The Socialist Surge Revives Failed and Hateful Ideas
Socialism, totalitarianism, and bigotry find a receptive audience among the young and disillusioned.
Abdul El-Sayed's victory in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary battle is only the latest by candidates affiliated with or adjacent to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Unlike many of the openly socialist officeholders and political hopefuls gaining traction in the Democratic Party, El-Sayed claims to be a capitalist, but his positions are indistinguishable from those of the left-wing figures he campaigns with, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), and podcaster Hasan Piker, who has aligned himself with both the Chinese government and Hamas.
As democratic socialists in general and the DSA in particular take over the Democratic Party, it's worth examining the positions they take, the enemies they pick, and who supports them to see what they have in store for us as they seek to remake the country.
You are reading The Rattler from J.D. Tuccille and Reason. Get more of J.D.'s commentary on government overreach and threats to everyday liberty.
Young, Credentialed, and Unhappy Recruits
At a time when trust in higher education is sliding among Americans, the socialist surge is largely a project of young college graduates. El-Sayed "eked out his victory by winning young voters and highly educated voters," finds a Washington Post analysis. That squares with a June Pew Research report that "Democrats who are White, younger or college-educated are more likely to view democratic socialists positively." Credentialed but relatively low-income people make up the core of DSA recruitment.
Political analyst Nate Silver writes that "the sweet spot for the DSA" is "voters with postgraduate degrees but lower-to-middle household incomes of $30K to $60K per year." Silver adds that "only 19 percent of Americans with bachelor's degrees or higher had household incomes of $60K or below. The DSA rate is around twice that." He puts this in the context of Peter Turchin's elite overproduction hypothesis which argues that the country's universities crank out too many credentialed graduates, with student loan debt attached to not-so-useful degrees, to be absorbed into the prestigious positions they believe they're entitled to. The result is disillusionment and a search for somebody or something to blame.
That blame is falling on capitalism, American and western civilization in general, and Israel and Jews (the line between the people and the only majority-Jewish nation is inherently fuzzy, and "antizionism" has become a cover for bigotry the way the pseudoscientific term "antisemitism" repackaged old-fashioned Jew-hatred in the 19th century).
Given that the rise of the DSA is likely rooted in disillusionment and resentment, it may be a losing proposition to point out that socialism's nostrums are nonsense. Still, we need to emphasize that free-market capitalism is good and contributes to liberty and prosperity while socialism does the opposite.
Free Markets Brought Us Prosperity. The New Radicals Support the Opposite
The share of the world's population in poverty plunged from 43.41 percent in 1990, when the communist bloc fell, to 10.4 percent in 2024, according to World Bank figures. Economist Deirdre McCloskey observed that such enrichment is due to "liberalism, in the free-market European sense."
But socialists inside and outside the DSA want to do away with the free exchange that brought us rising prosperity. The DSA envisions in its program "a future without capitalism" in which "food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren't for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities." This future, the DSA adds, requires no payments for rent, mortgage, insurance, or other bills.
"There are prices on housing, medicine, food, and energy because these goods are scarce and have alternative uses," responds the Cato Institute's Alex Nowrasteh. "In a free-market economy, workers produce those goods because they are paid to do so, the owners of firms organize production efficiently because their profits depend on it, and the owners of capital sell it to the most profitable firms. All that activity is guided by the incentives and information provided by prices."
Capitalism Brings Freedom, While Socialism Promotes Totalitarianism
Importantly, adds, Nowrasteh, "economic freedom and political freedom are correlated." As the Fraser Institute's Human Freedom Index 2025 points out, this is largely because "economic freedom decreases the dependence of individuals on government or other potential forces in society that would restrict liberty or attempt to centralize power."
Once-prominent socialist economist Robert Heilbroner, who later abandoned the ideology, acknowledged in a 1978 Dissent article the totalitarian nature of socialism. He conceded "the difficulty that a socialist culture will experience in accepting the tolerant political and perhaps social attitudes of bourgeois life." By contrast, he said, capitalism "celebrates, supports, encourages and breeds the idea of the primary importance of the individual" and upholds personal freedom.
Which is why the DSA's call to "replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress" sounds less like an interestingly naive take on democracy than a scheme to eliminate checks and balances on a government socialists aspire to control.
"In 2021, the DSA joined the São Paulo Forum, a communist-led international network," Jonathan Chait observed in The Atlantic in July. "It proclaimed its solidarity with Venezuela under the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro, and with Cuba under that of the Castro brothers. The DSA now locates its vision of the ideal society in the world's most despotic regimes."
Socialists Revive Ancient Bigotry
DSA-aligned figures are not especially fond of the United States and its allies. It's not difficult to find comments like New York socialist congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier's quip: "I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me." But as a group, they especially despise the world's only majority-Jewish state.
Michigan's El-Sayed says he believes the Israeli government is as evil as the terrorist group Hamas, which launched the October 7 attacks, and calls it guilty of "apartheid" and "genocide." The DSA last year adopted a resolution denouncing Zionism (the belief that Jews have the right to establish and maintain Israel) as "a racist, imperialist, settler-colonial project" and made belief that "Israel has a right to defend itself" an offense publishable by expulsion from the organization. Hamas Piker claimed and repeated that Hamas is "a thousand times better" than Israel. Colorado congressional candidate Melat Kiros declined to label as antisemitic a deadly firebombing attack on a Jewish rally in Boulder.
"As a Democratic member of Congress, I can attest that for a growing number of my colleagues, being anti-Israel has now become a nonnegotiable moral litmus test," warns Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D–N.J.) "History teaches us that antisemitism is never the endpoint of hatred."
It's as if the rising tide of modern radicals set out to revive some of the worst ideas of the past—socialism, totalitarianism, and bigotry—and combine them in the burnished turd of a modern political program for those disappointed with their lot in life. The ideas the movement peddles are ridiculous, hateful, and have proven themselves dangerous time and again. Yet they continue to find an audience.