Socialism is gaining ground in American politics and is dragging the Democratic Party increasingly to the left. Politicians belonging to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and those associated with it have enjoyed recent electoral victories.
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The new mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, is the most prominent among them, but since taking office in January there have been others. A socialist won the Democratic Party primaries for mayor of Washington D.C., which practically guarantees her the position. Far-left candidates have won Democratic primaries in the states of Michigan and Colorado for national senator and representative positions, respectively. A DSA member is about to win the Democratic primary to govern the state of Wisconsin. DSA reports dozens of other electoral victories across the country.
Not all will succeed against their Republican opponents, but the rise of socialists within the Democratic Party is reminiscent of the Republican Party in 2016. At that time, the populist Donald Trump emerged with ideas opposed to Reagan-era republicanism and against the wishes of the party establishment. Today, traditional and moderate Democrats do not know how to respond to the radical proposals of their party colleagues.
The question dividing a disordered Democratic Party is: in the face of Trump’s right-wing nationalism, should the party moderate or continue moving to the left? DSA members, who are still a minority in the party, advocate a radical agenda that, according to them, is what the people demand.
What do these leftists believe in? According to the DSA platform, they seek “to create a democratic socialist republic.” This is no small matter, so they add: “We know that, to achieve total victory, it will be necessary to build a new society from scratch.”
In practice, DSA says this means: defunding the police, abolishing the Senate, withdrawing funds from the Department of Defense, abolishing prisons, transforming large corporations into state-owned entities, replacing the presidency and the Supreme Court with bodies chosen and controlled by Congress, etc. Needless to say, this plan is absolutely contrary to the social and constitutional order of the United States. Another way to describe it is that it is madness. This is how it is being labeled not only by Republicans but also by prominent moderate Democrats.
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One reason the proposals of socialist candidates are nonsense is that they completely ignore historical experience. They overlook the record of communism, which killed at least 100 million people and was a total economic failure. Instead, DSA says that under socialism, “you have no debts, you don’t need health insurance, you don’t pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because decent housing is a human right.”
In New York – where the person in charge of housing believes the State has the “sacred right to confiscate property” and that homeownership is racist – the mayor is imposing new rent controls, despite the fact that such a policy has never achieved its goals of providing more housing at better prices.
It will be difficult to impose far-left policies in the United States. But the mere fact that socialists have shown some political viability is striking. It may be that this viability is due to young voters who do not remember the Cold War, or to people fed up with inflation, or to the fact that Trump has shown that the traditional capitalist course of American policies can be changed (the federal government today has stakes in about 30 private companies, for example).
For the sake of the United States, let us hope that extremism does not transform the Democratic Party in the next 10 years.
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