Earlier this week, CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten delivered startling news: Socialism is all the rage in the Democratic Party.Citing Gallup polling data, Enten noted that two of three Democrats have a favorable view of socialism. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a political organization in the United States, was actually outpolling congressional Democrats by 13 points.“Up like a rocket,” was how Enten described socialism’s popularity among the party faithful.
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.The fallout from Tuesday night’s 2026 primary election results, specifically the wins in three of New York’s U.S. House of Representatives districts, shows that both Democrats and Republicans are throwing all their eggs in the socialism basket. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
