Using the Democratic Party ballot line on occasion is a strategy borne of the acknowledgement of the left's institutional weakness over the last four decades. We have to use the channels available to us to promote our politics in order to get mass numbers of people interested in talking about inequality and class divisions - and ultimately interested in workplace struggles and mass protests - the kinds of things that are the prerequisite for building an independent, mass party.

Jacobin writer Meagan Day examines the present and future of democratic socialism in the US - as a movement balancing short term goals of reform, electoral gains and renewed class politics with the longterm objective of overthrowing capitalism - and explains how much a President Bernie Sanders might get us from here to there.

Meagan wrote the articles Democratic socialism, explained by a democratic socialist for Vox and Wielding the Imperial Presidency for Jacobin.