The term “Socialism” has been around for a long time. Also, there are dozens and dozens of definitions of “Socialism,” and each socialist can probably give three or four definitions of what it really is. What we’re going to do here today is explain — with evidence — what Socialism has historically been in multiple settings, while referring to a few of the many who claim “their” version of “Socialism” is THE definition.
Let’s begin with the simple history of the political philosophy. Then, we will break it down in the context of Zorhan Mamdani’s stated “version” of Socialism, or “democrat socialism.
The Beginning
Over the past 100 years or so, socialist experiments around the world unleashed a vast tide of tyranny, starvation, and mass murder on a scale never seen before in human history. Socialism was implemented in the Soviet Union, East Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary, Maoist China, Chávez-Maduro’s Venezuela, and other places. In every one of these places, it has failed. As American writer Joshua Muravchik observes in his 2019 Wall Street Journal article on socialism, “It’s hard to think of another idea that has been tried and failed as many times in as many ways or at a steeper price in human suffering.”
Despite its demonstrated record of producing evils, however, the spirit of socialism is very much alive today, even in the United States. According to a 2019 Gallup poll, as many as 49% of millennials and Gen Z members (ages 18 to 39 in 2019) hold a favorable view of socialism. Socialists are fond of saying that socialism has not failed because real socialism has never been tried. In the eyes of today’s democratic socialists, the earlier socialist leaders failed because they were “authoritarian socialists” who believed in a strictly hierarchical, top-down bureaucracy and “perverted” socialism’s noble ideals—if, instead, our socialist government is led by public-spirited people whose beliefs are rooted in democratic principles, then we will achieve real socialism and all will be well. The problem, they argue, has never been the socialist horse, but the jockeys who rode it and led it astray.
This couldn’t be further from the truth. When today’s socialists talk about building a non-authoritarian socialist government rooted in democratic and humanitarian principles, they are far from original. In fact, that has always been what the earlier socialists said they would achieve. Aimed at improving the lot of the common people and creating a more egalitarian society, the early socialist movements emerged primarily as a reaction to the inhumane working conditions and yawning wealth disparities in industrialized Europe. Empowering working-class people, dismantling societal hierarchies, and ensuring a more equitable distribution of goods and services have always been among the many honorable objectives of socialist leaders. Socialist regimes have all ended in varying degrees of totalitarianism, to be sure, but there is no denying that earlier socialist leaders, just like today’s, generally started with good intentions.
Lenin’s seminal book The State and Revolution, presumably the closest thing ever to a Leninist manifesto, does not read at all like a master plan for creating some sort of totalitarian society. Instead, we see Lenin’s sheer authenticity in trying to salvage his nation and envisioning a brighter future for the masses. Hugo Chávez, architect of Venezuela’s socialist experiment, was constantly praised for his noble intentions by mainstream intellectuals such as Cornel West, Naomi Klein, and Noam Chomsky. President Carter claimed that he “never doubted Hugo Chavez’s commitment to improving the lives of millions of his fellow countrymen.” Not even Stalin and Mao set out with the intention of creating a totalitarian state and turning their countries into a living hell. It was always in practice, however, that socialist regimes turned out to be totalitarian. As German economist Kristian Niemietz put it, “Socialism is always democratic and emancipatory in its aspirations, but oppressive and authoritarian in its actual practice.”
The problem, therefore, has not been bad jockeys, but the socialist horse itself. Real socialism has been tried many, many times and it has ended in dismal failure without exception. By the time it collapsed in 1991, the USSR had left humanity with what German historian Tarik Cyril Amar called “a legacy of tyranny and oppression, at first manically bloodthirsty and then (mostly) depressingly drab.” Its economy had been stagnating for two decades with farms and factories producing far short of the demand. Soviet satellite states, independent in name only, were held under tight rein by the USSR and replicated most of the brutal methods the Soviets used to suppress opposing voices. Their economies were even more enfeebled than the Soviet economy, with the New York Timesin 1987 calling Eastern Europe “increasingly a museum of the early industrial age.” Singapore, a city-state that had only two million residents at the time, was exporting 20 percent more machinery to the West than all of Eastern European nations combined.
In Asia, Mao’s Soviet-style socialism plunged China into two of its most catastrophic historical periods ever: the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The former was a bold, comprehensive campaign to industrialize China’s agrarian economy that went horribly wrong and resulted in more than 30 million Chinese starving to death. The latter was Mao’s attempt to purge political opposition and reassert his authority after the failure of the Great Leap Forward. Notwithstanding the benign-sounding name, the Cultural Revolution was notoriously vicious. It crippled the Chinese economy, obliterated much of China’s social fabric, and caused yet another two million deaths. It wasn’t until the late seventies when Deng Xiaoping steered China away from socialist planning and incorporated elements of the free-enterprise system that the country’s well-known economic miracle started gaining momentum.
More recently, Chavez’s and Maduro’s socialist regimes have turned Venezuela, once the wealthiest nation in South America, into utter ruin. Its economy is now marked by hyperinflation, oppression, and starvation, with nearly one-fifth of the population having already fled the country since 2014. Socialism has also been tried in Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Somalia, and many other countries. The end result has always been the same: tyranny and mass suffering. Ordinary citizens, the very people whom the socialists claimed to champion, were shot dead on the streets, thrown in prison camps, and deprived of the most basic human rights. What started as a well-meaning commitment to improve life for the masses brought about economic collapse, political oppression, and more than 100 million deaths across socialist societies.
“Since [Mamdani’s] primary win in June, Democratic Socialism has soared in popularity here and across the nation,” the NYC-DSA tweeted after his general election win. “Our unprecedented growth is a testament to our vision and our ability to inspire renewed hope and political engagement from the working class.”
As Mamdani’s campaign pushed democratic socialism further into the mainstream, it has also raised questions about what the political ideology is — and isn’t.
Most notably, President Trump has frequently criticized Mamdani as a communist in the lead-up to the election. Mamdani refuted that characterization in a June appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, saying, “I am not.”
Mamdani went on to describe his brand of democratic socialism, a term that is largely up to interpretation.
“When we talk about my politics, I call myself a democratic socialist in many ways inspired by the words of Dr. King from decades ago, who said, ‘Call it democracy or call it democratic socialism. There has to be a better distribution of wealth for all of God’s children in this country,” he said, referring to a 1961 speech by Martin Luther King Jr. “And as income inequality has declined nationwide, it has increased in New York City. And, ultimately, what we need is a city where every single person can thrive.”
What Is Democratic Socialism?
There is no one-size-fits-all definition of democratic socialism. However, its adherents broadly support the government taking control over certain sectors of the economy, such as health care and utilities, to benefit the public rather than private corporations.
“We want to collectively own the key economic drivers that dominate our lives, such as energy production and transportation,” reads the DSA’s website.
The DSA, which has been around since the 1980s, calls itself the largest socialist organization in the U.S. It says it has more than 80,000 members organized into campus and community chapters across all 50 states.
The group says its members are socialists because they reject an international economic order sustained by things like private profit, discrimination and violence “in defense of the status quo,” and instead envision a more equitable and humane social order “based both on democratic planning and market mechanisms.”
Democratic socialists often distance themselves from historic examples of socialism and communism, which have had largely negative connotations in the U.S. since the Cold War era. Proponents also say democratic socialism goes further than “social democracy,” which often involves a strong welfare state operating under capitalism.
“We believe there are many avenues that feed into the democratic road to socialism,” the DSA says. “Our vision pushes further than historic social democracy and leaves behind authoritarian visions of socialism in the dustbin of history.”
The Communist Party USA says that while it shares some values of democratic socialists — like opposing war and wanting a higher minimum wage — it believes those can only happen through a fundamental restructuring of society.
Many democratic socialists acknowledge that radical transformation won’t happen in the short term, so they use tools like organizing, lobbying, and protesting in hopes of making change within the existing system, at least for now.
“As we are unlikely to see an immediate end to capitalism tomorrow, DSA fights for reforms today that will weaken the power of corporations and increase the power of working people,” it explains, naming single-payer Medicare for All and the Green New Deal as examples.
Why Is Democratic Socialism On The Rise?
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont put democratic socialism on many people’s radars during his 2016 presidential campaign.
While a registered independent, Sanders has described himself as a democratic socialist for decades, the ideology shaping his stances on everything from poverty to health care to higher education.
Sanders is not a member of the DSA. But his candidacy is credited with boosting the organization’s membership and visibility, just in time for the first Trump presidency.
Holly Otterbein, an Axios reporter who has covered the rise of socialism, told NPR’s It’s Been a Minute earlier this week that she saw the biggest increase in DSA membership after Trump’s 2016 win.
“When I’ve talked to people who have become members of the DSA or DSA leaders, they felt like that 2016 election sort of discredited the Democratic Party in their eyes,” she said.
Many young voters have become discontented with the Democratic Party, a trend that has continued through the COVID-19 pandemic, economic turbulence, and now Trump’s second term. All of that has fueled the democratic socialist movement.
“Socialism is a recurring talking point for people that still can’t find ways to get out of the economic precarity that their generation and the immediately prior generations couldn’t get out of,” Lex McMenamin, head of the politics section at Teen Vogue, told It’s Been a Minute.
A Gallup poll released in September found that roughly two-thirds of Democrats view socialism positively, up from 50% in 2010, even as Americans as a whole continue to view capitalism more favorably.
What Could Mamdani’s Win Mean For The Movement?
Recent years have seen the elections of DSA members, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.
Both Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez — as well as the NYC-DSA — endorsed Mamdani before the primary in June, and have headlined rallies with him in the months since.
After Mamdani’s win on Tuesday, an NBC reporter asked Ocasio-Cortez how she would define democratic socialism.
“To me, it’s this radical idea that working people have economic rights,” she said, listing housing, a livable wage, health care, and child care as examples.
Political scientists have cautioned that Mamdani’s approach may not be a winning blueprint for democratic socialist candidates running outside of New York City, where registered Democrats heavily outnumber Republicans. But supporters see lessons in his success.
“He had to defeat a Republican and the old guard of the Democratic party at the same time,” Ocasio-Cortez told CNN, referring to Curtis Sliwa and former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. “And he still won resoundingly.
“And I think the message that that sends is that the Democratic Party cannot last much longer by denying the future, by trying to undercut our young, by trying to undercut a next generation of diverse and upcoming Democrats that … our actual electorate and voters support.”
NYC’s DSA is already touting Mamdani’s victory in recruitment efforts, calling it just the beginning. Notably, during his campaign, Mamdani stressed that his platform differs from the DSA’s and that he has taken a more moderate stance on issues such as eliminating misdemeanor offenses and defunding the police.
McMenamin, of Teen Vogue, says Mamdani’s mayorship could change what socialism means to people, depending on how he governs.
“I think people are going to really want to talk about socialism if some of these policy changes actually start coming into effect,” McMenamin adds. “And so what could happen in New York over the next year could make a big change for people in all 50 states.”
German philosopher G.W. F. Hegel famously said, “We learn from history that we do not learn from history.” The enduring appeal of socialism attests to Hegel’s insight. However, the underlying problem is not that we are unable or unwilling to learn from history. Rather, we have so often found ourselves repeating the mistakes of previous generations because we have drawn the wrong lessons from them. The conclusion we should draw from our socialist experiments is not that we need a different jockey to achieve real socialism, but that real socialism has been the problem all along. Unless we truly take this lesson to heart, it won’t be long before we find ourselves stuck in a living hell once again.
Summary
As is the consensus among most politicians to “keep those seeking truth in politics,” Mamdani’s mayoral victory demands that Americans examine the details of his stated political stance. You can read above what he “states” are his foundational absolutes. However, understanding the nuances is virtually impossible.
And that’s for effect!
That’s the hope of Mamdani and other so-called “Democrat-socialists” as they paint a pretty picture with amazing promises. That’s where the attempted fraud sneaks in. Leftists understand that the definition of Socialism needs NO clarification. Why is that?
The louder, entrenched explanations, arguing over every detail of the political perspective, the more likely Americans will jump in.
So, what to do?
Read and Listen! Then trust God to give us all the facts: both those on the table, but also those OFF the table.
“You shall know the truth, and the Truth will set you free.”
