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
A lot of the members and leaders were writers and academics, really not capable of affecting any sort of political change in this country at all until
Bernie Sanders comes along.
Mm-hmm.
So Bernie Sanders was never a member of DSA, but he self-identifies as a democratic socialist.
And he becomes this really pivotal figure in the modern evolution of this organization.
And he also sort of points this movement forward towards the real policy focuses that will continue to define DSA going forward.
You know, he runs on Medicare for All and a fifteen dollar minimum wage mandated by the government.
he's really drafting off of this populist anger that comes out of the financial crisis.
And overall this message that the establishment has rigged the system against working people and working people need to take their power back.
That's right.
And obviously people on the left are really drawing those connections at the time, you know, pointing to the resonances with the Gilded Age, the Great Depression.
But for the socialists, what Bernie did that was really important was show that self-identified socialists could actually do quite well in a democratic primary.
You have to remember that before this point, socialism was really like a very taboo word in American politics and had been for quite a long time.
And Bernie kind of reclaimed this word as something that you could actually run on as a left-wing candidate and said, Yeah, I am a socialist, and really embraced this label very directly in a way that people prior to 2016, I think, would have assumed would have been absolute poison.
In even a democratic primary.
And what Bernie did was show that that wasn't actually true at all.
And his candidacy is becomes this real movement and draws all these people to his cause.
And after the election, all these people are kind of out there, you know, asking, what do we do with this energy and these ideas?
And one of the big answers they come up with is let's join the DSA.
The membership, which prior to this point is 6,000 members basically, jumps to 30,000 members over the course of 2017.
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