The Deceptive Allure of Socialism, in Five Simple Points

If there’s one major takeaway from the 2026 midterm elections, it’s that socialism is apparently on the rise in America. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) fielded several successful candidates in recent elections, clinching victories that would have been unthinkable as little as a decade ago. Among young people, socialism has been polling more favorably than it has in the past, despite the ideology’s proven track record of poverty, bloodshed, and failure. So, what’s going on here? How did a cowboy frontier country that spent decades living in terror of the Red Menace suddenly become so comfortable with central planning and the nanny state? Why are these ideas so resilient, that they keep having to be challenged over and over again every few years? It turns out there are many reasons for socialism’s appeal, some specific to this year and others more general. For those of us who want to combat the ideology and preserve the kind of values that made America great, it’s imperative that we understand the factors that attract people to socialism in the first place.

1. Failure of Leadership

One of the major reasons DSA candidates did so well this year is that they were given a huge opportunity to capitalize on Republicans’ self-inflicted mistakes. Donald Trump campaigned as a different kind of politician, an outsider and a maverick not beholden to the entrenched machinery of the Deep State. He promised to drain the swamp, to stop the pointless foreign wars, to cut wasteful programs and spending through D.O.G.E., and to make America great again. Had he delivered on even a couple of those promises, we might be seeing a very different election cycle.

Instead, D.O.G.E. was almost immediately dissolved without accomplishing anything. Rather than cut spending, Trump demanded a $1.5 trillion military budget. He involved us in a war in Iran which, despite repeated assurances that it would be quick and painless, has no sign of ending anytime soon. He completely lost interest in pursuing justice against crooked insiders, like those mentioned in the Epstein Files, while viciously attacking anyone who dared to suggest that we should not be protecting powerful pedophiles. And when all these policies, along with aggressive tariffs, resulted in skyrocketing consumer prices, his administration mocked and belittled those who are worried about the affordability of gas and groceries. Given all this, it is understandable that voters would look for an alternative, and the DSA was savvy enough to pounce on this chance by making big promises on affordability and other voter concerns. Of course, such promises are not worth the paper they are printed on, but this brings me to my next point…

2. Non-Incumbency

It is normal for the incumbent party to lose seats in an off-year election. This is usually because the party in power overpromises and underdelivers, as explained above. So, it is no surprise to see Democrats doing well in 2026. The Democratic Socialists, however, have an added advantage in that they have never really held power in a meaningful way. Voters can (sometimes) remember that previous Democratic administrations have not lived up to the hype, which is why they tend to trade off the White House to Republicans every four to eight years. But the slate of DSA candidates represents a tabula rasa to most voters, with no experience to draw from by which to judge their policy proposals and talking points.

With mainstream Democrats, we can point to the disconnect between Barack Obama’s anti-war campaign rhetoric and his bellicose actions as president, or to Joe Biden’s disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. DSA candidates, on the other hand, are untested. They have no records to defend, and so we can only judge them by their rhetoric, which is something most of these candidates seem to have a talent for.

This lack of empirical data means that democratic socialism has the luxury of remaining a theoretical construct, and anything can sound good in theory. The proof of the pudding is in the eating and the test of a policy is in the implementation. Until we see some of these socialist ideas actually become reality, their advocates can continue to talk up all the supposed advantages of their plans without mentioning any of the inevitable downsides.

3. Definition Games

A related reason that voters are finding socialism attractive is that most don’t even know what the word means. Historically, the definition has been something like “a political and economic system in which the government owns the means of production,” but this is too technical and abstract for the average voter to wrap their heads around, and in any case it’s far from the way that DSA candidates market themselves.

Socialists have a history of using propagandistic language to make their ideas sound warm and fuzzy, the kind of thing that no one could object to. Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank once described government as “the things we choose to do together”, which sounds nice if you don’t think about it for more than a second. Examples of things we do together include eating, drinking, going to church, operating a business, joining a club, playing games, and raising a family. It would be insane (and insanely dishonest) to call all of these activities “government.” But government sounds more friendly and less threatening when described this way as opposed to a faceless, heartless bureaucracy run by the worst people in the world.

In an interview with the New Yorker, DSA co-chair Megan Romer, when asked to define democratic socialism, leaned into the “democracy” aspect, claiming “it’s people having a democratic say so in all of the things that they need to survive,” a helpfully vague platitude that leaves out traditional socialist policies like not allowing individuals to start and run their own businesses. When asked a similar question, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani waxed poetic about “dignity” and taking on income inequality, bolstering his statement with a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. To hear it from these people, socialism is more about peace and love than the private property seizures, inefficient bureaucracies, and centralized power of actual socialist countries.

Meanwhile, capitalism, the alternative to socialism, is not subject to this wishful, idealistic set of definitions, and is instead invariably described as a monopolistic, plutocratic, unfair, and cruel system of wage slavery to the elites. Ironically, almost every criticism of capitalism focuses on the areas of the economy with the most government intervention and regulation, such as health care, the military, education, and labor. The monopolies socialists claim to hate exist because the government makes competition either illegal or unfeasible. The reason employers have so much power over workers is a dismally poor economy created by choking regulations that result in fewer jobs than there are willing workers, making it a buyer’s market. The reason health care and college are so expensive is because government props up universities and insurance companies with subsidies and mandates.

If socialism is always defined in the most charitable, hypothetical terms, and capitalism is defined by outright lying about what it is, then of course voters are going to prefer socialism.

4. Ignorance of History

Part of the problem is that the greatest and most visible failures of socialism are now sufficiently remote that few people remember them anymore. The 20th century was largely marked by the emergence of a number of regimes that explicitly organized around Marxist principles and those of scientific socialism, the belief that smart people could rationally plan a society from the top down. The most famous of these is the Soviet Union, which locked the West into a decades-long Cold War for cultural and ideological supremacy. I would put Nazi Germany in that same category, but people get triggered when you refer to National Socialists as socialists, so we can leave them out in favor of Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and Castro’s Cuba. Without exception these were brutal and repressive regimes that trampled on human rights and left millions of corpses in their wake, all in the name of glorious, Utopian socialism.

But the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, 35 years ago. Mao died in 1976. Pol Pot was overthrown in 1979. Castro lasted a bit longer, but Cuba is a small island and the U.S. embargo meant that few people got a close look at what was really going on there. Other more modern examples, like Venezuela, do not get the kind of media coverage that would lead the average American to associate famines, poverty, and corruption with socialism, despite their obvious correlation. And while school curricula talk endlessly about the horrors of Nazism, many students are almost entirely ignorant of the atrocities committed by Lenin, Stalin, and Mao.

Bernie Sanders, despite once being a vocal defender of the Soviet Union, now prefers to point to the harmless and charming countries of Denmark and Sweden when discussing socialism. Never mind that neither of these countries is actually socialist at all. It’s true that they have high taxes and extensive welfare states, but private enterprise is generally less tightly regulated than in the United States, resulting in thriving capitalist economies.

Young people like the sound of socialism because they have been failed by their teachers, who gloss over the crimes and collapses of socialist regimes because they are largely sympathetic to the ideology. As it turns out, there’s a reason for this too.

5. Envy

It has often been wondered why intellectuals seem to be inherently drawn to socialism. It is tempting, and some do fall into this trap, to reason that if all the smart people like socialism, then socialism must be correct. To think this is to ignore the fact that mere intelligence does not immunize one from bad ideas or cognitive biases. In fact, some studies have found that intelligent people are more likely to fall prey to conspiracy theories and other bizarre ideas than their more average counterparts.

The real reason is somewhat more disappointing. People are self-centered and they like to imagine that whatever gifts they possess must be more important than those they lack. Professional athletes value athleticism, beautiful actors and models value beauty, and smart people value intelligence. But when university professors look around at the world, they see that their skills are not valued as highly as they feel they deserve. Why should a physicist have to toil away in obscurity, fighting for tenure and publishing in arcane journals no one reads, when meathead jocks and pretty-boy actors are earning millions for their relatively unimportant talents? Why should the opportunistic finance bro or the slimy real estate salesman be able to afford three houses while their betters, the noble scholars, are forced to subsist on a teacher’s salary? Such an arrangement seems unfair, and so the intellectuals favor an alternative in which smart people not only get to run everything, but also occupy the most prestigious positions in society. This attitude dates back at least as far as Plato, who proposed a caste of “philosopher kings” in his famous work The Republic. Oh, the philosopher just happens to think that philosophers should rule the world? What a coincidence.

This kind of thinking is not limited to professional academics. Every one of us is susceptible to resentment towards those who succeed where we fail. It’s an unfortunate fact of human nature. Unsurprisingly, a system that promises to even things out, to stop anyone having to feel inferior to anyone else, has broad appeal. But it’s a child’s conception of fairness that demands that everyone receive equally, irrespective of the size of their contributions. Wisdom is recognizing that it is no kind of justice to punish success or to interfere with the free choices of others just because you don’t like the outcome.

Christianity teaches that pride is the cardinal sin that resulted in the fall of mankind, but perhaps we would have done better if our moral and ethical leaders had spent more time condemning the sin of envy, the hatred of those who have more than we do. In practice, the egalitarian impulse behind socialism functions not by lifting everyone up, but by tearing down the successful and the exceptional. As the rock band Rush reminded us, “the trees are all kept equal by hatchet, axe, and saw.” With this election, American voters have handed the first pruning shears to a group of politicians who are just dying to use them.