Socialism’s Popularity is Not About Winning the Economic Argument — Despite the Austrian economists (Mises & Hayek) decisively winning the “calculation debate,” showing central planning is impossible, socialism remains appealing for non-ideological reasons.

It’s Driven by Power and Resentment — People turn to socialism when they see government already redistributing wealth to the well-connected. Socialists promise to redirect that redistribution toward “the people,” but this misunderstands how states actually function.

Democratic Socialism is Not a Solution — The new wave of socialist candidates (linked to Mamdani) would accelerate the interventionist system rather than fix it, as states inherently serve the interests of those who control them.

In the last few weeks, we have seen self-described democratic socialists winning primary elections across the country. Most were closely associated with Zohran Mamdani, the socialist who became mayor of New York City this year, who is seen by many on the left as a figure who is finally able to enact the kind of agenda that had made Bernie Sanders and AOC popular in previous election cycles.

The growing popularity of this kind of explicit, full-on socialism and the indisputable electoral success it’s having in some primaries has predictably caused establishment liberals, conservatives, and libertarians to panic. Centrist commentators across the country have been sharing the most extreme policy positions and previous statements from the socialist candidates who won their races, seemingly under the assumption that the radicalism alone will be sufficiently off-putting to enough people. That is, at best, a dangerous misreading of the situation.

Despite the surface-level rhetoric used by all sides, the growing popularity of “socialism” or “populism” is primarily a non-ideological phenomenon.

That becomes obvious if we look back in time. Because there was a period in the early twentieth century when the intellectual battle between advocates of socialism and capitalism was as rigorous and intellectual as many like to pretend it still is. That phase culminated in the so-called “calculation debate” between Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek and socialist scholars like Abba Lerner and Oskar Lange. The debate sought to determine if a centrally planned economy was—not preferable to........

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