If that assessment seems exaggerated, New York’s recent Democratic primaries suggest otherwise. 

On Tuesday, New York City socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani strengthened his influence in the party as candidates he backed won several key races, including victories over a pair of incumbents, Reps. Dan Goldman (D-NY) and Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY). One winning candidate was a member of the DSA.

“The sheer scale of what just happened in New York is historic,” Bhaskar Sunkara, former DSA vice-chair and president of The Nation, told Politico. “Nationally, this is a massive boon for the democratic socialist movement.”

For Americans old enough to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, socialism’s resurgence is a shocking development.

One reason socialism is on the rise is that its faithful have worked diligently to erase its meaning. Today, its advocates rarely describe it as collective ownership of the means of production or the subordination of markets to political control. Instead, socialism is often presented as compassion.

“One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) remarked during the 2024 campaign.

It’s a clever rhetorical move. After all, who could oppose neighborliness?

Yet more than 100 million victims of socialist regimes would object to this sanitized definition. Governments that embraced Marxist ideas and reorganized economic life through state power did not produce “neighborliness.” They produced repression, poverty, and mass death.

While socialist leaders often claimed noble intentions, the ideology has long drawn energy from a less admirable impulse: resentment. When Winston Churchill famously called socialism “the gospel of envy,” he was identifying the sickness at the heart of socialism: a covetous heart.

While the Bible warns against coveting “anything that belongs to your neighbor,” Karl Marx rejected the premise entirely by labeling private property itself as a moral abomination.

“The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: abolition of private property,” Marx wrote.

Marx died in relative obscurity, but his ideas unfortunately blossomed in the mind of a young Russian named Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, later known as Vladimir Lenin. Lenin used Marx’s theories to wage a bloody revolution and establish the world’s first communist state. The Soviet regime institutionalized political violence, beginning with the Red Terror, which claimed thousands of lives and laid the foundation for decades of repression. Under Joseph Stalin, the system forced its people into collectivization, labor camps, purges, and famine. Similar tragedies later unfolded in Maoist China, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and elsewhere. 

Given this history, how in the world has socialism regained popularity?

Part of the answer is cognitive dissonance. Most Americans who express favorable views of socialism do not support political terror, famine, or dictatorship. They’ve divorced themselves from its actual fruit and bought into the lie that socialism simply means fairness and a strong social safety net.

There’s also the fact that many people who embrace the ideology have never bothered to read Marx, the “holy father of socialism,” whose unholy gospel did not just call for abolishing private property but the family, history, and eternal truth, all of which he saw as bourgeois creations.

As America approaches its 250th anniversary, it is worth remembering what made the United States unique. The country thrived largely because the Founding Fathers created a system designed to limit and frustrate the centralized political power, the very power socialists crave.

“The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty,” John Adams warned.

To be fair, today’s Republicans are hardly pure defenders of free markets. From unconstitutional tariffs to support of public ownership of tech companies, GOP leaders have embraced forms of economic intervention they would have decried as statist had Democrats embraced them.

Democrats, however, should not see these GOP policies as an excuse to embrace Marxism. Instead, they should see it as a political opportunity.

FACULTY POLITICAL BIAS IS EVEN MORE WIDESPREAD THAN WE THOUGHT

There’s been a great deal of chatter on the center-left about Democrats returning to an abundance agenda that focuses on fixing real economic problems in cities and America more broadly. If Democrats truly want to solve problems such as housing shortages, stagnant growth, and declining opportunity, they should begin by rejecting an ideology that has repeatedly concentrated power, undermined markets, and failed to deliver on its promises.

America does not need a revival of socialism. It needs a renewed commitment to the institutions of liberty that made prosperity possible in the first place.