The Invisible D-Word

First we have Congress’s resolution, the text of which suggests that adopting “socialist policies” would lead to totalitarianism and that any redistribution of wealth is a grave violation of traditional American values. It’s all nonsense.

Eight of the resolution’s twelve “whereas” lines are about the crimes of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and other authoritarian dictators. As a general rule, it’s probably a bad idea to try to learn history from Congressional resolutions instead of reading the work of serious historians, but there’s no denying the brutality of these regimes. What, though, is this supposed to have to do with the politics of Zohran Mamdani or other democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

Democratic socialists oppose authoritarianism in our time. Our commitment to democracy is right there in the name. And we carry on the legacy of socialists before us who opposed authoritarianism in their time — including from totalitarian leaders waving the banner of socialist politics.

In 1918, the socialist Rosa Luxemburg wrote a pamphlet expressing alarm about the early warning signs of authoritarianism in the brand-new Soviet Republic. (The Soviet Union wasn’t formally formed until several years later.) In it, she warned that “socialist democracy” isn’t and couldn’t be “something which begins only in the promised land after the foundations of socialist economy are created; it does not come as some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people who, in the interim, have loyally supported a handful of socialist dictators.”

Luxemburg was arguing that ruling parties and state bureaucracies are unlikely to voluntarily give up their power. A regime that doesn’t start out as a democracy is unlikely to end up as one. And the whole point of socialism, she emphasized, is to create a system more democratic than capitalism.

The Overton window has shifted dramatically to the right on fundamental economic questions in the last fifty years. As a consequence, many Americans aren’t very familiar with the socialist tradition, which makes it easy for opponents of our politics to tar us with the brush of Stalin and Mao. In truth, today’s democratic socialists are, like many of our predecessors who opposed the authoritarianism of those regimes, deeply committed to democracy. In fact, we value democracy so much that we don’t think it should stop at the door to the workplace. Rather than letting a small number of CEOs make decisions that impact vast numbers of people, we want to empower workers and communities through social ownership and democratic control of society’s productive resources.

Since Rosa Luxemburg’s pamphlet about the Russian Revolution, there’s been an unbroken tradition of socialist criticism of authoritarian one-party states that ruled in the name of socialism. Anti-Stalinist socialists in the West, for example, were denouncing Stalin’s show trials at a time when most Western liberals couldn’t be bothered to care. The organization Mamdani is a member of, Democratic Socialists of America, added the d-word to its name when it was founded precisely in order to differentiate the socialism it advocated from the undemocratic system that still existed in countries like the Soviet Union.

Pinning Stalin’s crimes (“the horrors of socialism”) on today’s democratic socialists makes about as much sense as pinning the historical crimes of the Catholic Church (“the horrors of Christianity”) on today’s Southern Baptists.

American History Lessons

How, then, does the resolution try to connect the dots?

The opening “whereas” line claims that “socialist ideology necessitates a concentration of power that has, time and time again, collapsed into communist regimes, totalitarian rule, and brutal dictatorships.” Oddly enough, though, it doesn’t cite a single instance of this actually happening. Instead, the resolution lists off a number of regimes whose leaders started out as authoritarians and saw the Soviet Union as a model to emulate rather than identifying any cases of democratic socialist governments that became authoritarian. Yet, it frames such a degeneration as an inevitability.

For example, the resolution’s authors make no mention of the fact that a democratic socialist party was in power almost continuously in Sweden from 1932 to 1976 without the inevitable collapse into one-party rule and brutal dictatorship playing out. But perhaps Sweden’s socialists were just too busy creating an expansive welfare state and empowering labor unions to set wage floors for whole sectors of the economy to remember that they were supposed to be building gulags for their political enemies.

The bait and switch becomes clear in the last few lines of the resolution:

Whereas President Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, wrote, “To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry, and the fruits acquired by it”;

Whereas President James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution”, wrote that it “is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where the property which a man has in his personal safety and personal liberty, is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest”; and

Whereas the United States was founded on the belief in the sanctity of the individual, to which the collectivistic system of socialism in all of its forms is fundamentally and necessarily opposed: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That Congress denounces socialism in all its forms, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States.

The cherry-picked quotes from Jefferson and Madison suggest that any redistribution of wealth whatsoever is alien to the founding traditions of American politics. The reality is that these men’s views were far more complex than this.

In a 1785 letter from Jefferson to Madison, for example, Jefferson wrote that while he was “conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable,” he thought “enormous inequality” produced “so much misery to the bulk of mankind” that legislators needed to find ways to greatly reduce it. He suggested that this could be alleviated by mandating that inherited land be subdivided among all the children instead of just one heir, which is far more radical than anything Mamdani is proposing. Another “means of silently lessening the inequality of property,” Jefferson wrote, “is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise,” which sounds pretty close to actually-existing Mamdanism, aka the democratic socialism being impugned by Congress.

Ultimately, Jefferson’s ideal of democracy was a republic of independent small farmers and small craftsmen. He ends the letter to Madison by writing, “The small landholders are the most precious part of a state.” That vision always came with massive limitations and blind spots. (Most obviously, the rights of slaves were entirely excluded from Jefferson’s moral calculations.) Even putting this aside, the core vision of a society that isn’t dominated by the wealthy because most people are “small landholders” has long since become impractical. In a high-tech modern economy, most work is going to be done by groups of people working together, so the real question is whether those groups will collectively own their own workplaces or be subordinated to the will of a separate class of private owners.

In terms of the short-term steps that could take us a bit closer to socialism, though, Jeffersonian democracy and Mamdani-style democratic socialism converge on the mechanism for funding government efforts to improve the lives of citizens. From Mamdani’s proposals to make buses and childcare free at the point of service in New York City to Bernie Sanders’s proposal to replace the system of for-profit private health insurance with a “Medicare for All” system of single-payer public health insurance, socialists agree that the right way to pay for these things is through taxes that rise “in geometric progression” as incomes increase.

Implementing such policies wouldn’t somehow turn the United States into an authoritarian one-party state. It would, however, make this a significantly more humane and livable society.

Trump Meets Mamdani and Immediately Forgets the Horrors of Socialism

Eighty-six Democrats, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Democratic Whip Katherine Clark, Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar, and Caucus Vice Chair Ted Tiu, joined the GOP in voting to denounce socialism. Then, a few hours later, Donald Trump came out of his meeting with one of the country’s most prominent socialists. . . praising the socialist.

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— Eraser (@eraser0110) November 22, 2025

Seemingly charmed by the mayor-elect now that they’ve been in the same room, Trump said at the press conference following the private meeting, “I feel very confident that he can do a good job,” and that he and Mamdani “agree on a lot more than I would have thought.” After months of predicting catastrophe for his hometown under Mamdani’s mayoralty, Trump even said that he “would feel very, very comfortable living in New York.”

On Mamdani’s end, the meeting made sense. If, as seems likely, he ends up butting heads with the Trump administration after he takes office, he wants to establish that he was willing to be reasonable and try to work together on affordability concerns.

What, though, explains the dramatic pivot on Trump’s end? Part of it could just be the president’s animal instinct to bully those who seem vulnerable but flatter the charismatic and the popular (especially at a time when Trump himself is underwater in the polls). And it’s all too probable that these kind words will be forgotten within a week.

Part of what’s going on there, though, could reflect a simple truth that fits awkwardly with Congress’s posturing about “the horrors of socialism.” Mamdani started the race polling at 1 percent and went on to beat the former governor of his state, who had the backing of the entire Democratic establishment, in the Democratic primary. When the former governor ran as an independent against both Mamdani and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, Mamdani not only won the three-way race but beat his opponents’ combined totals.

While it might be tempting for centrist pundits to dismiss the popularity of Mamdani’s proposals to make life more affordable for the working class as a matter of New York City being unrepresentative of the country, national polling undermines this narrative. Data for Progress reports:

We find that many of Mamdani’s policies to lower housing costs are overwhelmingly popular with voters nationwide — including speeding up the approval process to build affordable housing (83%) and penalizing landlords who significantly increase rent or violate tenant protections (82%). A strong majority of voters also support adding a 2% tax on income over $1 million (72%), raising taxes on corporations (72%), creating new violence de-escalation programs and mental health teams to respond to certain 911 calls instead of the police (72%), cutting fines and fees for small businesses (70%), and spending funds to provide free child care for every child from infancy through age 3 (65%).

None of this means, of course, that there’s currently majority support for democratic socialists’ most ambitious goals of ending the tyranny of elites and extending democracy to the workplace. When it comes to the politics of the here and now, though, the plain fact is that most Americans don’t find what democratic socialists are proposing particularly horrifying. And at least for the moment, that puts reactionaries like Trump on the back foot.

No doubt Trump’s authoritarian instincts and his dedication to serving the ultrarich will bring him into conflict with Mayor Mamdani soon enough. For the moment, though, he’s been left dazed and smiling, unsure how to proceed.

Yesterday’s events reveal an opposition unsure of how to respond to a democratic socialist’s demonstrated appeal and clear momentum. From praise to denunciation, they’re throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.