How a 1906 Book Predicted the DSA

How a 1906 Book Predicted the DSA

Socialism was never popular in the U.S. Now it is.

Charles Lane

Oct 30, 2026

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Werner Sombart in 1923. (Photo by ullstein bild.)

With the partial exception of the presidential campaigns that Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas waged in the early 20th century, socialism has been a marginal force in American politics. By the turn of the 21st century, the ideology seemed definitively dead, discredited by the failures of its totalitarian variant in the Soviet Union and its democratic one in postwar Britain.

Yet, now, socialism is resurgent. Last month, a Gallup poll

showed

that 43 percent of American voters see socialism favorably—an all-time high. Among 18–34-year-olds, the figure is 57 percent. Seven candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)

won

congressional primaries and are highly likely to win election as Democrats on November 3. Two others finished in the top two spots under California’s nonpartisan primary system and

face

moderate Democratic incumbents in the general election. Zohran Mamdani, of course, was elected mayor of New York last year, and could be joined by Janeese Lewis George in Washington, D.C. and Nithya Raman in Los Angeles.

Why is socialism having a moment in the United States? And why now?

Some answers can be found—paradoxically enough—in a book titled

Why is There No Socialism In the United States?

, first published in Germany in 1906. The author, German political economist Werner Sombart, gave a nuanced account of why America’s version of democratic capitalism enjoyed far more public support than socialism. And a Sombart-style analysis, applied to today’s situation, can also help explain why socialism is starting to turn the tables.

Sombart was not trying to understand why there was no socialist

system

in the United States; that would have been absurd since in his era no country yet claimed to be socialist. Rather, the issue for him was the United States’ lack of a substantial socialist

party

like Germany’s Social Democrats and the other European members of the Second International.

Strongly influenced by Marxism, Sombart found this anomalous. According to Marx, class conflict should intensify as capitalism advanced, producing a proletarian socialist movement. But this hadn’t happened in the United States, even though “nowhere on earth have the economic system and the essence of capitalism reached as full a development as in the United States.” Ergo, he acknowledged, “The doctrine of the inevitable socialist future is refuted by the facts.”

Sombart’s search for the truth led him to study American political culture and social mores, somewhat in the manner of Alexis de Tocqueville. Sombart was also a colleague of Max Weber, whose work on the Protestant “spirit of capitalism” he contested but admired. The two professors made extensive tours of the United States in 1904. Sombart conducted a sophisticated examination of the U.S. political system and an exhaustive comparative analysis of working-class living standards in the United States and Germany.

What struck him first and foremost was American workers’ generally favorable attitude toward markets and money-making, based on their origins as self-selected, fortune-seeking immigrants. They were indeed infused with a capitalist spirit. And, to a degree that truly impressed Sombart, this attitude had a basis in reality. With statistical data that covered page after page of his book, he showed that the American proletariat was better fed, housed, and clothed than the German one. “All socialist utopias come to nothing on roast beef and apple pie,” he observed.

Like Tocqueville, Sombart took note of the relative social equality among the classes in America. Despite income inequality, he wrote, the worker “carries his head high.” Social mobility was also much greater than in Europe, enhanced by the option of seeking a better life in a new town or in the still thinly-populated West.

Perhaps most important of all, workers had had the franchise (for white men) since the Jacksonian era. Elections for a myriad of local, state, and federal offices occupied their time and attention, with political participation channeled through the two parties, each of which operated as a “machine” for choosing candidates, gathering votes, and distributing patronage. A two-party system created disincentives for workers to start or join a new socialist party—especially since, as Sombart put it, both Democrats and Republicans “have a strongly populist streak in their characters.”

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The upshot was that American workers felt no class consciousness as Marx had predicted, but rather a sense of inclusion and, indeed, patriotism. In their eyes, the political and economic system seemed legitimate. And while a legitimate system can always be reformed, it does not call for a radical overhaul such as the one socialists propose. “Among American workers one finds none of the opposition to the state that is to be found in continental European socialism,” Sombart wrote.

Sombart’s analysis has its problems. His generalizations about working-class life in the United States were sweeping and idealized. He underestimated such episodes of intense class conflict as the Pullman Strike of 1894. Jim Crow and white supremacy created obvious obstacles to working-class solidarity in America, but Sombart paid little attention to them. At a time when mostly black sharecroppers toiled across the rural South, he wrote that “there is no half or wholly feudal peasantry.” Indeed, his only mention of race was to rebut the argument that America had no socialism because “the so-called Anglo-Saxon race” was “by nature” resistant to it.

Nevertheless, Sombart deserves credit for rejecting economic determinism in light of contrary evidence. His broad argument—that radical ideologies cannot flourish in a society whose political and economic institutions enjoy wide public acceptance—seems both true and applicable to our time.

The America Sombart

visited was still a new nation, upbeat and unburdened by the history that weighed upon Europe and bred dissatisfaction with its venerable monarchies and parliaments. Today, however, the U.S. political-economic model is 120 years older and showing its age. Buffeted by a series of crises and shocks—the Iraq War, the 2008-2009 Great Recession, the pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests, inflation, a border crisis—Americans are losing faith in established political and economic institutions, and entertaining formerly taboo ideas of all stripes.

The percentage of Americans who trust the federal government to do what is right all or most of the time has

fallen

from 77 percent in 1964 to 17 percent in 2025. The figure has not exceeded 30 percent in two decades. Meanwhile,

70 percent

of those who responded to a YouGov poll on the “American Dream” earlier this year said that it’s harder to achieve today than it was for their parents.

What about the patriotism that so impressed Sombart? An NBC

poll

recently found that 33 percent of Americans feel “extremely proud,” down from

55 percent

a quarter century ago—and a record low.

Against this backdrop, socialism’s rise on the left is of a piece with the rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement on the right. Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party showed that the two parties no longer perform the gatekeeping function over ideas and candidates that Sombart had identified as a key source of America’s political stability. The GOP and the Democrats are anything but the tightly-controlled “machines” Sombart observed. It’s still true that third parties are unlikely to prosper—but like MAGA before it, the DSA is attempting to capture the Democrats from within by winning primary elections, an alternative route to establishing a socialist party that Sombart did not envision.

Notably, the ideologues, candidates, and voters executing this maneuver are generally not from the working class. Rather, they tend to be recent college graduates, journalists, professionals, artists, or teachers. Los Angeles mayoral candidate Nithya Raman has degrees from Harvard and MIT and worked for social justice-oriented nonprofits before winning a seat on the city council. Melat Kiros, the Democratic nominee for the House in Colorado’s 1

st

congressional district, is 29 years old and has spent most of her adulthood pursuing a law degree and a doctorate in public affairs.

Indeed, Sombart’s greatest error might have been to assume that a socialist party would emerge from proletarian ranks at all. He should have known better, since some founders of Germany’s Social Democratic Party came from the middle class and intelligentsia. If anything, the working class in the United States favors Trump’s brand of right-wing populism.

After the publication

of

Why is There No Socialism In the United States?

Sombart became increasingly disenchanted with Marxist theory, lost his belief in the proletariat’s revolutionary potential and—unfortunately—moved steadily toward the nationalist and anti-Semitic right. Though he never joined the Nazi Party, Sombart sympathized with the Hitler regime and cooperated with it until his death in 1941. This may explain why his books are no longer widely read.

Nevertheless, Sombart’s book bears revisiting in our current moment. In a cryptic passage on its last page, Sombart predicted that the conditions that had inhibited socialism in the United States were “about to disappear or to be converted into their opposite.” This, he said, would trigger socialism’s “greatest possible expansion” in the next generation. He promised to explain why in a forthcoming “thorough analysis of the whole state of American political and social life.”

Sombart never actually produced such a book, leaving us with the task of understanding why his prophecy might be coming true, albeit somewhat later than he expected.

Charles Lane, a contributing writer at

Persuasion

, is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

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A guest post by

Charles Lane

Nonresident senior fellow, American Enterprise Institute. Former deputy opinion editor, Washington Post. Author, "The Day Freedom Died." Adult Lego builder. Ask me about the S2K.

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