On July 4, 2026, the Democratic Socialists of America announced it had surpassed 120,000 members, the largest socialist organization in American history, larger than Eugene Debs's Socialist Party at its 1912 peak. Pick your irony: a group built around collective ownership of the economy chose Independence Day to claim the mantle of America's biggest-ever socialist movement. The Tea Party picked the same holiday to explain itself back in 2009, dumping metaphorical tea into the harbor to protest a government that had stopped listening to the people who paid for it. Both movements changed their parties. Both claim the mantle of the ordinary American against a distant establishment. That's where the resemblance ends.

I've spent thirty years underwriting risk for institutional investors and sitting as an expert witness on fiduciary duty in federal and state courts. My job in that chair is simple: separate what an institution says it stands for from what it actually does under pressure. Apply that same test to these two movements and you get two very different verdicts.

The Tea Party emerged from Rick Santelli's February 2009 rant on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, aimed at a bailout that rewarded bad decisions with other people's money. Thomas Sowell and Milton Friedman had been making the same argument for decades: government spending crowds out private choice and someone always pays the bill. The movement's demand was almost quaint by today's standards. Follow the Constitution. Cut spending. Respect enumerated powers. Hold Congress accountable for the checkbook it controls. Reagan had made the case a generation earlier that government wasn't the solution........

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