Beyond Obama: Could a True Socialist Actually Gain Power in America? How One Almost Did

http://www.thenation.com/blog/165355/beyond-obama-could-true-socialist-actually-gain-power-america-how-one-almost-did



As we all know, President Barack Obama hardly deserves the epithet “socialist” tossed at him by right-wing commentators and candidates. There is one prominent Socialist in Washington, DC, but Senator Bernie Sanders comes from a very small state and acts as a true voice in the wilderness. Looking abroad, French voters this year elected a Socialist, François Hollande, to head their government, the first time that has happened in two decades. Could this happen some time soon in America, or ever?

Progressives, with our without the capital P, have occasionally taken the reins in a major city or small state. But for perhaps the leading example of a near-takeover in a giant state one has to go back nearly eighty years.

Of all the left-wing mass movements that arose in the early years of the Great Depression, Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California (EPIC) crusade proved most influential, and not just in helping to push the New Deal to the left. The Sinclair threat—after he easily won the Democratic gubernatorial primary—so profoundly alarmed conservatives that, seventy-eight years ago this month, it sparked the creation of the modern political campaign, with its reliance on hired guns, advertising and media tricks, national fundraising, attack ads on the screen and more.

Profiling two of the creators of the anti-Sinclair campaign, Carey McWilliams would call this (in The Nation) “a new era in American politics—government by public relations.” It also provoked Hollywood’s first all-out plunge into politics, which, in turn, inspired the leftward tilt in the movie colony that endures to this day.