In the hurly-burly of the mid-term elections, few people noticed an Election Day (November 3) notification issued by the White House. Through a proclamation, US President Donald Trump declared the week between November 1 and 7 as Anti-Communism Week, whose purpose, among other things, was to “honour the victims of socialism and communism.” It was an unusual intervention on a day when Americans were voting, but it was also a revealing one.The proclamation deliberately, conflating socialism with communism, was clearly aimed at countering the growing electoral appeal of politicians advocating socialism or socialistic ideas in the United States. Many, though not all, belong to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), whose most prominent members include New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib. The organisation has been expanding its electoral footprint, particularly among younger voters and in urban constituencies.The DSA said that around 200 candidates and ballot measures supported by its national and local chapters were on the November 3 ballot. Its ambitions extended across federal, state and municipal politics. The results included victories for Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez in New York, Melat Kiros in Colorado, Donavan McKinney in Michigan and Chris Rabb in Pennsylvania. These victories will considerably expand the DSA’s presence in Congress. Its existing congressional members include Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib, and the new contingent will give the organisation a more substantial platform within the Democratic Party. Note that the DSA is not a political party, but a membership organisation that endorses candidates, most of whom contest elections on the Democratic Party ticket.Abdul El-Sayed greets a supporter at the base of the Spirit of Detroit monument in Detroit on August 19, 2026. Photo: AP /Paul Sancya.There are also prominent politicians who describe themselves as democratic socialists but are not members of the DSA. The best-known is Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and the newly elected Senator Abdul El-Sayed from Michigan. Another is Congresswoman Pramila Jaypal. Their appeal rests on the argument that the American economy has generated enormous wealth but distributed its benefits very unequally.What makes Trump’s proclamation interesting is that it treats this resurgence as though it were an alien ideology threatening to take over the American Republic. In fact, socialism in the United States is almost as old as the Republic itself. Its history is much more complicated than the familiar Cold War narrative of an ideological contest between American capitalism and Soviet communism.Given its vast territories and relatively sparse population in the early nineteenth century, America became an attractive destination for experiments in alternative forms of social organisation. Socialist ideas arrived through European thinkers and reformers, among them Robert Owen, Charles Fourier and various religious communities. Owen established the New Harmony settlement in Indiana in 1825, seeking to create a cooperative society in which education, productive work and shared responsibilities would replace competition and individual acquisitiveness. The Shakers, too, developed communities based on collective property, common labour and religious principles.Owen was a respected public figure and addressed joint sessions of Congress on two occasions. He argued for a society based on “strict justice and impartial kindness” and was deeply critical of what he called the existing trading system, which he regarded as selfish and inhumane. He believed that a new social order would emerge in which union and cooperation would supersede individual interest. His experiments ultimately failed to establish a lasting alternative, but his ideas helped introduce the vocabulary and practice of socialism into American public debate.Also read: Why US Midterm Poll Outcome is a Victory of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Which Trump Wanted to ReverseOne of the more radical American economic thinkers of the nineteenth century was Thomas Skidmore. His 1829 work, The Rights of Man to Property!, used the democratic language of the American Revolution to mount a blistering attack on economic inequality. His central argument was that political democracy was a sham without economic democracy. He proposed that a constitutional convention abolish existing property titles and redistribute land and productive assets equally among adult citizens. Property would revert to the community upon the owner’s death rather than being passed down through inheritance.Skidmore’s proposals were remarkable for their time. He explicitly included women in his redistribution scheme, arguing that married and unmarried women should enjoy independent property rights rather than having their economic position determined by men. He also called for the abolition of slavery and insisted that Black Americans and Native Americans receive equal shares of property. His programme was radical even by the standards of contemporary reform movements, but it reflected a recurring American concern: that the promise of equality in the Declaration of Independence was being undermined by the concentration of economic power.Skidmore was not alone. Langdon Byllesby argued that the emerging industrial system deprived workers of the fruits of their labour. William Heighton, a Philadelphia shoemaker, helped establish the Working Men’s Party and urged workers to organise against exploitation. Cornelius Blatchly, a physician and communitarian writer, challenged private property on grounds of natural law and Christian morality. Frances Wright, a lecturer, abolitionist and feminist, established the Nashoba commune in Tennessee, an experiment intended to demonstrate how enslaved people could be emancipated through education and economic cooperation. She also became an important voice in the radical reform movements of the period.These early experiments were not necessarily part of a unified socialist movement. They ranged from religious communitarianism to radical proposals for the redistribution of property. But they demonstrated that the American political tradition had always contained a critique of concentrated wealth and unrestrained private ownership.In the late 19th century organisations like Terence Powderly’s Knights of Labour created the first major labour movement. Thinkers Henry George’s Progress and Poverty (1879) fed into the socialist movement. Then there was Edward Bellamy whose Looking Backward (1888) was a best seller and is arguably the most influential American socialist text.Victor Berger of Milwaukee was the first socialist elected to Congress in 1910. Socialism’s most significant electoral moment came in the early twentieth century. In the 1912 presidential election, Eugene V. Debs, a former railway union leader, contested the presidency on the Socialist Party ticket. He received 901,551 votes, approximately 6% of the popular vote. The winner, Woodrow Wilson, secured just over six million. Debs ran for president five times, but the 1912 result represented his high-water mark. The Socialist Party also enjoyed considerable support in parts of the Midwest and Oklahoma. At its peak, it elected six members to the Oklahoma legislature.Socialist and radical ideas also attracted a remarkable range of American intellectuals, writers and artists. These included Walter Lippmann, John Dewey, Charles and Mary Beard, Jack London, W.E.B. Du Bois, Helen Keller, John Reed, Reinhold Niebuhr, Upton Sinclair, Eugene O’Neill, Thorstein Veblen, Clarence Darrow, Norman Thomas and Woody Guthrie. Their work reflected a wider intellectual engagement with inequality, industrial capitalism, workers’ rights and the limitations of American democracy.The First World War and the Russian Revolution changed the character of the debate. Socialism increasingly became associated with the Bolshevik Revolution and the establishment of a communist state in Russia. The distinction between democratic socialism and revolutionary communism became blurred in the public imagination. The Red Scare of 1919-20 brought arrests, deportations and repression of radical organisations. The Socialist Party split, while the Communist Party emerged as a separate force. Thereafter, American socialism found itself burdened by an association with a foreign revolutionary movement. But that did not stop labour leaders like A. Philip Randolph from bringing the gospel of socialism to black Americans.Yet its ideas continued to influence American politics. The Great Depression brought capitalism itself into question. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was not socialist, but it incorporated many of the demands that progressive and socialist reformers had advocated for decades: social security, stronger regulation of business, public works, protection of organised labour and greater responsibility on the part of government for the welfare of its citizens. The state was no longer expected merely to protect property and maintain order; it was increasingly expected to address economic insecurity.The Cold War, however, once again marginalised socialism. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist campaign and the wider political atmosphere of the 1950s made even moderate left-wing ideas suspect. The Soviet Union’s record of repression, its one-party political system and its failures in economic management provided powerful ammunition to those who equated socialism with authoritarianism. The distinction between a democratic socialist advocating universal healthcare and a communist supporting a Soviet-style state was frequently ignored.Michael Harrington’s The Other America (1962) inspired the war on poverty and he founded the DSA. Civil Rights figures like Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King saw the link between economic democracy and their movement.This is the historical baggage that the contemporary democratic socialist movement is attempting to overcome. Its programme is not the establishment of a Soviet-style command economy or the abolition of all private property. It is principally concerned with the problems of contemporary America: the cost of housing, inadequate public transport, expensive healthcare, stagnant wages, student debt and the growing concentration of wealth. Mamdani’s campaign in New York, for instance, drew considerable support from younger voters concerned about the cost of living and the inability of ordinary wage earners to afford life in one of the world’s most expensive cities.There is an Indian connection too, through Bhaskar Sunkara the founder of the influential Jacobin magazine whose parents came from Trinidad and Tobago. Pune-born Kshama Sawant served in the Seattle City Council as a member of Socialist Alternative. But the Indian connection is older going back to Lala Lajpat Rai who lived in the US between 1914 and 1919 and moved in radical and labour circles. M.N. Roy absorbed American socialist ideas before going to found the Communist Party of Mexico. B.R. Ambedkar who studied in Columbia was influenced by Dewey and his advocacy of state ownership of industries comes through the latter’s advocacy of public control of natural resources.What about Karl Marx? His ideas reached America largely through German exiles and translated texts, but the movement that mattered, from Owen, Debs to Sanders, has spoken in the idiom of Protestant moralism, populism and the Declaration of Independence.The larger point is that socialism has periodically resurfaced in American politics whenever the contradictions of capitalism have become particularly visible. The extraordinary concentration of wealth, the growing unaffordability of basic necessities and the perception that political institutions are increasingly responsive to wealthy donors and corporate interests have created fertile ground for its revival. For many young Americans, the question is less about ideological doctrine than whether the existing economic system can provide them with a reasonable standard of living.Trump’s proclamation is therefore an interesting response to a phenomenon that is fundamentally domestic. By conflating socialism with communism, it seeks to use the historical fears of the Cold War to discredit a movement whose contemporary appeal is largely rooted in economic grievances. It may work with sections of the electorate, but it does little to address the reasons why these ideas are gaining traction in the first place.America is unlikely to become a socialist country in any conventional understanding of the term. Its institutions, political culture and economic structures remain deeply rooted in capitalism. But the notion that socialism is somehow un-American is historically untenable. From the communitarian experiments of the 19th century to the labour movement, the New Deal and today’s democratic socialists, the argument over how wealth should be created and distributed has been part of the American story almost from the beginning.The real significance of the 2026 elections is not that America is turning socialist. It is that a growing section of its electorate is questioning whether the existing version of capitalism is working for them. That is a question which no presidential proclamation can wish away.Manoj Joshi is a Distinguished Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi.