There is a Specter Haunting the Democratic Party

LAST WEEK, ON A writing retreat, I was immersing myself in a lot of old books: ones I haven’t read for years, and ones I’ve never had the chance to read. One of them, which I haven’t thought about much since I was in graduate school, was Derrida’s Specters of Marx. I won’t get into why I was reading it, but I will tell you that it wasn’t because everyone seems to be re-evaluating French theory right now (again). What I will say is that his claim—that all men and women of the earth are, to some extent, the heirs of Marx—made me think about a recent encounter I had, with the back of someone’s pickup, in Louisville, Kentucky (where I live.)

I was sitting, the other day, at a traffic light near my house drifting off to the sounds of some podcast or playlist when I reconnected with reality and saw that I was stopped behind an absolutely massive pickup, bedecked with an exhaust stack and flying a Confederate flag. It was also covered with a significant number of bumper stickers, including a large one—in red, white, and blue—that very clearly read “Fuck Communism.” I knew, abstractly, that this sticker was meant for “people like me”, despite the fact that I’m not a communist, or even a member of the DSA. In the end, none of that really matters. I’m too far left, and this truck was trying to scare me to slide a bit to the right, through a little Marx-inspired American-style intimidation. It was invoking the specter of Marx for (conservative) political purposes.

There’s been a lot of discussion, recently, about how socialist the American left is (or isn’t) right now. Commentators are filled with analyses and predictions about how far left the DSA is going to convince voters to move, through the primaries, into November, and on into 2028. I know that I spend a lot of time immersed in history, so perhaps it’s predictable for me to say this, but I’ve been a little surprised by how disconnected these conversations are from American history. There seems to be a sense that socialism has been sneaking up on the left from some strange and foreign place, and it may finally be ready to sink its teeth in. But the specter of Marx has been in America for a very long time, and it’s often surprising to notice who keeps it alive. Lately I’ve been thinking about how much (and I say this with the utmost respect), Catholics have played a role in this strange legacy.

I’VE ONLY BEEN thinking about this because of Catholics themselves. I am not a Catholic, but I have seen a couple of Catholic writers recently make note of the fact that, whatever the socialists have, left Catholics seem to have in spades. Christopher Hale recently argued that the Catholic Church is the origin point of the DSA. The DSA was created by someone who was shaped by catholic social teaching, in other words, and might not exist without catholicism. And a bit before the Michigan primary election, Jesuit priest Thomas Reese publicly pondered: “Is Pope Leo a Democratic Socialist?” I’ll spoil the article for you: Reese doesn’t think the pope is a member of the DSA. But he does argue that the DSA and the pope are both guarding a constellation of things that seem to appeal to many Americans on the left right now.

In his commentary, Reese walks through a shortlist of factors that drive the resonance between Pope Leo XIV and the DSA. Both are concerned enough with workers, and the lives of workers, that they support something like a living wage. Both believe that wealth should be more widely distributed, rather than concentrated in the hands of a select few. They both see rampant injustice in our current economic system, in other words. Both are also in support of universal healthcare. Both believe that one of the primary functions of our social and political system is to help care for one another. Both the pope and the DSA have also expressed plenty of concern about the impact of AI. They worry about what will happen to the lives of workers, because of this new technology, as well as the kind of damage that this technology might inflict on our shared ecological context (what Pope Francis referred to as our “common home”). They are both concerned about what the most economically powerful new technology might do to erode the things that shape our common life.

Reese even links the pope and the DSA together in their shared critique of American policies that have led to military engagement in Iran, Gaza, and Lebanon. The DSA is arguably much more pointedly antizionist than the pope. In that sense, their positions might actually differ more than Reese allows for in his analysis. But there may still be something resonant in their positions, nevertheless. Both seem to be aware of the fact that zones of war cannot foster a common life: they can only be the territory of one side or another, and the quest to adjudicate that matter is a violent disruption of the commons itself.

Reese ultimately makes the comparison between the pope and the DSA because he seems to want to pull the Democratic Party a little closer to the pope’s own position. Reese recognizes that there are some elements of the pope’s value system that are irreconcilable with that of Democrats (his position on abortion, for instance). But, he says, “Democratic Socialists are having mixed results winning over the Democratic Party, let alone American society.” And he notes that Leo appears to be more popular, among Americans, than either party. “Democratic Socialists, as well as the Democratic Party as a whole,” he says, “would be wise to emphasize the areas where they agree with him rather than the topics where they disagree.”

One could argue that Reese is essentially commending a kind of mainstreaming of the DSA’s message, making it a bit less alienating for American voters and somehow more appealing for the masses. And he’s offering the pope—and the church he leads—as a kind of model for that political work. What he doesn’t mention is that the Catholic Church has been strategically disinheriting the legacy of Marx for more than a century, making it palatable for the masses in the way that Marxism and socialism have never been. Yes, of course, there are deeply conservative sectors of the Catholic Church that are so anti-communist they probably find everything about Pope Leo XIV’s politics abhorrent. But they’re just one sector of a massive institution. And the specter of Marx has a mixed legacy in the church.

POPE LEO XIV has intentionally chosen to inherit his name from Pope Leo XIII, and I think this should be a clear cue that he’s tapping into a stream of tradition in the Catholic Church that has a complex but intimate relationship with socialism. Both socialists and those who followed Catholic social teaching were pitted against American industry at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, as they reacted to the crush of industrialization and extreme wealth inequality. Socialists pushed for the organization of workers, and for shared (public) ownership of resources. The Catholic Church, while studiously uncritical of private property, was pushing forward a resonant view through Pope Leo XIII. Leo XIII was clear and explicit that he wasn’t commending Marxism, and this was indicated in his embrace of the principle of private property. But the resonances between these positions were nevertheless deep, and clear.

Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum founded Catholic social teaching, and emphasized the rights of workers to fair wages and a comfortable quality of life. The dreams for a better common life that socialists and Catholics were both dreaming around that same moment of history became dreams that were shared by many Americans on the left (including many Protestants, who went on to participate in the Social Gospel movement). And many of the people who inherited this dream of a better common life for all people—and the dream of what I might call a sort of labor-friendly approach to resource-sharing—was something that many Americans inherited not through Marx directly, but through the Catholic Church’s strategic disinheritance of marxism. Until they became preoccupied with other things.

The dream did not die, even if it did go a bit dormant (protected by many true believers, including but not limited to socialists and catholics). And it was reactivated, in different shapes and forms, at other moments in 20th century history. The Catholic Church itself became, because of this legacy, a kind of refuge for people on the left who couldn’t quite make their peace with marxism or socialism (even before Michael Harrington helped to found the DSA.)

Dorothy Day is perhaps the most famous example. She was a leftist whose labor movement work drew her directly towards marxism, but she was put off by its explicit materialism (she wanted more room for spiritual matters). And she wanted to align with an institution that was a bit more distributed than the state itself. This strategic disinheritance isn’t entirely unlike what you also see in the work of liberation theologians like Gustavo Gutiérrez. While it’s certainly the case that the anti-oppressive bent of liberation theology can “feel” a bit like marxism (especially to those who find themselves very allergic to it), Gutiérrez was as clear as Day was about the fact that he was actively disinheriting dimensions of Marx’s legacy (like Marx’s distaste for religion). Although she refused baptism in the Catholic Church, I would also throw Simone Weil onto this list, only just because it was Catholics like Gustave Thibon and Joseph-Marie Perrin (to whom Weil entrusted her literary legacy, before she died in 1943) who were largely responsible for bringing her work to the world. And Weil was someone who was very clearly both attracted to, and repelled by, marxism. She found an interesting but resonant replacement, one could argue, in the church (that, like marxism, she also couldn’t completely accept).

THE POINT, I SUPPOSE, isn’t merely to contest the idea that the Catholic Church created the DSA (I think it played a role, but the line of inheritance is more complex). Nor is it to argue, like Reese, that Americans will inevitably find a more appealing mainstream version of the DSA’s message in the Catholic Church (though I’m sure that this will be true for many people). Perhaps all I’m really saying is that the DSA and left-leaning Catholics make pretty “natural” allies in a coalition. And not because they have, for some odd reason, suddenly converged on a set of issues. They’ve both been tangling, for more than a century, with the specter of Marx in very different ways. Socialists might be carefully and conscientiously inheriting Marx’s legacy, and the Catholic Church might be strategically disinheriting it. But his ghost looks at least a little bit friendly to many Catholics today (unlike the way it looks to that truck, driving around Kentucky somewhere, aggressively but unintentionally keeping the ghost alive with that “Fuck Communism” bumpersticker.)