A new form of socialism has escaped from the lab of “Woke 1.0,” and it seems intent on taking over the Left. The strain of socialism driving movements like the Democratic Socialists of America goes far beyond the traditional definition of government ownership of the means of production—it marries economic socialism to identity politics.
This isn’t your grandfather’s socialism, featuring factory workers waving red flags and professors droning on about dialectical materialism. The new socialists are young, college-educated, and racially diverse. They talk about intersectionality, pronouns, and microaggressions.
They may not think the USSR was on the right side of history, but they’re sure America’s on the wrong side of it. When socialism surpassed 40% favorability in the latest Gallup poll last month, it wasn’t because young Americans are overwhelmingly burying their heads in the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
Instead, they’re breathing a noxious cocktail of envy, social alienation, distrust of institutions, and an ideological framework teaching them to interpret inequality as evidence of oppression. Socialism is still fundamentally about government control over the means of producing wealth, but Marx’s class struggle has expanded into the social realm.
The Frankfurt School applied critical theory to culture, while later scholars developed theories centered on race, sex, and sexuality.