When the Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani won election as mayor of New York City, alarm klaxons went off across the internet and the mainstream press. Commentators declared it the end of the Democratic Party and the decline of America — a socialist takeover of the nation’s largest city and cultural capital.
The hysteria took me back sixty years, to when I announced I’d been accepted to study at the University of Chicago. The Benedictine nuns I worked alongside in the kitchens at St. Vincent Archabbey seminary pulled me aside and, in a tender mix of German and English, warned me of the dangers of communism and socialism awaiting me there. Their equating of the two struck me then, and strikes me now, as the root of a profound misunderstanding — of socialism generally, and of American socialism in particular.
Socialism in the United States has an extraordinary history that few of today’s mudslinging ideologues, left or right, know or care to know. American socialism comes in many varieties, and it has deeply shaped our Black, women’s and queer liberation movements. Two threads run through nearly all of it: pragmatism and religious conviction.
Sewer Socialism
Rather than trying to transform the entire national economy, many American socialists pursued public ownership of basic services at the city level — water systems, utilities, mass transit, affordable housing. The best-known example is Milwaukee’s “sewer socialism”: the city had a Socialist mayor for 36 of the 50 years between 1910 and 1960. These municipal socialists prized competent public administration over revolutionary rhetoric, which earned them the derisive nickname “Sewer Socialists” from purists who thought instilling revolutionary zeal in the working class should come first.
American Christian Socialism
A second, distinctly American strand fused socialism with Christianity, arguing that excessive private wealth and economic exploitation are incompatible with the Christian obligation to care for one’s neighbor. This conviction fed the Protestant Social Gospel movement, which influenced Democrats William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson alongside Republican progressives Theodore Roosevelt and Robert M. La Follette. The University of Chicago Divinity School, which I attended from 1966 to 1972, was one of the movement’s important academic and theological centers.
American Catholicism was officially anti-socialist, but Catholic social teaching repeatedly converged with socialism on the problems of capitalism, poverty, labor exploitation, and inequality. That creative tension produced a distinctive American Catholic social-activist tradition that sometimes allied with socialists, sometimes opposed them, and sometimes charted its own powerful alternative. Labor priests like Charles Owen Rice in Pittsburgh and Jack Egan here in Chicago worked tirelessly for workers while just as vigorously opposing Stalinist communism.
Before coming to Chicago and motivated by Catholic social justice, I had worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee on voter registration in Mississippi and taken part in Saul Alinsky’s strategy sessions for civil rights and workers’ rights actions funded by the Presbyterian Church. And Dorothy Day, whom I met at St. Vincent Archabbey, showed me a deep spiritual understanding of nonviolence and respect for the individual within revolutionary action.
Much of the legislation Franklin D. Roosevelt wove into the American social fabric through the New Deal — support for labor unions, Social Security, unemployment insurance, public assistance, workers’ rights, economic regulation — realized what generations of religious and pragmatic socialists had long fought for. Most Americans came to accept these programs as essential to the American experiment. They are now being systematically dismantled in the name of populism.
American Socialism and Queer Liberation
The radical left was involved in gay liberation well before Stonewall. Harry Hay, a Communist Party member and labor activist, founded the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles in 1950 — one of the first sustained gay-rights organizations in the country. Hay’s key insight was to frame homosexuals not as individuals who happened to engage in homosexual behavior, but as an oppressed cultural minority with a collective culture and political interests. The Communist Party itself, notably, strongly opposed homosexuality and gay liberation.
Bayard Rustin — gay, Black, socialist, and pacifist — bridged gay liberation with Black liberation, the peace movement, civil rights, and labor rights, and served as one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most important advisers. He was arrested in 1953 for homosexual activity.
Stonewall, in 1969, changed everything. Shaped by Black Power, women’s liberation, and sexual liberation, the Gay Liberation Front emerged in New York with politics far more radical than the earlier homophile organizations, understanding sexual oppression as bound up with racism, capitalism, militarism, patriarchy, and imperialism. As historian Emily Hobson documents in Lavender and Red, gay and lesbian radicals came to see sexual liberation as inseparable from opposition to militarism, racism, and imperialism. Socialist feminism and gay liberation began shaping each other — the New American Movement, for instance, developed an explicitly socialist-feminist conception of gay liberation during the 1970s.
The AIDS epidemic of the 1980s transformed the movement again, exposing the limits of purely liberal notions of individual rights. Activists demanded access to medical treatment, public funding for research, affordable drugs, health care, and housing. Organizations like ACT UP forged a politics of direct action that fused sexual liberation, public health, and economic justice — a lineage our own Howard Brown Clinic carries forward today.
Where We Are Now
The anti-socialist vitriol of this political moment carries a deep hostility to queer people. In 2026, LGBTQ+ movements are operating in a far more hostile environment: PFLAG reports more than 600 anti-LGBTQ+ bills and amendments introduced this year alone, touching education, health care, identity documents, and even marriage equality. The paradox is stark — the movement has won enormous cultural and legal gains for gay and lesbian people even as it has become the target of an intensified political attack centered on gender, aimed at unraveling the entire liberation movement.
The Farmer-Labor, socialist, and social-justice movements have a long and honorable history in our Midwest. Chicago has nurtured municipal socialism, Catholic social activism, the Social Gospel, organized labor, the Haymarket tradition, and women’s and gay liberation movements. This is populism that is non-authoritarian and inclusive — the true antidote to a hate-based populism that excludes and demonizes people who simply want to live safe, productive lives in solidarity with their neighbors.
What my Benedictine nuns most feared in 1966, and what many still fear in 2026, is that socialism means attacking private property, mocking religion, and embracing dictatorial government. But those are more properly the characteristics of doctrinaire communism than of the democratic socialism that has developed in the United States.
American socialism has always been rooted in pragmatism as well as moral conviction.
Let’s keep this kind of “socialism” alive in our hearts and in our actions.
Nick Patricca is professor emeritus at Loyola University Chicago, active member of the Dramatists Guild of America, member of International PEN San Miguel Centre, MX. nicholas.patricca@gmail.com