Socialist in Seattle.

• Author: Nichols, John
• Position: Kshama Sawant of Seattle, Washington

The headline on the front page of The New York Times announced the election of a socialist in an American city. "Socialism has been given a chance to show its merit," declared a municipal militant, who announced: "We shall make the corporations pay their share of the taxes and shall improve the condition of the laboring men and women of the city" A key supporter of the newly elected radical said, "This is not a victory for the [local] socialists. It is a victory for international socialism."

That was the message from the Milwaukee socialists of 1910. But it could easily have been the message from Kshama Sawant and the Seattle socialists of today.

America has a rich history of socialist politics and policymaking, more often than not at the municipal level, but frequently with a reach that has influenced state and national affairs. It has not been a steady history, however. It has come in fits and starts. Socialists were running cities, sitting in Congress, and forming state legislative caucuses nationwide in the 1910s. They ran up substantial vote totals and influenced the direction of the New Deal in the 1930s and 1940s. As late as 1960, Milwaukee still had a Socialist Party mayor, Frank Zeidler. Two decades after Zeidler finished his last term, in the first year of Ronald Reagan's Presidency, an independent socialist named Bernie Sanders beat the Democrats and Republicans to become the mayor of Burlington, Vermont.

So the history is there.

Unfortunately, America suffers from frequent bouts of amnesia when it comes to socialist and social democratic politics.

As a result, it came as a shock to the punditocracy when Sawant, a community-college professor and Occupy activist, was elected to the Seattle City Council as an open socialist last November.

But it did not surprise Kshama Sawant. "Every time people ask me 'Do you think this country is ready for socialism?' my response is, 'I think it is.' Look at the polls: People are more and more realizing the dysfunction of capitalism and want alternatives," says Sawant, who grabbed headlines in Seattle, across the nation, and around the world when she upset a veteran local Democrat.

Sawant's reference to the polls is instructive. Even as conservative firebrands have imagined that condemning Barack Obama as a foreign-born socialist--against all evidence to the contrary--would turn voters against the President, Americans have been showing more and more interest in socialist and social-democratic...