{"id":315996,"date":"2026-08-07T12:14:33","date_gmt":"2026-08-07T12:14:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/315996\/"},"modified":"2026-08-07T12:14:33","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T12:14:33","slug":"a-socialism-for-the-new-york-times-jacobin-founder-bhaskar-sunkaras-interview-with-ross-douthat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/315996\/","title":{"rendered":"A \u201csocialism\u201d for the New York Times: Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara\u2019s interview with Ross Douthat"},"content":{"rendered":"

On July 16, the New York Times published an interview conducted by its columnist Ross Douthat with Bhaskar Sunkara, founding editor of Jacobin, president of the Nation, and for two decades a leading member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The episode of Douthat\u2019s \u201cInteresting Times\u201d podcast ran under the headline \u201cA Vision of a \u2018Society Without Capitalism,\u2019\u201d followed by the telling subhead: \u201cCan democratic socialism redeem the left without destroying capitalism?\u201d<\/p>\n

The question answers itself. The Times, the authoritative voice of the Democratic Party establishment, does not devote 29 pages to movements that threaten the social order. It devotes them to movements it is seeking to promote.<\/p>\n

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat interviews Bhaskar Sunkara, founder of Jacobin and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, July 16, 2026. [Photo: New York Times]<\/p>\n

That Douthat was chosen for the assignment is itself significant. He is a right-wing Catholic conservative, a longtime intellectual voice of the Republican right. In the weeks since the interview with Sunkara was posted on the Times website, Douthat has been hired by Bari Weiss, the right-wing editor-in-chief of CBS News installed by pro-Trump billionaire David Ellison. Douthat was given a lucrative post as a correspondent for \u201c60 Minutes\u201d after most of the staff had been purged.<\/p>\n

The Douthat-Sunkara conversation was friendly to the point of coziness. Douthat opened by addressing Sunkara as \u201ccomrade\u201d and the two discovered \u201ccommon ground\u201d on various issues. The tone throughout was that of individuals who agreed on far more than they differed.<\/p>\n

Thirteen days before the interview appeared, President Donald Trump stood at Mount Rushmore and declared, in a speech marking the country\u2019s 250th anniversary, \u201cyou can be loyal to Karl Marx or you can be loyal to America. You cannot be both.\u201d He called communism a \u201ccancer.\u201d<\/p>\n

The following day he promoted a video calling for \u201chardcore communist bastards\u201d to be deported, including New York\u2019s Democratic mayor and DSA member Zohran Mamdani.<\/p>\n

Under these conditions, one of the DSA\u2019s most prominent voices sat down with a conservative columnist of the New York Times to deliver a systematic, point-by-point assurance that the DSA was loyal to American capitalism, hostile to revolution, committed to the Democratic Party and a safe steward for the ruling class.<\/p>\n

\u201cPerfectly comfortable to sit by and wait\u201d<\/p>\n

What was perhaps most striking about the interview as a whole was the utter complacency that pervaded every word Sunkara uttered. The interview was conducted under conditions of an escalating campaign for dictatorship, an expanding global imperialist war and the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a capitalist oligarchy.<\/p>\n

Not one of these issues\u00a0was addressed in 29 pages of conversation about the prospects for socialism. Fascism was not mentioned. Nor was Iran. The Trump administration itself was referenced to in passing. The life-and-death questions confronting the working class were simply not present, nor were the mass protests that have erupted in the United States, or the developing strike movement.<\/p>\n

In their place was a mood of self-satisfaction. Adopting the persona of Voltaire\u2019s Pangloss, Sunkara stated, \u201cWe are not living in the worst of all possible worlds.\u201d Things, in Sunkara\u2019s vision, are really not that bad.<\/p>\n

Sunkara should speak for himself. In fact, he does, and for a privileged social layer of which he is a representative. The supporters of the recently elected \u201csocialist\u201d candidates, as he understands it, are \u201cnot necessarily the most oppressed.\u201d In many cases, \u201cthey\u2019re earning raises at higher than the level of inflation, but they still feel like they\u2019re being squeezed.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is a candid self-portrait of the social milieu to which Sunkara directs himself: a fairly complacent upper-middle class. What this layer seeks is not the abolition of class society, but a more favorable distribution of wealth within the richest 10 percent, and a political voice that dignifies this aspiration with the name of socialism.<\/p>\n

But Sunkara\u2019s account of those voting for DSA candidates is warped by his own outlook. He looks at the masses of people who have turned out for these campaigns and sees his own reflection: comfortable individuals who merely \u201cfeel squeezed,\u201d whose perception of their lives, he suggests, is \u201ca little bit different than the reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

In reality, millions are voting for candidates who call themselves socialists because they are looking for a way to fight capitalism. Among them are broad sections of young people and workers, including many who once considered themselves securely middle class but have been profoundly radicalized by the genocide in Gaza, the buildup of dictatorship in the US and the obscene concentration of wealth.<\/p>\n

Sunkara paints them all with his own complacent brush. This complacency found its most finished expression at the close of the interview. \u201cMy vision of a good society,\u201d Sunkara declared, \u201cmight take centuries to enact, and I\u2019m perfectly comfortable to sit by and wait in my hyperbolic [is this a joke, or a mistake for \u2018hyperbaric\u2019?] chamber.\u201d<\/p>\n

Within the living memory of people now alive, capitalism produced two world wars, fascism and the Holocaust. It is producing now a genocide broadcast by the media in real time, a global rearmament, an accelerating climate catastrophe and, in the United States, the open preparation of dictatorship.<\/p>\n

The serious question posed by the present crisis is whether capitalist civilization can survive another 15 years. A man who surveys this landscape and pronounces himself \u201cperfectly comfortable\u201d to wait for centuries is disclosing a class position.<\/p>\n

A program to the right of the Great Society<\/p>\n

The content of Sunkara\u2019s program is calibrated to this social layer. He described it as \u201cdoses of socialism within capitalism,\u201d the \u201cdecommodification of certain goods,\u201d an expanded welfare state \u201cnot unlike Norway,\u201d and \u201cselective nationalization, particularly of natural monopolies\u201d\u2014\u201deven things like rail.\u201d He conceded at once that this \u201ccould be true of a lot of social democrats.\u201d<\/p>\n

That is, he gestures toward certain social reforms. However, the paucity of his \u201csocialism\u201d becomes the more glaring the more he descends into specifics. His housing policy is \u201cvery heavily built around upzoning and making it easier for developers to build.\u201d His own illustrative proposal is a bargain with the real estate industry: \u201cWe\u2019re going to clear the way. We\u2019re going to allow you to create this big housing development. We\u2019re going to fight against the interests of local homeowners, and you build your big piece of housing.\u201d In exchange, Sunkara asks only for \u201csome degree of rent stabilization\u201d arriving only \u201cafter 30 years, after you have a reasonable return on investment.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

His proposed fiscal program could have been written by the Brookings Institution or some other Democratic Party think tank: \u201ctaxes will have to go up on middle-class people,\u201d combined with the search for \u201cefficiency in the existing American welfare state.\u201d This is the vocabulary of every austerity government of the past four decades. And the whole is governed by a general law that Sunkara states as: \u201cany form of social democracy is grow-give. There needs to be a motor for economic investment. There needs to be profitability in order to have something to redistribute.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asked what mechanism would compel corporations to invest productively, Sunkara offered \u201cstronger unions and forms of sectoral and centralized bargaining,\u201d whose function he described as follows: a higher wage floor \u201cwill take the weakest companies in the field, it\u2019ll probably make them collapse,\u201d allow mid-field companies to \u201cinnovate,\u201d and leave the strongest with \u201cexcess profits that they could then invest to maintain their market share.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Sunkara\u2019s utopian vision, the working class serves as a midwife for helping large companies \u201cinnovate\u201d and ensure the continuation of the \u201cexcess profits\u201d and \u201cmarket share\u201d of the gigantic corporations, while untold thousands of jobs are wiped out by the collapse of the \u201cweakest companies,\u201d that is, small businesses.<\/p>\n

Douthat asked the question, \u201cIs democratic socialism compatible with capitalism?\u201d Sunkara\u2019s reply: \u201cIn the long term, no. We\u2019re anticapitalist… But in the short term, while we\u2019re within a capitalist economy, of course, we need firms that are profitable, that are providing employment, that are providing taxation. So I think to govern in the short term as social democrats, we need profitable firms.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201clong term,\u201d as we have seen, is measured in centuries. For every timescale that matters to a living human being, the program is the administration of capitalism on the basis of its profitability.<\/p>\n

It is worth measuring this \u201csocialism\u201d against the actual record of American capitalist politics. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson signed into law Medicare, Medicaid, federal aid to education and the food stamp program, alongside a major expansion of public housing and the civil rights acts, while the top marginal income tax rate stood at 70 percent and the corporate rate at 48 percent.<\/p>\n

Johnson was a ruthless bourgeois politician and imperialist, then escalating the war against Vietnam. The Great Society itself was wrecked within half a decade on the contradiction between social reform at home and the global war-mongering of American imperialism.\u00a0<\/p>\n

However, the baseline program of the Democratic Party at the height of the postwar boom, enacted by an imperialist president as a matter of routine capitalist statecraft, stands well to the left of what the founding editor of Jacobin now presents to the New York Times as the fighting program of \u201cdemocratic socialism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nor does the comparison improve if one reaches further back. Norman Thomas\u2019s Socialist Party campaigned in 1932 on the nationalization of basic industry and the banks. John Dewey, a liberal philosopher and no Marxist, spent the same decade insisting that working people could achieve nothing without breaking from both capitalist parties.<\/p>\n

Going back further, the People\u2019s Party (Populists) adopted their founding program in Omaha on July 4, 1892. It included government ownership of the railroads, the telegraph and the telephone; a graduated income tax; postal savings banks to break the grip of private bankers; and the reclamation of all land held by railroads and corporations \u201cin excess of their actual needs.\u201d This was the program not of Marxists, but of ruined farmers and small proprietors, a movement of the middle classes being ground up by finance capital.<\/p>\n

All of this is far to the left of anything proposed by Sunkara, who confines even his tepid suggestions of worker-owned businesses and public banks to the safety of \u201ccenturies\u201d in the future.<\/p>\n

A faction of the Democratic Party<\/p>\n

The political purpose of the interview runs through every exchange. Sunkara is making an argument, addressed through Douthat, to the New York Times and the Democratic Party establishment: The DSA is no threat. It is respectable, it is moderate, and it can be relied upon.<\/p>\n

The examples follow one after another. When Douthat raised the association of DSA candidates with abolishing the police, Sunkara pointed to the record: \u201cZohran Mamdani right now is administrating a Police Department with over 30,000 armed men and women, and he\u2019s administrating it, by many accounts, well.\u201d He drew the general lesson himself: \u201cI think in practice, the experience of governance, of competing in elections is a moderating force on a lot of these issues.\u201d<\/p>\n

The proof of the DSA\u2019s fitness for office, offered to a conservative columnist, is that its most prominent elected official is running the largest police force in the country to the satisfaction of the ruling class.<\/p>\n

On artificial intelligence, Sunkara\u2019s one firm principle is to protect the competitive position of American capitalism: \u201cIt doesn\u2019t make sense to tank certain US companies if there\u2019s going to be other companies creating the same disruption that are coming from other parts of the world.\u201d He endorsed the proposal for government equity stakes in AI companies, \u201ctouted by figures as varied as Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon,\u201d a coming together of the \u201csocialist\u201d senator and the fascist ideologue, which he offered without comment.<\/p>\n

On immigration, Sunkara presented himself as \u201ca very orthodox leftist\u201d who wanted to \u201cabolish ICE.\u201d The demand was qualified in the same breath: \u201cObviously, we still need some sort of border enforcement and customs, but at least go back to the norm before ICE.\u201d<\/p>\n

Having registered what he called \u201cthat radical demand,\u201d he devoted most of his answer to praising Dan Osborn, the Senate candidate in Nebraska, whose opening line before audiences of Trump voters, is, as Sunkara put it: \u201cI agree with Donald Trump. We need a strong border.\u201d Sunkara suggested that of the two\u2014he and the right-wing, pro-war Democrat Osborn\u2014Osborn was the more \u201cprogressive.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the Biden administration, Sunkara declared, \u201cI hate to defend Biden,\u201d and then proceeded to do so. Biden\u2019s industrial policy during the height of the pandemic created \u201chundreds of thousands of new manufacturing jobs\u201d while the rest of the capitalist world shed them. This when Biden was implementing what Trump began\u2014namely, the removal of all restraints on the spread of Covid. \u201cBiden, I think, did it right,\u201d Sunkara proclaimed. \u201cI think his failures were fundamentally the failure to communicate.\u201d Trump himself received credit for \u201cbringing up the specter of industrial policy and tariffs in 2016.\u201d<\/p>\n

The economic nationalism of the two administrations, which is the preparation of the American economy for war, was endorsed wholesale. What Biden lacked, in this account, was not a different policy, but a better salesman, and when Douthat suggested that Mamdani supplied the salesmanship that \u201can aging, decrepit Joe Biden couldn\u2019t,\u201d Sunkara agreed: \u201cI would say that\u2019s at least part of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

That brought the interview to the question that concerns the Democratic Party above all others: war. Here what Sunkara said matters less than what he did not.<\/p>\n

Questions about this article? Ask Socialism AI<\/p>\n

On Gaza, he did not use the word genocide. \u201cTens of thousands of people have just been killed in Gaza,\u201d he said, a fraction of the actual toll.\u00a0 Nowhere did he mention that the bombs were American, supplied by a Democratic administration. What he explained instead is the use to which the issue is put: \u201cit\u2019s being used to separate Democrats who are committed to an old political establishment, including the foreign policy establishment, and Democrats who are better.\u201d<\/p>\n

Douthat translated: a pro-Palestinian stance marked a candidate as \u201ca reliable vote for restructuring the Democratic Party overall.\u201d Sunkara agreed. The revulsion of an entire generation against the extermination of a people was presented as a sorting device in Democratic primaries.<\/p>\n

More significant still were the silences. In 29 pages, Iran was never mentioned. The war against Russia was never mentioned, nor was Ukraine, nor NATO, nor the preparations for war with China, nor the trillion-dollar Pentagon budget.<\/p>\n

For the ruling class, no question stands higher than war. A \u201csocialist\u201d tendency that maintains total silence on the war plans of American imperialism, while reducing US-Israeli genocide to an instrument of Democratic Party factionalism, is communicating something the Times understands perfectly: on the decisive question, the DSA will not be a problem.<\/p>\n

The DSA, Harrington and the \u201creconciliation of liberalism and socialism\u201d<\/p>\n

The socialism Sunkara presented to the Times has no relationship to the working class or the class struggle. Workers appeared in the interview as voters, taxpayers and consumers of social programs, never as a class in conflict with capital, never as the social force on which the socialist movement rests. What Sunkara outlined was not a program for the overthrow of capitalism, but the program of the DSA in power: the administration of the capitalist state, its police, its budgets and its wars, under a \u201csocialist\u201d label.<\/p>\n

He stated the theoretical formula near the top of the interview: \u201cAmerican socialists are way more liberal than they themselves think\u2026 There\u2019s been a sort of reconciliation of liberalism and socialism.\u201d<\/p>\n

An entire century of struggle between Marxism and liberalism\u2014over the state, over war, over whether the working class required its own party\u2014was dissolved into a \u201csort of reconciliation.\u201d Those voting for DSA candidates believe they are voting for socialists. Their publicist assured the New York Times they are mistaken. It would be difficult to state the DSA\u2019s function more precisely.<\/p>\n

Sunkara rooted this politics in a tradition. He was politicized, he said, \u201cin the library books, reading books by people like Irving Howe, by Michael Harrington.\u201d Harrington, he told Douthat, \u201cwas part of the organic establishment, to the left of social democracy, people who just wanted to make capitalism a little bit more humane\u2014but also, you could say, to the right of a certain Leninism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harrington was the central figure of a tendency, descended from Max Shachtman\u2019s 1940 break with Trotskyism, that spent the postwar decades moving steadily to the right, into the anticommunist apparatus of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy and the orbit of the State Department. Its strategic doctrine was \u201crealignment\u201d: the dissolution of independent socialist politics into the Democratic Party, summarized in Harrington\u2019s formula of seeking the \u201cleft wing of the possible.\u201d The \u201cpossible\u201d being defined at every point by what the Democratic Party, the trade union apparatus and the ruling class would permit.<\/p>\n

When the test came over Vietnam, deference to George Meany\u2019s pro-war AFL-CIO prevailed. Harrington opposed the demand for withdrawal for years and helped organize Negotiations Now, a front group whose principal function was to denounce the antiwar movement as \u201cobjectively pro-Communist.\u201d The DSA, founded in 1982, carried this politics forward intact.<\/p>\n

As for the \u201ccertain Leninism,\u201d Douthat supplied the translation: \u201cStalin. To the right of Joseph Stalin.\u201d Sunkara\u2019s answer: \u201cOf course, as we should all aspire to be.\u201d So he pledged to be \u201cto the right\u201d of the man responsible for the greatest slaughter of revolutionaries in history.<\/p>\n

The amalgam of Leninism with Stalinism is the foundational lie shared by Stalinist and imperialist historiography alike. It is refuted by the entire history of the Trotskyist Left Opposition and Fourth International, whose cadre were exterminated by Stalin precisely because they embodied the continuity of Leninism, that is, revolutionary internationalism.<\/p>\n

Sunkara, who slanders Leninism as Stalinism, in fact shares a great deal with Stalinism. In the United States, the cardinal service of the Communist Party to American capitalism was the subordination of the working class to the Democratic Party under the banner of the popular front. In his book The Socialist Manifesto, Sunkara upholds precisely this policy of the CP in the 1930s as a model, counterposing it favorably to the Socialist Party of the day, which still ran candidates independently of and against Roosevelt.<\/p>\n

Sunkara\u2019s objection to Stalinism is not that it became an openly counter-revolutionary force, exterminated the Bolshevik leadership, culminating in the assassination of Trotsky in 1940, but that it remained associated, however fraudulently, with the Russian Revolution. What he retains from it is what the American ruling class always found most useful: the channeling of every movement of workers and youth back into the Democratic Party.<\/p>\n

A brief to the ruling class<\/p>\n

Read as a whole, the interview is a brief, submitted to the ruling class through its principal newspaper, at a moment when sections of that class are debating what to do about the DSA. Trump\u2019s answer is to criminalize it, deport it, \u201ccut it out.\u201d The Times\u2019 answer, embodied in Douthat\u2019s courteous curiosity, is to examine it, domesticate it, employ it.<\/p>\n

But the two answers are not fixed antipodes. The one can shift into the other with extraordinary speed. The Democratic Party is no less hostile to socialism than Trump, and there is no section of the ruling class that will tolerate the slightest inroads into its wealth and power. The candidates of the DSA, useful today for channeling popular anger back into the Democratic Party, can be swept aside and criminalized tomorrow if their radical rhetoric is judged too dangerous under conditions of mass political radicalization among workers and youth.<\/p>\n

The entire history of the 20th century testifies to how quickly the ruling class discards its \u201cleft\u201d auxiliaries once they have served their purpose, or once the movement they were meant to contain escapes their control. For such a turn, figures like Sunkara, who respond to the threats of dictatorship by pledging their reliability to the state, are completely unprepared and are preparing no one.<\/p>\n

Millions of workers and young people are beginning to draw revolutionary conclusions from a social order that offers them war, dictatorship and extreme inequality. The votes for candidates who call themselves socialists are an initial expression of this radicalization, but the DSA, as a faction of the Democratic Party, is organically incapable of addressing the objective crisis that is driving it. Its program of minor social reforms within the framework of the capitalist system\u2014without touching the wealth of the oligarchy, without the class struggle, without any challenge to the state\u2014is historically and politically bankrupt.<\/p>\n

Genuine socialism is not a redistributive preference on the part of those already comfortable, but the revolutionary movement of the international working class against the capitalist system. Its first condition is the political independence of the working class from the Democratic Party and every party of the ruling class. Against dictatorship and war it advances not the better administration of the capitalist state, but its abolition and the reorganization of economic life on socialist foundations by the working class itself.<\/p>\n

The task is not to \u201credeem the left without destroying capitalism.\u201d It is to build in the working class a revolutionary leadership that treats socialism not as a centuries-distant aspiration, but as the practical program of our time.<\/p>\n

The World Socialist Web Site is the voice of the working class and the leadership of the international socialist movement. We rely entirely on the support of our readers. Please donate today!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On July 16, the New York Times published an interview conducted by its columnist Ross Douthat with Bhaskar…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":315997,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[9,11,10],"class_list":["post-315996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315996"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315996\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/315997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}