Charles Homans
speaker
782 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 26 Aug
Charles Homans’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
That's right.
DSA has been around for a long time in various forms, but for all intents and purposes, this group wasn't really on the radar of a lot of people in politics, and I think the general public until this past year, starting when Zoran Mamdani won in New York, and then continuing on through what's been a really pretty remarkable run of congressional Democratic primary wins.
So I was interested.
In better understanding the organization itself.
And I spent weeks talking to anyone who would talk to me in DSA, talking to the candidates, watching them campaigning, and came away feeling that this is a real force, a rising force in democratic politics.
And also that as it's growing its footprint in American politics, that it might be its own worst enemy in terms of its future.
And what do you mean by that exactly?
So you have to understand that DSA is not built as a political party.
It exists inside of the Democratic Party these days somewhat, but it doesn't work like a party.
It's a much more fractious organization and it has a lot of constituencies with very different ideas about how to pursue their aims in politics.
And as I explore deeper into the history of of the organization and American socialism more generally, I realized that these were really debates that have been happening throughout much of the history of American socialism.
And they're happening inside of DSA now in a way that is really going to affect its future as a force in American politics.
So to understand DSA, I think you need to understand the early history of socialism in this country.
And that means going back to the early 1900s, which was the previous heyday of socialism here.
You know, this is the period right after the Gilded Age, when you had some Americans making just really enormous amounts of money, these sort of railroad barons, timber barons, coal mining, that kind of thing.
At the same time, many Americans are working in these industries or in agriculture, and and there's this huge wealth gap between the rich and everybody else.
And this creates a lot of inevitable political reactions, people who are trying to envision a way of redistributing the wealth.
And you know, one thing that comes out of that eventually is this American form of socialism.
And
Specifically the Socialist Party of America, which in the early 1900s was the largest and most organized socialist party in the United States.
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