The labor movement in this country has long been torn between those who embrace the term “socialist,” and those who shun it.  Eugene V. Debs went from leading a railroad workers’ union to running for President as a Socialist.  By contrast, Samuel Gompers, the first President of the American Federation of Labor had this to say about socialists: “[t]heir statements as to economic ills are right; their conclusions and their philosophy are all askew.”  More recently, in the 1980s, the President of the International Association of Machinists, William Winpisinger, described himself as a “seat of the pants socialist.”  Today, I don’t think any prominent union leaders publicly identify as socialists.  In fact, in last month’s Congressional primary election in New York, Claire Valdez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) ran on a platform of “unions for all,” yet major unions spent substantial sums of money supporting her opponent, Antonio Reynoso.  There actually was not much ideological difference between Valdez and Reynoso, but a real split between the center and the left in the Democratic party threatens the Democrats chances to stop further damage in the last two years of the Trump Administration, and implement needed change in 2029. 

In recent weeks, three DSA members – Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Melat Kiros have won Democratic primaries for House seats, and a DSA ally, Brad Lander, also ousted an incumbent Democrat in a House primary.  Somehow, centrist Democrats in Congress seem far more worried about the victories by these insurgents than they are about the prospect of Republicans keeping control of Congress.  Almost immediately after Avila Chevalier, Lander, and Valdez won their primaries, a group of ten centrist Democrats in the House issued a letter they called “A Promise to America,” in which they declared, “We’re capitalist, not socialist.”  Not to be outdone, Donald Trump started attacking Democrats as Communists.  Voters in Colorado responded to this new Red Scare by electing Kiros. 

While there are real differences within the Democratic Party, it’s just silly to frame those differences as capitalism versus socialism.  Are the ten House members who signed on to the Promise to America going to abolish Social Security and Medicare?  I don’t think so.  What about public highways, public transportation, and public schools?  Do they want to close down the hospitals run by the Veterans’ Administration?  How about the Tennessee Valley Authority and other public utilities?  Democratic socialists want to build on some of these ideas – for instance, instead of limiting Medicare to those over 65, moving toward Medicare for All.  But, it’s hard to understand why government-funded health insurance for those over 65 is capitalism, but extending it to everyone makes it socialism.  As for public utilities, Nebraska, a state with two Republican Senators where Trump got 59% of the vote in 2024, is entirely served by public utilities, so Kiros’s assertion that publicly owned utilities are a model worth emulating hardly seems radical. Instead of name-calling, it makes more sense to have a debate on the merits of any concrete proposals.  

Maybe the Promise to America signatories fear government ownership of private companies.  But, I don’t recall any of them speaking out when Donald Trump arranged for the U.S. government to take a 10 percent ownership stake in the chip maker, Intel, or a so-called “golden share” in U.S. Steel that allows Trump to appoint a board member and veto company decisions.  The democratic socialists running for Congress are not running on a platform of workers owning the means of production.  Instead, Valdez’s “unions for all” proposal merely asks for the industrial democracy that Senator Robert Wagner promised when Congress enacted the National Labor Relations Act in 1935.  Similarly, Darializa Avila Chevalier proposes a higher federal minimum wage and a shorter workweek, updating the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act.  And their ally Brad Lander wants to do more to protect gig workers, who currently receive no protections from federal labor and employment laws. 

Democrats, and frankly all Americans, should be able to unite around the idea that we don’t want to live in a world where billionaires just keep getting richer while everyone else struggles to make ends meet.  And one way to address this issue is to do more to protect the right to organize and bargain collectively.  As union density has declined, workers’ wages have not kept up with productivity gains, meaning that money that could have gone into their pockets has instead enriched billionaires like Jeff Bezos.  Making it easier for workers to organize is a policy that all factions of the Democratic Party should support.  In fact, when the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act came up for a vote in the House in 2021, only one Democrat voted against it.  But, in the aftermath of Trump v. Slaughter, much in the PRO Act has become obsolete. In Slaughter, six Supreme Court Justices declared that the heads of agencies need to act like the President’s “assistants or deputies,” and “remain subject to his superintendence.”  As I have written before, the National Labor Relations Board is now a dead man walking, just waiting for someone to assert that it violates due process for one set of Presidential assistants (the Board Members) to decide a case brought by a different Presidential assistant (the General Counsel).  If Democrats in Congress agree that we need to do more to fulfill the NLRA’s promise of industrial democracy, the Democratic leadership in the House should be uniting the party on a plan to make that happen rather than letting centrists provoke an intramural fight over labels. 

I looked at the campaign websites of the ten House members who signed the Promise to America, and sadly only one of them, Maggie Goodlander, discusses policy goals.  Goodlander states that she believes healthcare is a right, not a privilege, which sounds suspiciously socialistic to me.  Goodlander also commits to protecting the right to collectively bargain, raising the minimum wage, combating climate change, and fighting against corporate monopolies.  Maybe this agenda can unite the factions within the Democratic Party. 

The signers of the Promise to America seem to think that if they attack their fellow Democrats for being “socialists,” that will somehow immunize them against attacks from the Republicans.  But politics doesn’t work that way.  It’s telling that more centrist Republicans in Congress hardly ever denounce their far-right colleagues.  Instead, Republicans focus on the issues that unite them, like lowering taxes for the wealthy.  After Trump’s first two years in office, Congress has a bigger to-do list than ever. Democrats should focus on taking power away from billionaires and big corporations and putting it in the hands of workers.  And if the Democrats in Congress can somehow accomplish that, I’d be happy to give the credit to all of them, regardless of how they describe themselves.