“GREAT TRUTHS,” the letters proclaimed. Each one was fired from his fevered mind like the fireworks that would soon be set off near the riverbank, arcing across the darkness to assemble into elliptical strings of capitals and italics.
“The cause of each misery that came before me to its true origin, I now DECLARE to you and the world,” the message read, “is slavery to the TRINITY of the most monstrous evils that could be combined to inflict mental and physical evil upon his whole race.”
The words then began exploding with the insistent tempo of divine revelation: “Individual property – absurd and irrational systems of religion and marriage.”
The words were those of Robert Owen. Almost two centuries before President Donald Trump founded Truth Social, the Welsh cotton magnate and socialist arrived in the small Indiana town of New Harmony and proclaimed the birth of a socialist utopia, using language never before heard in America’s political life.
Almost two centuries later, the language of political transformation has returned to American public life, albeit in a different form.
Like all moments of great political rupture, the 3 November midterm results are the product of many forces. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed became America’s first Muslim-American senator, despite vicious anti-Muslim propaganda. In Texas, James Talarico, a standard-bearer of progressive Christian theology, became the first Democrat to win a Senate seat since 1988.
Deb Haaland won in New Mexico as the first Native American woman governor, and Keisha Lance Bottoms became Georgia’s first Black woman governor. In New Hampshire, Chris Pappas became the first openly gay man elected to the Senate. The forces driving the turn to the Left are far larger than President Donald Trump’s dysfunctional reign.
Half of Americans under 30 lived with a parent in 2025, up 12 per cent from 2019. Few young people can afford a household of their own, and student debt is at record levels. American Millennials are set to become the first generation in the country’s history to be worse off than their parents in income and job status, prompting many to consider socialism with a sympathy their parents’ generation would have found inconceivable.
Less clear is what policies and programmes this generation’s revolt against the status quo will produce, and whether a party can unite around them. Less than five years after Owen began building New Harmony, the project had collapsed, a reminder that few dreams survive their first encounter with the real world.
The problems of success
In the chamber of the House of Representatives, Owen lectured Congress about his project on 25 February 1825 and again on 7 March, driving home a message that would be familiar to modern socialists. His audience included President-elect John Quincy Adams, outgoing President James Monroe, and former Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. America’s elite had just begun to embrace the steam engine, the spinning jenny and the blast furnace, but did not want the impoverished working class that came with them in Europe.
Like the nineteenth-century utopian, the new cohort of progressive Democrats will find itself under the arc lights. The policies being pursued by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani offer a glimpse of what a future Democratic platform could look like: an expansion of state intervention centred on housing, health and education, paid for by higher taxes on the super-wealthy. However, the larger questions remain unresolved.
Take tariffs. Progressive politicians from America’s hollowed-out industrial heartlands believe that tariffs, properly targeted and carefully implemented, are necessary to protect manufacturing and the interests of workers. That view informed President Joe Biden’s decision to impose high tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles and other clean-energy products. Critics argue that the tariffs raised prices, undermining the adoption of a technology the government wished to encourage.
Harder still is the shape of America’s trading relationships with Mexico and Canada, which bear directly not only on workers but also on critical questions of security and geopolitics.
Foreign policy will be another source of dissension. During the campaign, politicians like El-Sayed deftly avoided contention over Israel, making clear that domestic issues were their priority. Democrats will now be pressured to distinguish their foreign policy clearly from Trump’s. The war in Iran, military aid for Israel and relations with China and Russia are all likely to provoke intense internal debate.
Immigration will probably be the hardest issue of all for Left-wing Democrats. Even though Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s behaviour has repulsed many ordinary Americans, progressives will have to walk a careful line to reconcile the divisions within their own constituency.
Corporate employers and small businesses in coastal cities might welcome more foreign workers; rust-belt workers would not. The party has no consensus on how many immigrants, or what kinds, should be allowed in.
The cohort represented by the midterm victors wants to build a new kind of America. A deep utopian impulse in American political life, akin to religious feeling, feeds an aversion to tawdry compromise. Yet the history of America’s utopian experiments warns about what happens when ideals meet the business of governing.
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American utopianism
It may seem strange to think of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago or Fisher Island as inheritors of a utopian tradition, but real-world utopias were a significant feature of America’s political culture in the nineteenth century. The Oneida community built a culture that discouraged sexual possessiveness but, unless a committee approved reproduction, insisted on birth control through male continence. Ann Lee’s Shakers, so named for their ecstatic trembling, practised celibacy, pacifism and gender-equitable communal living.
Among the earliest utopian communities was the one founded by German ascetic George Rapp. As his neighbours sat through the Good Friday morning service in 1799, Rapp drove his newly purchased herd of swine past the church; the service, he contended, was an empty shell, undeserving of the name.
Like other Lutherans in the small German village of Iptingen, he had an uncomfortable relationship with established power, often clashing over civic regulations governing religious practice and ritual. Fed up, Rapp led his congregation to the New World in 1805, where they founded a settlement called Harmonie. Awaiting what most were certain was the imminent apocalypse, the immigrants adopted a lifestyle built on strict celibacy and the common ownership of all resources.
Harmonie was a financial success, but in 1823 its leaders decided to sell the land and move to a larger property in Pennsylvania. The buyer was Owen, who had been looking for an affordable platform on which to test his principles. The son of an ironmonger, he had risen to become a successful mill-owner, and his New Lanark mills had become a model for providing social and welfare programmes for workers.
Owen, the historian EP Thompson has argued, shared the conviction of many capitalists of the period that reform in education, health and housing could quell the insurrectionary impulses that had brought English working-class culture into collision with the demands of the modern factory.
The American leaders who turned out to listen to Owen were to be disappointed. Less than a year after New Harmony was set up, it had divided into three less-than-harmonious factions, marked by acrimony over responsibilities and the division of earnings.
After attempts at reorganisation failed in 1828, the land was sold as private lots. Owen’s projects in Britain, too, lapsed into relative obscurity. As the scholar Krishan Kumar has noted, most utopian enterprises were fated to fall through the cracks between theory and practice.
While New Harmony’s collapse did not end America’s utopian impulse, it exposed the gap between imagining a different society and building institutions within to sustain it.
Living politics
Both this election and the right-wing ascendancy that preceded it teach one lesson: like a storm system, American politics is drawing energy from a society in the midst of negotiating profound rifts. Four decades ago, the writer Joan Didion lamented the rise of a culture in which the choice between candidates was a question not of substance but of aesthetics.
Today’s politics involves fundamental questions about the distribution of wealth, the configuration of social power, race and gender. Even if parties seek to reduce politics to bureaucratic management, societies reassert themselves when fundamental questions emerge.
More important still, money alone does not shape outcomes. A succession of American legal judgments has allowed individual donors to pump money into the electoral process, raising fears for the survival of party institutions and the integrity of candidates.
Elon Musk, for instance, has ploughed $276 million into Republican campaign efforts since this summer, more than all donors combined to the Democratic effort. Yet neither he nor other Silicon Valley billionaires could swing the outcome.
The establishments of both parties, for their part, have unravelled, giving ever-greater opportunities to forces long kept on the margins.
Much of the rest of the world will take some satisfaction in Trump’s humiliation. There is no doubt, though, that American politics is entering a long period of reordering with profoundly uncertain outcomes. As Owen discovered, the hard part begins once the proclamation has been made.
Praveen Swami is a Contributing Editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Maryam Hassan)
Be patient. They will script a better future for USA, by far the greatest country on the planet. Away from the putrid MAGA swamp.