The Monster Returns: Democratic Socialism
The rise of democratic socialism in the United States and across parts of the wider world is not a minor political fashion. It represents a serious challenge to the foundations of free societies: private property, limited government, individual responsibility, and the spontaneous order of markets that have lifted billions out of poverty. What begins as a call for greater fairness and expanded social programs often hardens into a systematic expansion of state power that erodes the very conditions that make prosperity and liberty possible.
In America the shift has been visible for more than a decade. Once-fringe positions on wealth redistribution, government control of key industries, and the moral superiority of collective planning have moved into the mainstream of one major party. Candidates and officeholders openly describe themselves as democratic socialists, advocating policies that treat private capital as a problem to be managed rather than a source of growth. The rhetoric is carefully packaged as compassion for the working class and the vulnerable, yet the practical effect is to transfer decision-making from individuals, families, and firms to political authorities. History shows that once the state assumes the power to direct large portions of the economy, it rarely stops at the boundaries originally advertised. Price controls, industrial policy, and ever-higher taxation create shortages, black markets, and the need for still more intervention. The pattern is familiar from twentieth-century experiments that began with democratic mandates and ended in stagnation or authoritarian control.
The economic threat is fundamental. Democratic socialism rests on the claim that markets systematically fail ordinary people and that political allocation can do better. In reality, market prices coordinate the knowledge of millions of people in ways no central authority can replicate. When government substitutes its own priorities for those price signals, whether through heavy regulation of energy, housing, healthcare, or finance, the result is misallocation. Capital is steered toward politically favoured projects rather than those that create the most value. Innovation slows because the rewards of risk-taking are taxed or regulated away. In countries that have moved furthest down this path, capital flight, declining investment, and falling living standards have followed. The American version may move more slowly, protected for a time by residual wealth and institutional inertia, but the direction of travel is the same: larger public sectors, higher debt, and a gradual substitution of political favour for productive effort.
Beyond economics lies the threat to political liberty. Democratic socialists insist their project remains democratic because it retains elections. Yet democracy is not merely the right to vote; it requires a protected sphere of private life and property that governments cannot casually invade. When the state claims the authority to redefine the terms of ownership, speech, and association in the name of equity, the space for genuine dissent shrinks. Those who question the program risk being labelled enemies of progress. The administrative state expands to enforce the new priorities, and the distinction between public and private begins to dissolve. In practice this has meant pressure on businesses, universities, and media to align with the prevailing ideology, often enforced through regulatory power rather than open debate.
The cultural dimension is equally serious. Democratic socialism rarely travels alone. It arrives entangled with a broader politics of grievance that frames society as a hierarchy of oppressors and oppressed. Success is treated with suspicion, and personal agency is subordinated to structural explanations. The result is a culture of dependency and resentment that undermines the habits of thrift, work, and mutual responsibility that free societies require. When large numbers of citizens come to believe that their well-being depends primarily on political victories rather than their own efforts and voluntary cooperation, the social fabric frays.
The pattern is not confined to the United States. In Latin America, successive waves of democratic socialist or Left-populist governments have repeated the cycle of nationalisation, currency debasement, and eventual crisis. In parts of Europe, parties committed to expansive welfare states and industrial planning have struggled with low growth, high youth unemployment, and the fiscal strains of aging populations. Even where the formal structures of democracy remain, the cumulative effect has been a steady transfer of power from civil society to the state and a corresponding loss of dynamism.
None of this means that markets are perfect or that every social problem can be left to private initiative. Free societies have always mixed voluntary cooperation with limited public provision. The danger arises when the balance tips decisively toward political direction of economic life and when the moral language of justice is used to justify the permanent expansion of coercive power. Democratic socialism offers the promise of security and fairness delivered by the state. What it has repeatedly delivered is diminished prosperity, eroded liberty, and a political culture that prioritises control over creativity. The threat is real precisely because it advances under the banner of democracy itself, making resistance appear reactionary rather than defensive of the conditions that make democracy worth having.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/if-you-think-the-populist-right-is-bad-wait-until-you-meet-the-populist-left/news-story/e5caf6169e8c60a24758472be0c93b7c
https://nypost.com/2026/07/30/us-news/members-of-mamdanis-dsa-pledge-to-support-defend-china/
About a dozen Democratic Socialists of America activists have publicly pledged to "support" and "defend" China amid an apparent push by the communist nation to court members of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's party.
Friends of Socialist China, a London-based group, touts 952 signatories on its pledge to "support the People's Republic of China and to promote understanding of Chinese socialism."
Eleven self-described DSA or DSA International Committee members are among those that "resolve to support, defend and build understanding of Chinese socialism," The Post found.
The Times of London first reported on the DSA signatories.
The pledge argues that "the global advance to socialism is indispensable if humanity is to survive and to flourish," while decrying capitalism as "totally incapable of solving the problems of poverty and inequality" and being " inextricably linked with war, empire, racism, misogyny, alienation, and environmental destruction."
"Why China?" the pledge continues. "We support all states building or aspiring to socialism, and we favour the highest level of unity and friendship between them. We foreground China in particular because its size and level of development give it an objectively critical role in the global transition to socialism."
https://www.thetimes.com/article/c17b2d7b-9010-4bf8-94a2-df9333e1f24a
