In recent years, American socialism has experienced a rapid return to relevance, with politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez now commanding significant influence over national politics and organisations like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) as large as any socialist organisation since the early Twentieth-Century. Yet the origins of their ideas go far before the recent upsurge in socialist activity in the U.S. 

My research seeks to trace these origins by focusing on a key moment in the development of the contemporary American left- the 1970s and 1980s. By using three case studies, the Democratic Socialist Organising Committee (DSOC, DSA’s forerunner), the Harold Washington mayorlty in Chicago, and the Jesse Jackson presidential campaigns, it will seek to show the contribution of local, national, and Democratic Party politics to the development of the intellectual and organisational beliefs of the American left. 

To do so, it follows the intellectual development of these case studies, showing how they offered challenges to developments in national politics throughout the period, especially the austerity policies of the Carter and Reagan administrations. But it will also reveal the ways in which they formed part of political consensuses in the period, especially in the anti-bureaucratic nature of their politics and their emphasis upon bottom-up political strategies. 

This also sheds light on their organisational strategies, showing their development from conceptions that treated trade unions as the centre of political coalitions to a perspective that incorporated the new social movements that had developed since the 1960s. In doing so, it will highlight the successes of these strategies in terms of electoral politics and organisation at conventions, but also the continued contradictions and conflicts within these coalitions. 

Through this analysis, the project looks to provide a different perspective on America in the late Twentieth-Century. Rather than the only story being the rise of conservatism and the Republican Party under Ronald Reagan, this research hopes to convey a more complex picture, with the American left still able to show intellectual and organisational creativity, and change taking place along the lines of top-down to bottom up and bureaucratic to democratic, instead of solely from left to right.