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
Never a great situation.
The socialists also ran into a lot of other problems, kind of of their own making.
They split into a number of factions in this period.
They lost a lot of ground in American politics, and they were kind of a spent force really coming out of the 1920s.
But another problem for them really was that actually a lot of socialist ideas that were pretty popular were advanced by non-socialist politicians in this period.
Most importantly FDR.
Who borrowed a lot of what was thought of as democratic socialist economic policy as part of his new deal to help America out of the Great Depression?
This is another moment again when there's a huge wealth cap in the US.
And people see capitalism as really a broken system.
And so FDR pushes through things like federal employment programs, big public works projects, Social Security.
These were ideas that were very similar to what socialists had been advocating for.
And it really kind of stole out of the fire from American socialism to have these enacted by a progressive democratic presidency.
FTR saw himself as a reformer of capitalism, so he was happy to borrow a lot of these ideas that again we would in another context considerist, but as a way of correcting the capitalist system rather than replacing it.
And in fact he pushed back against the idea that this was socialist.
And the reason FDR is careful not to call this socialism is because of what's happening around the world at this time.
You know, the Russian Revolution has happened, the Soviet Union's been born.
This is the first country that embraces communism.
Now, communism is a much more radical and in the Soviet Union undemocratic system evolving from socialism, one that many American socialists reject.
But this has led to all these ideologies being seen in the United States as foreign and threatening in a way that they weren't necessarily before.
But as we saw with FDR, some socialist ideas can still find their way into the mainstream if they're packaged right.
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