In a new documentary, film-maker Yael Bridge looks back and forward to see why some people have been so repelled by socialism and how things might change in the future
Lee Carter is a US Marine Corps veteran and Lyft driver. He is also a socialist. After he suffered a workplace injury, realised the system was broken and Googled “How do you run for office?”, he stood for
election to the
Virginia state assembly.
A campaign leaflet from his opponent displayed the faces of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong – and Carter, who told film-maker Yael Bridge: “It’s from another era entirely. I was born in ’87, I don’t remember the
Berlin wall falling, so the ‘red scare’ – anybody who uses the big scary ‘s’ word is automatically Stalin – it just doesn’t work any more.”