Has the US ever had a communist or socialist president?

17 comments

1. FDR was probably the closest to a socialist.

2. Nope, this is googleable.

3. Ask a radical

4. No president would ever admit to such a thing as it would be the kiss of death to their career.

   But some presidents have done some things that are socialist-leaning. FDR is a great example. Even Nixon implemented price controls in the 1970’s.

5. No and it never will

6. No

7. No, some presidents may have shared some policies with communism or socialism but the Unites States has always been anti-commie and anti-socialist

8. FDR was the closest we’ve ever come to having a socialist president and even still today, his impact on the darkest financial period in our history is still contested. Many free-market absolutists believe that the depression would have corrected itself sooner without the help of FDR’s new deal.

9. No , but we’ve had nazi sympathizers as presidents .

10. like a real, marxist-leninist, socialist? No.

    FDR could be considered democratic-socialist but he was basically just progressive — it’s really stretching the definition of “socialism”. Same if someone ideologically similar to Bernie Sanders were to be elected — you can call them a democratic socialist, but really he’s essentially a progressive.

11. No, we haven’t.

12. No. FDR and the Cold War spooked Congress so much that even Bernie Sanders is a “socialist”, and Eugene Debs couldn’t even win from prison.

13. No

14. No

15. No. At least not one that would admit to it or identify as such.

    There have been presidents who had some socialist ideas, but none who have considered themselves socialist or communist

16. I mean, definite “Communist” and “socialist.”

    No President has ever been associated with our communist or socialist parties, but that’s probably because our communist and socialist parties never had much success. Eugene Debs got the closest, but even he was never more than a third party candidate.

    Some argue that the reason socialist politics never took off in the U.S. is because our parties integrated ideas of socialism into their own platforms. The policies of everyone from Theodore Roosevelt to Barack Obama arguably feature some socialistic ideas.

    Probably the closest we ever came to having a socialist President (with a lower-case ‘S’) was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. At least, his opponents have said as much. He argued that his progressivism was necessary to save American capitalism from the threat of socialism, but even today not everyone sees it that way.

17. Obama was a secret communist Muslim terrorist but besides him, no.