Michael Zweig talks about the 2026 midterm election debate about “socialism,” recent primary victories by Democratic Socialists of America candidates, and a growing number of Americans’ declining confidence in attaining the “American Dream.” Zweig is the author of Class, Race, and Gender: Challenging the Injuries and Divisions of Capitalism.
SCOTT HARRIS: This is Counterpoint. My name’s Scott Harris, and we’re talking about a lot of the issues that I think you’re interested in. And right now, one of the biggest issues that has emerged in the 2026 midterm election campaign is the issue of socialism. The election campaign has intensified a national debate over socialism, the word communism, and the future direction of the Democratic party following a series of primary victories by candidates affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, DSA. And we’ve talked about that on this program quite a bit over the recent months. And building on the 2025 election of democratic socialists, Zohran Mamdani as New York City mayor. DSA members, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez won congressional primaries in New York while Melat Kiros defeated longtime Democratic Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado. And you’ll probably remember Donavan McKinney unseated Rep. Shri Thaneder in Michigan. And then we had Chris Rabb win a congressional primary in Pennsylvania.
And Florida state Rep. Angie Nixon, also a DSA member, won her state’s Democratic U.S. Senate primary. And she’s doing quite well in Florida, a traditionally red state. These candidates have emphasized economic inequality, universal healthcare, affordable housing, higher taxes on the wealthy, workers’ rights and reducing corporate influence over government. And with us to discuss this issue is Michael Zweig, emeritus professor of economics, founding director of the Center for the Study of Working Class Life at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and author of his most recent book titled Class, Race and Gender: Challenging the Injuries and Divisions of Capitalism. Much appreciation, Michael. And I should also mention your co-host along with Richard Hill on WPKN’s monthly program, The Labor Report. Michael, appreciate you being with us on Counterpoint this evening.
MICHAEL ZWEIG: Being here. Thanks for having me.
SCOTT HARRIS: So wanted to get your perspective on the DSA victories and the discussion of socialism. Sometimes the discussions are really detached from reality, but before we get to some of the nuts and bolts of what the DSA stands for, what socialism means in the broader or the more specific sense of policy that’s being discussed in this election, I wanted to get your overview of what’s driving this really new kind of debate in American politics.
MICHAEL ZWEIG: What’s driving it is the unbearable inequalities, the gross corruption at the top levels of our country, the kleptocracy that the Trump administration is promoting, and the hard living that continues to be the reality of working people all across this country. And it’s that contradiction or that contraposing of the life of plenty and the life of hardship, which is galling people and increasingly visible and unable to be hidden. And it’s increasingly clear who’s responsible for that. And that’s where this surge is coming from.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thank you for that, Michael. So Trump and Republicans in response to the DSA candidate victories and in the general sort of rise of progressive candidates, DSA are not in the recent primary elections. They’ve used the word “socialism” interchangeably with “communism” to personally attack left-wing and DSA candidates. Really, all Democrats are in their crosshairs when they launch these attacks, along with the whole attack on trans children and all that. And certainly the Republicans, they’ve even attacked centrists like Joe Biden. They’ve called him a socialist and a communist. It’s, as I said, not based on reality. I wonder if you would talk about the issue of when these terms are thrown around, socialist and communist, when you press some of these commentators, candidates about defining what socialism is, they can’t even do it.
MICHAEL ZWEIG: Well, the conflation of communism, socialism and evil is something that’s been characteristic of capitalist societies, capitalist rulers, capitalist apologists for 150 years. And so I don’t think it’s any surprise that that’s been picked up again by the people around Trump and Musk and these tech bros and all these people who are just out there to make money and to crush anything that gets in the way of that. So we’ve seen this sort of struggle between workers and capitalists for basically the history of capitalism. So what’s to me, and I think what historically is, I think accurate is to say that what socialism is about is about promoting the interests and the power and the authority of working people or of the working class as a class formation in society that should exercise power over what happens in the country, what the country’s like, what its priorities are, who is favored and who is disfavored.
All of those questions have answers that are inflected by class interests. So if we’re talking about capitalism, we’re talking about a society in which the capitalists’ interests are prominent and are paramount. And that’s because the capitalists tell us that without them, we’re all lost. We wouldn’t have a job, we wouldn’t have way forward. The capitalists are the people who give direction to the country. What socialism is historically is an assertion by workers and by the working class for power. And it could be a sort of an ideology or a political program that asserts these interests or it could be an actual society that is run by a party or a political force that in fact does represent the working class in power. And then the conflation between socialism and communism is also something which has been used historically to condemn anybody from the center all the way out to the far left as all one thing—that’s the enemy of capitalism.
So the socialists started in the 19th century, mostly influenced by Marx, but by other theorists and by other activists. And what those socialists were doing was challenging capitalism. What happened in 1917 was that the Russian Revolution happened and that changed the complexion of the forces that were at play because the Russian Revolution was a real revolution and there was some socialists who thought it was inappropriate and went too far and was dictatorial and was wrong and they stayed being just socialists or democratic socialists believing that the working class should have power, but it should be done through democratic means.
And then the communists were people who said, “Forget about democratic means in a capitalist society. It’s impossible and we’re just going to make revolution and overthrow these people and take power by force.” And we don’t have a communist, a real communist movement in this country and it’s hardly anywhere in capitalist society around the world that there’s a real communist attempt to organize working class power in a really revolutionary way.
That’s not at all what’s going on in the United States. These people who are in DSA are the people who are around, that are thinking about it have nothing to do with communism. So I think that that is a conflation which Trump and the Republican apparatus wants to promote to confuse those things so that we can all feel that, “Oh, it’s just these communists who are going to rule us with an iron fist and we don’t want that because look at what happened with Stalin. And I think that we need to understand that DSA and the socialists in the United States have nothing to do with Stalin, condemn Stalin and have no aspiration to impose anything outside of democratic means.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thank you for that excellent summary of these issues that are so often confused in our political rhetoric. This is Counterpoint here on listener-sponsored WPKN in Bridgeport. My name is Scott Harris and we’re speaking this evening with Michael Zweig, emeritus professor of economics. And he’s the author of the book, Class, Race and Gender: Challenging the Injuries and Divisions of Capitalism. Michael, as you said, Democratic Socialists of America whose candidates won a slew of important elections in primary season this year, they are not revolutionaries as they’re portrayed by the Republicans, but they certainly have a platform that’s controversial in some ways, abolishing the Senate because of the Senate’s unrepresentative makeup and structure. There’s things in their platform about open borders. But at its heart, DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America really, I think squarely address rising inequality in the country, the problems we’re having with unaffordable healthcare, housing and declining wages as well as declining working power, workers’ power in the workplace.
So I think that’s the real core of what voters are attracted to with the DSA, apart from the particulars and the details that might be in their written platform.
MICHAEL ZWEIG: Well, I think that’s right. And what you’re describing in the issues of healthcare and housing and the rest of the platform, the policy platform of DSA and of these candidates who are running, and not all these sort of left candidates that are winning are DSA people. They’re in that general broad orbit, Abdul el-Sayed out in Michigan, he’s not a member of DSA. He doesn’t claim to be, and they don’t claim that he is, but he’s just sort of in that general orbit because he believes in expanding working class power and the life and authority and culture of working people. So that is the core of what is in that sort of democratic socialist platform. Now, if you read the platform of DSA, they do say abolish the Senate, but they say that in the context of a broader challenge to the very political structure of the United States.
And what they really are saying and literally are saying is that we should go to a parliamentary democracy, that the United States political structure as it was set up in the Constitution with a president that’s elected through a Electoral College where each state is represented just by virtual being a state independent of the number of people that are in it. Those kinds of things they say are archaic and thwart democracy. And so what they’re talking about there is going to a parliamentary system where parties are elected and where coalitions get formed. And in this country, in the United States, third-party politics are basically impossible. It’s almost never any kind of long-term solution. There may be some upsurge for one election cycle like Ross Perot, but that’s not really a viable strategy for long-term political participation by groups of people who really do challenge capital.
So what this DSA program is trying to say is, if we’re going to have a more democratically representative Congress and a more representative political process, it should not be what we have. It should be a kind of parliamentary system like they have in England or in France or in all kinds of other countries around the world, Canada and so on and so forth. So that, I think, in my own opinion, doesn’t really belong in a party platform, an electoral platform, because that project is so distant. So I don’t know why they put it in there, but the rest of the program, universal healthcare, Medicare for All, housing, build hundreds of thousands of housing units around the country, really take care of people’s lives in measurable ways. I think that that is an agenda which actually attracts people. And I’ll just tell you one quick story.
I was doing community organizing and tenant organizing in Newark, New Jersey in 1964. And we were trying to organize rent strikes and tenant councils and all that. And this was SDS people from Students for a Democratic Society, the Economic Research and Action Project, if people want to go look that up. But what we had was all these tenant groups in buildings all over the South Ward in Newark. And the people, one of the women who we were working most closely with and who was representing this whole movement got a phone call from the city council and the city councilman said, “Well, you’re dealing with communists. You should cut that out.” And what she told us, she said to him was, “Well, if those are communists, I think I better check that out.” So people are getting an idea that if these people who are talking directly to, for, and on our behalf are democratic socialists, well, what’s the matter with that?
Especially younger people who are not so infused with the history of the Cold War and all the anti-communism that came with the Cold War and the attack on the labor movement, the attack on the civil rights movement, the attack on the women’s movement, all of that came in the Cold War by asserting that those movements were communist or socialist or anti-capitalist or anarchist or they painted in all different kinds of ways, but it was all negative. And I think the younger people who are coming up now don’t have that experience. What they have is an experience of deprivation. What they have is an experience of a culture of fear that they don’t like, they don’t want. Who wants that? But when they see that, they want to resist it. And who’s coming along and talking about that openly, explicitly and with political apparatus? Well, that’s these democratic socialists and Bernie Sanders was the first of them really in the modern and immediate era.
But what Mamdani did in New York City was exactly that program and he won.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, Michael, we only have a minute or so left and I just want to close with this, get your quick take on this.
MICHAEL ZWEIG: Yeah, sure.
SCOTT HARRIS: It’s really quite clear from the cyclical nature of American politics that voters want change. I think it’s probably accurate that many people voted for Trump the first time to be a disruptor to a system that many feel no longer worked for them, where attaining the American dream seems like a distant out of reach mirage. And I think there’s a lot of people in the country, even Trump voters of course, who think for too long both parties have pursued policies that by and large benefit corporate profits and priorities at the expense of working families. And I think FDR’s New Deal is maybe an example of the kind of politics that would unify a lot of people across the country, the New Deal policies that addressed the economic inequality and deprivation that followed the Great Depression.
MICHAEL ZWEIG: Well, it would have to be a new New Deal because the old New Deal was so infused with racism and racial oppression and the authority of the Dixiecrats, so-called in the South, Southern Democrats, to make sure that black people in the South, but anywhere else didn’t get those benefits that Caucasian workers did get. I think that we can go back and talk about how wonderful Roosevelt was in the New Deal, but it was really so profoundly racially-oriented against black people and on behalf of white people that I’d be reluctant to want to hold it up as a great prize. I’ll say one other thing quickly because I know we have to go here, but I think there’s a danger here that people are thinking, okay, we’re going to elect all these Democrats and these democratic socialists and they’re going to make it happen. Trump is going to be president for the next two years and there’s nothing that is going to happen out of a Democratic Congress or a democratic socialist Congress that could stick as long as Trump is up there.
And we can leave the question of the Supreme Court, that’s a whole other issue. But I do think that people need, it’ll be wonderful to throw these Republicans out of the House and the Senate if that can be done. But the idea that that is going to be the transformational moment, I think is a mistake. And we need to understand that this process of drawing out a democratic socialist program is a process of a number of election cycles. It’s not even going to be solved in the presidential race in 2028 if some democratic socialist gets elected. It’s a much longer and more complicated process that we have to be prepared to pursue over long periods of time, 10, 15 years as an electoral project. And that I’m kind of worried that young people and other people are going to be voting for democratic socialist. They vote for Mamdani, but then can they really deliver?
And probably they cannot deliver, certainly as long as Donald Trump as president would veto any law and would come up with all kinds of other executive orders and who knows what kind of machinations to interfere with the elections themselves.
SCOTT HARRIS: All right, Michael, we’re going to have to leave it there, but thank you so much for joining us tonight and people can tune in to hear you and Richard Hill on the Monthly Labor Report. Which date is that? They can mark it on their calendar.
MICHAEL ZWEIG: That is the fourth Monday of every month.
SCOTT HARRIS: Right after this show. Right after this show.
MICHAEL ZWEIG: That’s right. The fourth Monday, I think it’s at 9:30.
SCOTT HARRIS: 9:30.
MICHAEL ZWEIG: All right. And the one coming up this month, we have the president of the American Federation of Teachers for the state of Massachusetts, Jessica Tang, who has been very much involved in Mayday Strong and bringing the labor movement into the fight against fascism in this country. So that is going to be a really interesting conversation for half an hour.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thanks so much, Michael. We’ll be in touch soon. Take care.
MICHAEL ZWEIG: Okay. Carry on. Thanks a lot.
SCOTT HARRIS: That’s Michael Zweig, emeritus, professor of economics, founding director of the Center for the Study of Working Class Life at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. This is Counterpoint. Do stay tuned.
