The Republican National Committee called it the Democratic Party’s “Summer of Socialism.” The legacy media adopted a similar framing, producing headlines about “the D.S.A.’s Audacious Quest for Power” or huffing and puffing about a socialist “hostile takeover” of the Democratic Party.

What do we actually have here?

Given Scene on Radio’s past explorations of capitalism, democracy in the U.S., and, for that matter, our recent season on the news media, I have thoughts on the ruckus about an insurgent left here in 2026.

To start, let’s not get carried away with what we’re witnessing. The right has a clear interest in claiming that socialists now represent the Democratic party as a whole – which, at this point, is very far from the case. Some establishment Democrats also seem eager to sound the alarm, either because they sincerely believe that their centrist, pro-corporate politics are the only path to victory and therefore the party must firmly distance themselves from the progressive left, or because they loathe the prospect of an actual leftward turn in America just as much as Republicans do. Or both.

But let’s put the recent successes of progressive-left candidates in perspective. The candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America (D.S.A.) who won a Democratic Party nomination represented less than 1% of all Dem candidates, according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution, and most of those were running for local and state legislative offices. Of the D.S.A. candidates running for statewide or Congressional seats, fewer than half won.

Looking at a somewhat broader swath of progressive-left candidates – those endorsed by the Justice Democrats as well as the DSA – CBS found that two-thirds won their primaries this year. But even after the ballyhooed “Summer of Socialism,” the number of new progressive-left members in the House of Representatives next year will probably land somewhere between 7 and 9. With the Democrats projected to capture 220-to-230 House seats, we’re still talking about a small faction.

If your aunt Martha is a sincere centrist who opposes “extremism” of any stripe, she should be far more worried about the other end of the spectrum. The far-right, MAGA-aligned Freedom Caucus started the last Congress with 32 Republican House members. And never forget that 147 GOP members – a solid majority of the caucus – voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election. That crowd of antidemocratic extremists is infinitely more dangerous than the handful of democratic socialist-leaning members likely to serve in the House in 2027. There’s zero evidence that the progressive left wants to strip Americans, or others in the country, of their rights and freedoms; meanwhile the Trump Administration spends each day doing just that.

And yet, major media outlets have decided that the rise of the left is the political story of the year. “The tug of war between Democratic moderates and increasingly left-wing progressives has defined this year’s midterm primary elections across the country,” New York Times reporter Patricia Mazzei declared in a recent article. That struggle is clearly a story, but it often seems to be the only one the news is interested in.

Having won the Democratic primary in Wisconsin, David Crowley is now running to become that state’s first Black governor. But that historic possibility barely gets a mention. What the media finds far more interesting is that Crowley, deemed a moderate and endorsed by the party establishment in his state, won a narrow primary victory over the democratic socialist Francesca Hong. A Times headline called Hong’s loss to Crowley “stunning,” but it was only remotely surprising because late polls had shown Hong well ahead. If you’d predicted in 2024 that Hong, an openly democratic socialist candidate — and one who, journalists pointed out repeatedly, had once called for the cancellation of Thanksgiving — would come within a point of claiming the nomination for governor in a purple, Midwestern state, everyone would have called that stunning.

In The News we made a case that the legacy media, which the president of the United States likes to call the “far left” media, is anything but. And, we pointed out, its suspicious-to-hostile treatment of New York City’s democratic socialist mayor is further proof. The corporate media’s coverage of this year’s modest wave of electoral success among the progressive left should put the “left-wing bias in the media” tale to rest for good.

Opponents of the progressive left, including those in the news media, routinely otherize the new socialists and overstate their radicalism. No doubt, some individual democratic socialist candidates, and the national D.S.A. platform, offer proposals that sit outside the mainstream of U.S. public opinion — abolishing prisons and the Senate, for example — especially when those policies are rattled off with no context. It’s hard to miss, though, that democratic socialist-adjacent candidates are routinely called on to distance themselves from the positions of their colleagues in a way that major party candidates are not.

In an interview with C-Span, Karishma Manzur, a D.S.A. Senate candidate in New Hampshire, called out the double standard. Asked by the C-Span interviewer if she agreed the Senate should be abolished, she waved the question away. “I cannot answer for other people,” she said. “I’m also a Democrat. Chris Pappas [her primary opponent] is a Democrat. Chuck Schumer is a Democrat. They are basically enabling genocide. Does that mean I have to answer to what their votes are? No.”

Sometimes, in their eagerness to highlight the exoticism of the progressive wing, journalists just get stuff wrong — then double down anyway.

In Florida last week, Angie Nixon, a veteran community organizer, won a stunning upset in the Democratic Senate primary, defeating the much-better-funded establishment candidate, Alex Vindman. Nixon joined the D.S.A. in June, though the party had not endorsed her, and Nixon has described herself as “not a socialist” but a “capitalist who believes we need some strong regulations.”

The day after Nixon’s primary win, on CBS Mornings, co-host Gayle King, interviewing Nixon, asserted that Nixon had campaigned with Rashida Tlaib (the progressive Michigan House member) and “Mr. Piker” – meaning, of course, the left-wing Twitch streamer, Hasan Piker. King then asked Nixon if those two figures would be joining her on the general election campaign trail. Hmm. Out of all the questions King could have asked, she chose to probe Angie Nixon’s alleged ties to two left-leaning Muslims.

Nixon corrected King, saying she had not campaigned with Piker. Nonetheless, CBS showed multiple images of Piker onscreen as Nixon spoke. King apologized for getting her facts wrong on Piker, but then asked, “Would you want him to campaign with you?” (Excuse me, what?) When Nixon replied that she’d heard of Piker but didn’t “really know who [he] is,” King ostentatiously cocked her head in disbelief.

Here’s a novel idea for journalists: Instead of relentlessly pigeonholing candidates as “socialist,” “progressive,” “moderate,” etc. and then banging on about the inter-party “wars” and horse races, what if you reported calmly on the candidates’ proposed policies and what they might mean in the lives of actual people? Angie Nixon, in fending off Gayle King’s questions about Hasan Piker, tried to steer things in that direction. “I’m focused on Florida,” she said, “and making sure that I’m talking with voters here to uplift their needs and their concerns.”

Imagine that — uplifting the needs and concerns of regular people. Most of the progressive-left candidates who’ve won nominations for national office are more FDR social democrat than full-on socialist, and not a one, as far as I can tell, is any sort of communist. These candidates want Medicare for All and measures to get money out of politics. They want higher taxes on wealthy people and corporations. They want free childcare and college tuition. They want life to be more affordable for people. They want to stop funding Israel given its brutal crimes against humanity in Gaza and its long-standing occupation and oppression of Palestinians. Some would abolish ICE – which, let’s remember, didn’t exist before 2003. Some want to reform the Supreme Court and end the Electoral College. They want real change that, they argue, would make life better for people and make the country more democratic – that is, more responsive to the wants and needs of the working-class majority.

The Republican leadership can talk about a “Bolshevik takeover,” but if these democratic socialists were to get their way, the U.S. would look more like Germany or Denmark – not Russia, China, or Cuba. Those nominally communist countries are not democratic, of course, and China is not particularly socialist, either. In fact, let’s be real. Which American politicians are trying to turn the U.S. into an authoritarian, crony-capitalist oligarchy along the lines of Russia? Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. (Those shouting “communist” about the progressive left don’t seem to mind the Trump Administration’s seizure of the means of production, by taking government ownership shares in some 30 large corporations.)

There’s no point in hoping Republicans will calm down with the new red scare, but it does seem reasonable to ask establishment Democrats — and the mainstream media — to take a breath for the sake of reason and accuracy.

All this said, there is something happening here. The stirring of a progressive-left movement is a thing. A growing number of people, especially younger people, have had enough of a Democratic Party that’s only marginally more helpful to the working class than the hard-right GOP. A Dem party that gobbles up corporate money and serves corporate interests. One that seems far too content with an extreme concentration of wealth among the 0.1% while the majority of regular Americans struggle to pay rent and feed themselves. A party that joins with the Republicans in handing billions of dollars to Israel year after year, no questions asked. A party that lectures its voters to choose the lesser of two evils because, you know, “electability,” and loses elections anyway.

When offered candidates who promise to work for something different – including, yes, candidates comfortable with the S word – people are not just voting for those candidates, they’re volunteering in droves to knock doors for them.

In a poll released this summer, the Wall Street Journal found that just 48% of Americans believe capitalism is functioning “very well” or “somewhat well” — down from 60% a decade ago. Strikingly, the same survey found that Americans have even less faith in our democracy as currently constructed. Just 12% believe it’s working well, compared to 56% who say it’s not.

No wonder, then. This new crop of progressive candidates — some calling themselves democratic socialists, some not — are offering a tangibly different vision. They’re promising a world where government does more to put a solid floor under people — as in dozens of other rich countries. And they’re pledging to go after the rampant corruption in our politics and make democracy real.

No wonder folks are sitting up and taking notice.

*

There’s still time to send in a question in response to our Season 8 series, The News. My co-host Chenjerai Kumanyika and I want to hear from you, for a bonus q&a episode that we’ll put out in a few weeks.

What would you like us to clarify or elaborate on? What did we not cover, or not discuss thoroughly enough, that you’d like us to say more about? Any thoughts on solutions and responses to the media crises beyond what we discussed in Episode 8?

We plan to record our answers to your questions quite soon, so please get those questions in by August 30.

You may write your question as a comment here. Or send an email to [email protected]. Even better, if you like, record a voice memo and send that as an attachment to the same email address. We’ll choose a selection of the questions and record our answers to them — look for that episode in September.

Like this? Forward Keeping ScOR to a friend.

If you missed past posts, find the archive here.