The socialist revolt that America forgot: A history lesson for Bernie Sanders [View all]

[JonLP24]

In 1978, the Left was fed up with Jimmy Carter and looking for an alternative. If only they had followed through.

Bernie Sanders is a singular figure in modern U.S. politics, the lone self-identified socialist to serve in Congress, at a time when mainstream American attitudes, if not actively violent towards socialism as they have been in the past, remain nonetheless fundamentally suspicious. As such, his plans to run against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primaries represent something of an anomaly. What bears mentioning about Sanders’ run, however, is that it is not the first time a prominent socialist has considered a bid for the Democratic nomination. To understand the significance of Sanders’ candidacy, it’s worth flashing back to the summer of 1978, as liberal Democrats were growing increasingly disillusioned with Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

Jimmy Carter was never going to be the left’s favorite candidate. On the eve of the 1976 elections, Michael Harrington, the leader of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee had called on leftists to vote for Carter “without illusions.” We expected very little and that’s exactly what we got.

In his lone term in office, Carter failed to pass a national health insurance program, failed to reform labor laws, and disappointed liberal Democrats on a wide range of issues — in particular, full employment.

So as the 1980 presidential election drew near, many were hoping that Senator Edward Kennedy would step in, as his brother Robert had done a decade before, and run against a sitting Democratic president. But Kennedy was cautious, despite some polls that showed him with a significant lead over Carter.

At the time, Harrington, a social critic and author of “The Other America” – a book widely credited with convincing President John F. Kennedy that poverty was still an issue in America – was trying to build up an explicitly socialist wing of the Democratic Party. Harrington and his supporters had won over the venerable (and tiny) Socialist Party a decade earlier to the view that if they were serious about politics, it was time to stop running independent candidates. Their argument was a simple one: The Socialist vote had declined from a peak of around a million in the years around World War I to just a couple of thousand by the 1950s. If socialists were ever going to leave their mark on the country, it would have to be done through the Democratic Party.

By 1978, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) was growing in numbers and in influence in the liberal wing of the party, having successfully organized two major national conferences of progressives, called “Democracy 76” and “Democratic Agenda.” The latter was successfully challenging Carter from the Left, and at the Memphis Democratic mid-term convention in 1978, its resolutions were supported by a very large minority of delegates.

DSOC was recruiting new members in places across the country where a young New York radical such as myself would never have expected to find an organized Left, such as in Texas and North Carolina. In just a few months, the DSOC would hold its national convention in a motel outside of Houston. The hotel’s billboard sign proclaimed “Welcome $ocialists.” (They actually did use a dollar sign.) To young and inexperienced activists like myself, it looked like we might be on the cusp of a breakthrough.

http://www.salon.com/2015/05/08/the_socialist_revolt_that_america_forgot_a_history_lesson_for_bernie_sanders/

This was before my time & all new & interesting information. Almost afraid to post over what sort of flame war to expect but it is a good read.