Before 2008, calling yourself a socialist was basically the same thing as calling yourself a Level 70 Necromancer. You were engaging in a kind of political LARP with a bunch of other tweedy, unwashed academics. You were announcing that your relationship with reality was tenuous.

Then the economy crashed, retirement savings were wiped out, and the government saved big banks at the expense of everyone else. A new generation tried to get jobs "in this economy" and didn't do so well. And when they did find jobs, their labor was so clearly exploited they could only laugh through the tears. Later on, unburdened by red scare rhetoric from earlier generations, they didn't find themselves disagreeing with *Socialist* Sen. Bernie Sanders when he pointed the finger at millionaires and billionaires for hoarding cash and accelerating income inequality. They liked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's vision, leadership, and Instagram feed. Suddenly, calling yourself a socialist was basically the same thing as calling yourself a guilt-ridden graphic designer who grew up in an affluent suburb. Or an overburdened public school teacher. Or a nurse. Socialism was no longer a bad word. But what, exactly, was it?

Bhaskar Sunkara, founder of Jacobin, has been selling out venues on a national tour of his new book, The Socialist Manifesto, which he hopes provides a good answer to that question. On Thursday, at the risk of being extremely on brand in this Socialist Hellhole, we sat down in a cafe and talked about the history—and the future—of the movement.

Who is this manifesto for?

My intended audience was partially these young people who are identifying as socialists. But I also wanted to explain, as clearly as possible, some of the core ideas and animating principles for people who are sympathetic but who are not ready—and who might never be ready—to call themselves socialists. That's a huge layer of the people we need to reach.

The ideas of rugged individualism and the Protestant work ethic run deeply through American culture, and they're seen as antithetical to socialism. How do you deal with that?

I think it's not a huge barrier. Our message to people isn't that you're not responsible for your own life. We want to create a condition in which people are given the opportunity to reach their full potential.

And I think Americans are used to thinking about themselves not just as individuals but as families and communities. It'd be one thing if we were asking people to sacrifice their individual well-being for the sake of a vague, abstract collective. But we're actually saying, "No, you're doing enough. Keep doing what you're doing. You just also deserve these things that will make your life easier and less stressful."

Sure, but Americans don't trust the government to provide services they rely on.

I don't think that's necessarily true anymore. I think people are perfectly willing to trust the post office to deliver their things. They're perfectly willing to keep accepting checks through Social Security.

But obviously, we need responsive programs. Often what happens in the U.S. is that programs get defunded, then they're shown later on, when they collapse, as proof that the government can't do anything right.

So you want to entrust the state with everything, huh?

I think people are willing to trust certain things to the state. I think there is also a civil libertarian streak in the U.S. It's a good streak. I don't think the state should regulate speech, morality, or a whole host of other things that most Americans agree with. But people are starting to realize they're either going to be subject to big corporate bureaucrats they have zero say over, or it's going to be government bureaucrats that we can maybe make democratically accountable and transparent. In big democratic societies, there are not yeoman farmers anymore. You can't do it alone.

The first part of the book offers a selective history of socialism. Since most Republicans in Washington have been pointing at Venezuela as a sign of the way socialism inevitably rots markets and societies, could you give me a lesson that speaks to the problems there?

I don't think Venezuela is a particularly good case study in socialism. It was a populist movement with a populist leader who essentially tried to alleviate poverty and other things through redistributing oil rents more aggressively to poor and working people, and also they established a network of price controls. Many of them were counterproductive, there was inflation, there was at times vicious opposition, and there was, later on, the destabilizing effects of U.S. sanctions.

At the same time, however, more radical or traditionally socialist parties and movements in Bolivia and Ecuador managed to maintain pretty strict macroeconomic stability while redistributing natural resources well, creating programs and what not.

Where else has it worked?

I think the real lessons we can point to of socialist governance within a capitalist country would be the experience of European socialist democracy. In the Nordic countries, you have in Sweden a socialist party come to power and rule for 50 years. During the course of that 50 years, they were able to guarantee huge swaths of life just by virtue of being born. Health care, child care, housing rights, things like that were all guaranteed, were all taken out of the market. There was a competitive market in other sectors. But this competitive market was tempered by having really strong trade unions that were able to bargain with capital.

I think the lesson is social democracy works. But it contains a dilemma within it. Even though workers get more and more powerful and get stronger rights, capital still has a lever of control, because capital can say, "Listen, this arrangement that was working for us in the '40s, '50s, and '60s is now no longer working for us." In small countries, they can threaten to flee. In other countries, countries as large as the US, they can withhold investment. When people start feeling that in their pocket and start seeing job growth decline, they might rightly say, "I like this system, but we need to roll it back because we need to get the jobs flowing again and the money flowing again." And even a politician like Bernie Sanders might say, "The only way I'm able to afford my social programs is because we're able to tax profitable, growing firms."

That does sound like a problem.

To solve that dilemma of social democracy, what I think we need to do is find ways to create a sector of the economy that's built off cooperative, worker ownership and other forms of social ownership to take this power away from capital and to resolve this dilemma of social democracy. At a certain point, either you deepen the reforms, or you go back and you deregulate and bust unions.

But isn't the U.S. too big, too diverse, and aren't its political parties too entrenched to implement any of this stuff?

Obviously, we need to cohere together, and we need to rebuild unions. But I don't think there's anything intrinsic about Americans to stop that.

And I would say creating a strong working class movement created community and created homogeneity in the Nordic countries. Obviously, we have certain other barriers in the U.S., such as our history of racism. But these are barriers that I think can be overcome. When we think about our history as it relates to racism, we shouldn't be completely defeatist. This is a country that saw a mass, popular civil rights movement that achieved quite incredible gains. Even the fact that we have someone like Trump looking to roll back some of these gains is, in fact, a sign that we had something of a real revolution in this country.

The Democratic Socialists of America have enjoyed a resurgence, but, like Democratic clubs, the chapters seem to be full of infighting. They don’t know if they want to get involved in electoral politics or not. There are cops in DSA! How are socialists going to enact massive reform or even revolution if they just sound like every other party?

American politics as a whole is kooky and eclectic. As a journalist I've been to libertarian party meetings, I've been to the DNC. We underestimate how much of this is in the national character, not just a product of the Left.

That's what I'm getting at—can an American sensibility even do this?

You don't need to mobilize everyone. You mobilize a strong minority of people behind something, you give them real ties in a base, and you get passive support of the majority. That's the way change has been made most of the time.

When it comes to elections, I think it's common sense that this is what Americans think politics is. In Seattle, we've seen the example of Kshama Sawant and others using their bully pulpit to talk about issues like the fight for $15, or a host of other things.

There's been a conservative backlash to the city council, and Kshama Sawant has been the face of their opposition. There's an idea that this kind of movement politics doesn't lend itself to civility, and it's necessarily antagonistic.

There is a certain part of the reputation we need to combat, which is the idea that you have to be burning with self-righteousness, that you have to know the code to be able to engage with socialism. But, obviously, when it comes to being less civil against people with power, as long as we're picking the targets that are unpopular, or we're able to very quickly make them unpopular, then I think that's a lot of what politics is. It is about conflict. It is about the question of who is going to get resources.

How important is it to you that Bernie Sanders wins in 2020?

I think the key is that he runs a strong, competitive campaign and continues to build this opposition within and outside the Democratic party. He's the strongest weapon the Left has because he's figured out a language that is so much more approachable to ordinary working people than what the Left normally does. He really does have a mass base. As long as the campaign stays oriented around issues it will be good.

Do you think he'll win?

I think he has a real chance. If I had to bet my life on it, I would bet on someone else, not Bernie Sanders. But I think it will hopefully evolve into a two-person race between him and Biden.

What's wrong with Elizabeth Warren's approach? She just told me she was going to cancel my student loan debt, so I like her.

I think Warren is good. Her approach is the approach of the regulator trying to say we need to establish better rules for the game. Sanders's approach is more telling people that the game is unfair, the game is rigged. And so I think her approach seems slightly more technocratic, slightly more about tinkering, slightly more cerebral.

I think we need a candidate who can galvanize a coherent opposition movement that can speak to anger. The only other person I saw speaking to anger in U.S. politics as well as Trump is Sanders. Obviously, their policy goals are very different, but I think we need to be able to capture some of that. I think there are a lot of voters who will stay at home if there isn't a candidate who is reflecting the things they're seeing, and also a candidate that's giving them something positive, a movement that they're a protagonist of.

Warren is fleshing out some of the details of what these programs can look like. Obviously, a President can't just legislate that way. But I wonder whether a detailed white paper is more effective than a Bernie Sanders stump speech.

You're the publisher of Jacobin. Do you want more people in the Walmart layaway reading it? It gets criticism for being this very beautiful magazine for graduate students.

With Jacobin, we have a paid print circulation run of 45,000 to 55,000 50,000. We reach over a million people online. The online part is what's much more mass. To the extent we have a strong working-class base, it's among teachers' unions and nurses' unions. Those are among the more educated professionalized layer of the working class, but you start with where you are. When Jacobin started, to call yourself a socialist was actually an insane thing to do in U.S. politics. Over the course of the last eight years, I think we helped mainstream it.

In the long run, we need popular, more regular outlets. But the way people are consuming politics now, I think a lot of it has to be video. We need a socialist on YouTube instead of just ceding that to the right. But also, we need a Breitbart-like venue. One with even less of a barrier to entry, but with even more of a commitment to basic journalism and truth. We'll be undermined if we just become pure propagandists, but we need to study what Breitbart did, and what a lot of these different outlets and efforts on the right did.

Sunkara is in town for Red May, a monthlong festival of "radical art and thought." Catch him this Friday morning at 10:30 a.m at the Victrola on 15th for Breakfast with Bhaskar. Friday night at Town Hall Seattle he'll talk about "neoliberalism’s current crisis" with philosopher Nancy Fraser. And Saturday at noon, Sunkara will moderate a panel on teachers' strikes at the University Book Store.