A review by russellarbenfox
We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism--American Style by Peter Dreier, Michael Kazin, Kate Arnoff

4.0

This is a fine collection of essays, overwhelmingly addressing themselves to the theoretical and practical issues pertinent to a huge range of democratic socialist policies. The essays I enjoyed the most were Naomi Klein's on climate change, Robert Kuttner's on corporate power, Michelle Chen's on immigration, and Thomas Sugrue's on urbanism. None of them argued anything entirely new, and in some cases the authors were plainly cribbing from work that they'd published before, but that doesn't take away from the good ideas they put forward, even when I disagreed with them (for example, both Sugrue's insistence that DIY/localist-style socialism could never scale up to address macro-level injustices, and Chen's mostly, in my view anyway, empty distinction between "no borders" and "open borders," generated all sorts of questions in my head). A few of the essays took a larger political or historical view of problems and possibilities democratic socialism in America, and I really would have liked to have read more of that. My great interest right now is understanding if democratic socialism, as it has revived in America over the past five years, has really come to contribute anything distinct to the ideological construct itself; Bill Fletcher's and Harold Meyerson's essays probably come closest to doing this, but ultimately that's not their focus, so my highest hopes for the volume were not satisfied. Still, any book that includes Michael Walzer's classic and deeply important essay on socialist theory, "A Day in the Life of a Socialist Citizen," is worth owning, so I'm glad I have this one.