—be it nuclear annihilation, climate catastrophe, AI-driven apocalypse, or all of the above—no one can yet be certain.
Yet fatalism is not a viable option. A different direction for the country and world remains possible, and Americans still can meet this moment and avert catastrophe. If we are to do so, Luxemburg’s prescription, socialism, remains our last, best hope.
Whether Mamdani wins or loses in November (and count on him winning), he has sparked the reawakening of a long-dormant American tradition of leftist politics.
That conviction animates the democratic socialist campaign of Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York City. In a bleak political climate, he offers a rare spark of genuine hope. Yet his mass appeal has provoked a remarkable, if predictable, elite backlash. He’s faced Islamophobic smears, oligarch money, and backroom deals (efforts that, Mamdani observed, cost far more than the taxes he plans to impose to improve life in New York). Trump has unsurprisingly joined these efforts wholeheartedly, while the Democratic establishment has chosen the path of cowardice and silence, or at least equivocation.
The outrage over Mamdani is not only about the label “socialist.” Every American has heard the refrain: Socialism looks good on paper but doesn’t work in practice. The subtext, of course, is that capitalism does. And in a sense, it has. It has worked exactly as designed by concentrating obscene levels of wealth in the hands of a ruling class that deploys its fortune to further entrench its power. Especially since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, private capital has wielded untold influence over elections, drowning out ordinary voices in a flood of corporate money.
What makes Mamdani’s campaign so unsettling to those (all too literally) invested in this status quo is not merely his critique of capitalism but his insistence on genuine democracy. His platform rests on the simple assertion that, in the wealthiest city in the wealthiest country in the world (as should be true everywhere across this nation), every person deserves basic dignity. And what undoubtedly unnerves the political establishment isn’t so much his “radical” agenda but the notion that politics should serve the many, not the privileged few, and that the promise of democracy could be transformed from mere rhetoric to reality.
Whether Mamdani wins or loses in November (and count on him winning), he has sparked the reawakening of a long-dormant American tradition of leftist politics. Reviving socialism in this country also requires reviving its history, recovering it from the hysteria of the Red Scare and the Cold War mentality of “better dead than red.” Socialism has long been a part of our national experience and democratic experiment. And if democracy is to survive in the 21st century, democratic socialism must be part of its future.
The Roots of American Socialism
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a wave of immigration brought millions of workers to the United States, many carrying the radical ideas then germinating in Europe. Yet such beliefs were hardly alien to this country.
The growth of labor unions and the rise of leftist politics were not foreign imports but emerged as a byproduct of the dire material circumstances of life under industrial capitalism in America.
By 1900, the US had become the world’s leading industrial power, surpassing its European rivals in manufacturing and, by 1913, producing nearly one-third of global industrial output, more than Britain, France, and Germany combined. That share would climb to nearly half of the global gross domestic product by the end of World War II. However, the immense accumulation of wealth was not shared with those whose labor made it possible. American workers endured intense poverty and precarity, while being subjected to grueling hours for meager pay. They saw few meaningful protections, and suffered the highest rate of industrial accidents in the world.
When workers rose in collective opposition to those conditions, they faced not only the monopolistic corporations of the Gilded Age, but an entire political economy structured to preserve that system of inequality. Anti-competitive practices concentrated wealth to an extraordinary degree. The richest 10% of Americans then owned some 90% percent of national assets, with such wealth used to buy power through the co-optation of a state apparatus whose monopoly on violence was wielded against labor and in defense of capital. As Populist leader Mary Elizabeth Lease described the situation in 1900: “Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.”
That was evident as early as 1877, when railroad workers launched a nationwide strike and federal troops spent weeks brutally suppressing it, killing more than 100 workers. Such violence ignited a surge of labor organizing, thanks particularly to the radically egalitarian Knights of Labor. Yet the Haymarket Affair of 1886—when a bomb set off at a May Day rally in Chicago provided a pretext for a bloody government crackdown—enabled the state to deepen its repression and stigmatize the labor movement by associating it with anarchism and extremism.
Still, the socialist left was able to reconstitute itself in the decades that followed under the leadership of Eugene V. Debs. He was drawn to socialism not through abstract theory but lived experience in the American Railway Union. There, as he recalled: “in the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle the class struggle was revealed. This was my first practical lesson in socialism, though wholly unaware that it was called by that name.”
In 1901, Debs helped found the Socialist Party of America. Over the next two decades, socialist candidates became mayors and congressional representatives, winning elections to local offices across the country. At its peak in 1912, Debs captured nearly a million votes, some 6% of the national total, while running as a third-party candidate for president (and again from prison in 1920). For a time, socialism became a visible, established part of American democracy.
“This War Is Not Our War”
Yet socialism faced its most formidable test during the First World War. Across Europe and the United States, many socialists opposed the conflict, arguing that it was a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” a framing that resonated with broad segments of the American public.
The socialist critique went deeper than class resentment. For decades, socialists were drawing a direct connection between capitalism’s parasitic exploitation of labor at home and its predatory expansion abroad. Writing during the late 19th-century era of high imperialism, as European powers carved up the globe in the name of national glory while showing brutal disregard for the lives of those they subjugated, progressive and socialist thinkers contended that imperialism was anything but a betrayal of capitalism’s logic.
Russian communist and revolutionary Vladimir Lenin called that moment “the monopoly stage of capitalism.” (Capitalists labeled it the cause of “civilization.”) While British economist John Hobson similarly maintained that empire served not the interests of the nation but of its elites who used the power of the state to secure the raw materials and new markets they needed for further economic expansion. “The governing purpose of modern imperialism,” he explained, “is not the diffusion of civilization, but the subjugation of peoples for the material gain of dominant interests.” That was “the economic taproot of imperialism.”
The centuries of imperialism that are returning home in the form of fascism can’t be dismantled without confronting the capitalism that has sustained it, and capitalism itself can’t be transformed without democratizing the economy it commands.
Similarly in the United States, W.E.B. Du Bois, a leading civil rights advocate, situated the war in the longer history of racial and colonial domination. He traced its origins to the “sinister traffic” in human beings that had left whole continents in a “state of helplessness which invites aggression and exploitation,” making the “rape of Africa” imaginable and therefore possible. War, he argued, was the continuation of empire by other means. “What do nations care about the cost of war,” he wrote, “if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa?”
Others, like disability activist and socialist Helen Keller, a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union, echoed such critiques. In 1916, she wrote: “Every modern war has had its root in exploitation. The Civil War was fought to decide whether the slaveholders of the South or the capitalists of the North should exploit the West. The Spanish-American War decided that the United States should exploit Cuba and the Philippines.” Of the First World War, she concluded, “the workers are not interested in the spoils; they will not get any of them anyway.”
Once Washington entered the war, it criminalized dissent through the Espionage and Sedition Acts, the same “emergency measure” that would be used, during future wars, to charge whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, and Daniel Hale. Socialists were among its first targets.
After a 1918 speech condemning the war, Debs himself would be imprisoned. “Let the wealth of a nation belong to all the people, and not just the millionaires,” he declared. “The ruling class has always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and have yourself slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world, you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war.” The call for a world “in which we produce for all and not for the profit of the few” remains as relevant as ever.
Socialism After the Scare
The Red Scare of 1919, followed by McCarthyism in the 1950s and the broader Cold War climate of hysteria and repression, effectively criminalized socialism, transforming it into a political taboo in the United States and driving it from mainstream American discourse. Yet, despite the ferocity of the anticommunist crusade, a number of prominent voices continued to defend socialism.
In 1949, reflecting on a war that had claimed more than 60 million lives and brought us Auschwitz and Hiroshima, Albert Einstein argued that “the real source of evil” was capitalism itself. Humanity, he insisted, “is not condemned, because of its biological constitution, to annihilate each other or to be at the mercy of a cruel, self-inflicted fate.” The alternative, he wrote, lay in “the establishment of a socialist economy,” with an education system meant to cultivate “a sense of responsibility for one’s fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success.”
Martin Luther King Jr. carried that struggle against capitalism, racism, and war forward. Building on the legacy of the Double-V campaign, he called for confronting the evils of white supremacy at home and imperialism abroad. In grappling with those intertwined injustices, he increasingly adopted a socialist analysis, even if he didn’t publicly claim the label. For King, there could be no half freedom or partial liberation: Political rights were hollow without economic justice and racial equality was impossible without class equality.
As he put it, you can “call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God’s children.” Rejecting the pernicious myth of capitalist self-reliance with biting clarity, he pointed out that “it’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”
In his 1967 Riverside Church speech denouncing the American war in Vietnam, King made the connection clear. “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift,” he warned, “is approaching spiritual death.” America, he added, needed a revolution of values, a shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” one. As long as “machines and computers, profit motives and property rights [are] considered more important than people,” he concluded, “the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
A Better Country and World is Possible
The effort to discredit Zohran Mamdani and other Democratic Socialists like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib, who challenge entrenched power, is, of course, anything but new. It reflects an ongoing struggle over the meaning of democracy. To build a society that actually serves its people, it is necessary to recover a long-marginalized tradition that understands democracy not simply as the holding of elections but as a genuine way of life focused on fighting for the many rather than the privileged few. Mamdani and crew can’t be exceptions to the rule, if such a vision is ever to take root in this country.
In Donald Trump’s grim vision for and version of America, democratic institutions are decaying at a rapid pace, the military is being used to occupy cities with Democratic mayors, and tyranny is replacing the rule of law. Fascism has never triumphed without the assent of elites who fear the rise of the left more than dictatorship. Mussolini and Hitler did not take power in a vacuum; they were elevated by an elite democratic establishment that preferred an authoritarian order to the uncertainties of popular democracy.
The choice remains what it was a century ago: some version of socialism as the foundation for a renewed democracy or continued barbarism as the price of refusing it.
Meeting today’s crises requires more than piecemeal reform. It demands a reimagining of political life. The centuries of imperialism that are returning home in the form of fascism can’t be dismantled without confronting the capitalism that has sustained it, and capitalism itself can’t be transformed without democratizing the economy it commands.
This country once again stands at a crossroads. Capitalism has brought us to the edge of ecological, economic, and moral catastrophe. Today, the top 1% control more wealth than the bottom 93% of Americans combined, a trajectory that is simply unsustainable. The choice remains what it was a century ago: some version of socialism as the foundation for a renewed democracy or continued barbarism as the price of refusing it. The question is no longer whether socialism can work in America, but whether American democracy can survive without it.
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Your Socialist Grandfather Wants You to Fight for Economic Democracy
"The left" must get back to what was its original reason for existence—to fight for one-person, one vote democracy in the economic as well as political systems that govern our lives.
Sep 14, 2025
What’s the best way to pass on what you learned from more than a half century of left-wing doing, reading, writing, talking, and thinking?
Write a book. This was especially obvious to a retired union-activist-journalist-novelist grandfather. So, I did. Started writing a book tentatively titled Economic Democracy or No Democracy—An Anti Oligarchy Manifesto.
But then I actually listened to my grandchildren and learned they don’t read much. Instead, their pipeline to understanding the world is social media, mostly memes and videos, few of which exceed five minutes of attention span. At first, I argued with them. “You should read. Much more. Opens your mind to places, experiences, ideas …”
They try to be polite to grandpa, but there’s no mistaking the disinterest as cellphone-induced zombie (perhaps Zen-like?) eyes stare at a screen on the table instead of me.
How to respond? What to do? Decades of union organizing has taught me the importance of listening. Meeting people where they are at. Following their lead rather than trying to impose an "organizing template" on them. The most successful organizing drives are ones in which the "organizer" is a resource, an assistant in a process where the unorganized transform themselves into the organized. “The union is U”—an old slogan expressing a fundamental truth.
So, how to meet my grandchildren and other young people where they are at? How to say something they might consider listening to?
To achieve our goals, we must get rid of capitalist dictatorship in our economy and workplaces as well as oligarchy and authoritarianism in our political systems.
Perhaps these are questions someone two generations removed can never really answer. Certainly, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, when I was the ages of my two oldest grandchildren, there was no way most "old people" were deemed worthy of even asking their opinion about war, politics, and life in general, let alone the really important issues of the day like sex, relationships, and feminism.
Still, it is important for a socialist and union elder to try passing on at least a few things that might help young people today learn from our experiences—successes and, most of all, failures. According to a TV documentary about elephants, the oldest females are the ones able to lead the herd to faraway, lifesaving watering holes in times of drought.
Surely this era of climate-change-ignoring-billionaire-emperor CEOs, "free-world"-supported-live-streamed genocide, Donald Trump and all the other authoritarian, about-to-turn-fascistic "world leaders" is at least the human political equivalent of a savanna drought.
We are in a crisis almost certainly about to get worse, and the young ones need our working-class socialism, union-movement elderly-elephant-like accumulated knowledge to survive. It is up to us whose tusks are falling out to do what we can to save the herd.
So, I taught myself how to make videos, created the Your Socialist Grandfather YouTube channel, and turned my book manuscript into 43 five-minute-or-so-long videos. I call it a video book, and the first few episodes are already live on YouTube with a new one added every second day.
Mostly the free videos are about creating a new inclusive language of economic democracy to replace the old socialist-Marxist-anarchist jargon that divided us and to understand capitalism as another in a long line of tiny minorities attempting to rule over the vast majority.
As Your Socialist Grandfather sees it, "the left" must get back to what was its original reason for existence—to fight for one-person, one vote democracy in the economic as well as political systems that govern our lives. To achieve our goals, we must get rid of capitalist dictatorship in our economy and workplaces as well as oligarchy and authoritarianism in our political systems. We must challenge capitalists’ claim to “own” our economies.
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