Socialist Promises, Promises

The increasing popularity of socialism in America is frightening.

Jeffrey Folks | August 31, 2026

The increasing popularity of socialism in America is frightening.  When candidates like Francesca Hong speak of seizing the wealth of the rich, they are speaking of seizing what in most cases took a lifetime of hard work to amass.  Thankfully, the people of Wisconsin had the good sense to defeat her, but only by a small margin.  Others have been more successful, and when they promise free groceries, free housing, free college tuition, free transportation, Medicare for all, and the rest, they are pandering to the worst impulse of parasitism, which goes right along with envy of the rich.

As long as socialism attracted only a small number of voters, it didn’t matter.  But now nearly half of young people in America believe in socialism, and millions of their elders, who should know better, agree with them.  It is frightening because it reminds one of the rise of Hitler and the National Socialists in Germany — and the National Socialists were Socialists.  They and their predecessors in Italy believed that “the State is all, the individual nothing,” and so do American socialists today.

It’s for this reason — the State Is All — that socialists everywhere attempt to eliminate the practice of religion and to outlaw its public expression, as socialists today do in our public schools and universities.  All of their actions are rooted in a single motive: the creation of a centralized, all-powerful State, presumably with themselves in charge.  Though given the predatory nature of socialist politics, those who at first contribute to the movement soon become its victims, as happened in the French Revolution with the Jabobins turning against the Dantonists and other factions, in the Soviet Union with Stalin’s show trials executing thousands of his former followers, and in Maoist China with Mao killing as many as 80........

© American Thinker