Beginning with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's election victory in 2025, democratic socialist candidates have won a string of major Democratic primaries – most recently Florida state Rep. Angie Nixon's upset U.S. Senate nomination win – and come close in several others. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has long been the most prominent self-proclaimed democratic socialist in national politics, and was the runner-up for the Democratic presidential nomination in both 2016 and 2020.

Democratic socialism is a terrible ideology. If implemented, its agenda would cause grave harm and imperil democracy itself. And in seeking massive state control of the economy, today's socialists ironically have much in common with the MAGA nationalists they claim to oppose.

Both promote government control over the economy, and both paths undermine liberty, prosperity and democracy. Socialists do not control the Democratic Party in the way MAGA largely dominates the Republicans. But their influence is growing.

What's the DSA's agenda? Let's look at the socialist wish list.

The democratic socialist agenda goes far beyond a marginal increase in economic regulation or welfare spending. It amounts to sweeping government control of the economy and society, on a scale that invites comparison to Cuba, North Korea and the old Soviet Union.

The platform of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), America's most prominent socialist organization, states the goal plainly: a system in which "food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren't for-profit businesses; they are common goods" – which is to say, a complete government takeover of those industries.

The DSA also envisions a society with no debt, no mortgages and no landlords, which would require government control of most housing, plus extensive rent control and a $20 an hour or higher minimum wage on whatever remains in private hands.

Economists across the political spectrum agree that this kind of wage floor would price millions of workers out of the labor market, and that rent control would greatly shrink the housing supply.

All told, the DSA agenda would add $71 trillion to $212 trillion in new federal spending over the next decade – at least doubling, and possibly tripling, today's $7.4 trillion in annual federal outlays, which are already unsustainable on their own. And there's no way to cover it by taxing........

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