Our dream ticket would have been one consisting of Martin Luther King and Benjamin Spock, linking the issues of civil rights and peace. - Dorothy Ray Healey

I won't see socialism in my lifetime; I don't know if my son will see it in his, or even my grandchildren in theirs. There is no way to foretell what kind of political developments and issues will galvanize a future generation to turn towards socialism. The model I embraced in my youth, the vision of a vanguard party of the working class seizing power in the midst of a great social and political crisis like the one that had overtaken Russia in 1917, is no longer relevant. But I still believe that working people must be at the center of any real movement for socialism, for they are the majority for whose well-being that government "of, by, and for the people" should be concerned. Ultimately I have faith that people, given the understanding of how they can help bring it about, want to live in a better world. People can change the world, but they can't do it as individuals alone. They have to join with others to do it. One thing I have not changed my views on over the years is the belief that organization is the key to winning victories for social change. That's why it was such a tragedy that so little in the way of organized radicalism survived the collapse of the New Left. (p 252)

Socialist politics should mean more not less debate; socialist democracy will involve an ongoing debate over all the important issues confronting the nation. Genuine democratic debate requires a genuinely free press. My travels to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union convinced me of the necessity for the independence of the mass media from state and Party control. Most people did not believe what they read in the official press or saw or heard on radio or television. Their daily lives belied the "official" facts. A socialist America should not only ensure a free press, it should guarantee as well something that does not exist today under capitalism, and that is the widest possible access to popular communication for individuals and groups. Real democracy is impossible unless people know the facts behind proposed policies, unless they hear all the relevant arguments pro and con-which is something that our own corporate-dominated media has almost as little interest in promoting as the Party-dominated media in the pre-glasnost Soviet Union. (p 252)

Hitler's triumph made terribly clear the danger of our earlier notions, as well as the very stark differences between a fascist regime and "bourgeois democracy" as represented by someone like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. By the mid-1930s the issue of anti-fascism permeated all our mass work. In countries like France and Spain where big socialist movements existed, Communists sought to unite the Left into antifascist united fronts. In the United States we sought to work with the socialists, and we also began to reevaluate our earlier, highly critical assessment of the New Deal.