Recently Mike Miller, a frequent contributor to the Stansbury Forum, and other outlets posed the following:

Question to socialists regarding the 2026 and 2028 elections:
Is your priority to defeat the right or to elect socialists? (Of course this assumes a tension between the two, which I assume.)

Here is Fred Kotler’s response

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To answer your question, without question, the priority is to defeat MAGA and demand accountability for the nearly countless crimes of this regime. The stakes are too high to do anything else.  It’s no time for a purity of politics or self-deception. Despite some recent victories in NYC and other solidly blue locales, there’s no emerging groundswell of support for what’s labeled “socialist” politics.  So let’s not get carried away, folks.  

One must think situationally. The United States today is not the Germany of the 1930s. There is barely the living memory of a popular mass based communist, socialist – or even social democratic – driven movement in the US. What McCarthyism didn’t accomplish, historical illiteracy did. Red baiting may be less potent as a strategy but it still has some cache. America’s working class is divided with significant support for Trump among white, especially male, blue collar workers.  An estimated 40+% of union households voted for Trump in 2024. 

That’s Trump Round 3… after the attempted coup and all the damage wrought to union and worker and civil rights. So comparing the working classes of 1930s Germany with 2020s America just doesn’t make sense – culturally, organizationally, demographically, and politically. Do you put your faith in the DSA? The DSA membership is not based in the working classes and I doubt it ever will be. Not those guys.  (See Thomas Edsall, “A Working Class Party Without Many Workers“, 6/30/26 The New York Times. 

Americans in large enough numbers aren’t ready to embrace a particular “ism.”  Particular issues with well-articulated social democratic solutions, around health care, housing, taxation and America’s grotesque inequality, when well-presented by competent people, potentially yes. It would be well for Democrats to revisit Roosevelt’s 1944 Second Bill of Rights address. That’s the vision of social democratic America.  

MAGA must be soundly and overwhelmingly defeated. The grand issue is the survival of constitutional government. Without it, nothing moves forward. There is, fortunately, a deeply rooted, if flawed, political culture based on the rule of law in the United States. There wasn’t a corresponding, established tradition or a similar context or history in Weimar Germany.

Defeating MAGA means building a powerful consensus across a broad political spectrum – a majoritarian movement – against the crimes, the corruption, the treason, and the utter incompetence of the Republicans.

There is an encouraging shift underway. Trump is discredited. His power and health are on the wane.  And he is down to the hard core true believers. Be realistic and clear headed about where we are and what’s possible. Act accordingly.

Look at the electorate as it is and not as we perhaps want it to be.  And, on that basis, end this damned nightmare.

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