The Political Paradox
On November 4, 2025, Zohran Mamdani, a New York state assemblyman and professed democratic socialist, was elected Mayor of New York City. Mamdani is the first Muslim to be elected to that office and the youngest person to be elected to it since 1892. Widely perceived as a rebuke to the second Trump administration, Mamdani’s victory can also be interpreted as a symptom of the polarization of American politics. It’s well known that young Americans are growing more favorable toward socialism. Leftists are drifting further left and right-wingers further right.
This changing attitude toward socialism in the United States burst into the open in 2015 when Bernie Sanders announced his first presidential campaign. Membership of the organization Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) surged from around 6,000 in 2015 to over 90,000 by 2021. Numerous leftists have since openly embraced Sanders’s example and won public office on similar platforms. My hometown of Seattle elected Katie Wilson, another self-described democratic socialist, in the 2025 mayoral election. It has never been better to be a socialist in the United States. Or at least, a democratic socialist.
But what exactly is democratic socialism? How does it differ from social democracy? For that matter, how should we define such basic terms as democracy, socialism, communism, and capitalism? The more these terms are popularly used, the vaguer their popular definitions become.
The rise of socialism raises a more pressing question, however. Socialism has been associated with a wide variety of political regimes in the past century which were generally not only not democratic but thoroughly autocratic. The insistence of Mamdani, Sanders, and others that they are “democratic socialists” is in part a strategy to distance themselves from the atrocities of the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and so on. Their insistence that their brand of socialism is democratic might, nonetheless, be considered to involve protesting too much. It is certainly not encouraging that a growing body of research indicates that authoritarian personalities are more commonly found among radicals on both ends of the political spectrum. This applies to the type of left-leaning voters most inclined to support figures like Sanders and Mamdani.
While I do not doubt the personal commitment of these figures to democratic principles, I believe there are aspects of socialism which call its compatibility with democracy into question.
Note that my purpose here is not to argue against socialism. Nor will I be arguing for democracy or political freedom. As the political philosopher John Gray argues, freedom from choice can be just as liberating as freedom of choice. Hence the perennial allure of authoritarianism. To be sure, I am a proponent of democracy and not a socialist. My biases will inevitably inform my analysis, which will naturally address the character of socialism as I understand it, to the extent that it is necessary in order to clarify whether socialism can be reconciled with democracy.
But first, a question of vocabulary.
For the purposes of this discussion, I will be using the relevant terms as follows: Socialism refers to any socioeconomic system committed to collective, public ownership of the means of production, with the theoretical aim of a more equalized distribution of the fruits of production. Communism is an extreme version of socialism in which even private property is abolished and economic controls are firmly centralized. Democratic socialism can be understood as any movement committed to achieving a socialist state through democratic, gradualist means, and usually claiming that democracy will continue even after this socialist agenda is achieved, allowing the public to reject that agenda if and when they choose. Social democracy aims to incorporate some socialist aims into a democratic, capitalist political economy, broadly endorsing a strong welfare state but not necessarily advocating a socialist agenda. Capitalism refers to market economies in which the means of production are in private hands, allowing and encouraging competition over resources and profits. Democracy is a particularly thorny term which I will define as a political system in which the public has a strong degree of influence over the policies of the state and in which the public is guaranteed a wide range of personal freedoms on which neither the state nor any private person may legally encroach.
It is important to clarify these terms at the outset because they are so often misused in popular discourse. The welfare states of Scandinavia and several other European countries are often described as socialist by Americans, with the progressive left typically pointing to their perceived socioeconomic and environmental successes as proof that socialism is a viable alternative to our capitalist market economy. In reality, it is much more accurate to describe Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Spain, and so on as social democracies. That is to say, their economies are indeed much more closely regulated, their wealthiest citizens much more highly taxed, and their most vulnerable citizens protected by a much stronger safety net compared to the United States, but at the same time, their states do not control the means of production, businesses remain competitive, and private property rights remain strongly protected.
China and the much smaller states of Vietnam, Cuba, Laos, and North Korea are still sometimes described (by themselves) as communist. As with the European welfare states, this is an overstatement, but their economies are indeed considerably more centrally controlled. Private property rights are comparatively curtailed in these countries; however, all have increasingly begun to allow aspects of the market economy into their systems, particularly China. Since these states effectively control the means of production, I feel it is safe to describe them as socialist states, although their economies are becoming more mixed.
Note that, in describing these countries as socialist states, I do not describe them as social democracies. The Democracy Matrix ranks these five states (as of 2020) among the least democratic on earth, with Vietnam the most democratic at 145 out of 176. By contrast, the Scandinavian social democracies of Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Sweden are ranked (in that order) as the four most democratic states in the world.
In other words, democratization seems to be positively correlated with strong welfare states. However, it also seems to be positively correlated with protection of property rights and market economies: the former is good news for democratic socialists; the latter not so much. Market economies free us to compete with each other, creating and exacerbating inequalities. As the conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. once put it: “Freedom breeds inequality. Unless you have freedom to be unequal, there is no such thing as freedom.”
Why do socialist states worthy of the label seem incapable of functioning democratically? The theoretical underpinnings of socialism provide a clue.
Karl Marx (whose writings are not synonymous with socialist theory but have had a major influence on it) famously argued that the mode of production shapes the rest of society more than society shapes the mode of production. That is to say, the organization of the productive organism into a tiered structure in which a vast body of workers toils in obscurity and poverty on behalf of a wealthy, powerful minority directly shapes the structure of the government, organized religions, laws, the family, and so on, which in turn reinforce the mode of production to the extent that they can shape it. Democratic socialists today generally do not go quite that far. However, their ideology still implies that the mode of production wields an outsized influence in human affairs. Hence the importance of handing control of it over to a wider circle, on the basis that such will facilitate a fairer distribution of resources.
But who decides what counts as a fairer distribution of resources? This is a crucially important question because, if socialist theory is correct, then whoever makes this decision has control over the most influential sphere of human activity. Moreover, even if socialist theory is not correct in this regard, there is no denying the importance of the mode of production. Therefore, the entity controlling the mode of production will inevitably be conferred with enormous political influence.
It is worth taking a moment to consider whether socialism has the right idea in this regard, because a socialist entity’s ability to achieve resource redistribution through control of the mode of production will inevitably shape the policies said entity will implement in pursuit of that goal. To reiterate, there is no denying the importance of the mode of production. Many historical phenomena can be convincingly linked to it. For instance, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita presents a compelling case in The Invention of Power: Popes, Kings, and the Birth of the West (2022) that the Protestant Reformation was able to overturn the religious order in northern Europe because economic growth there had developed to the point that it was more expedient for rulers to cast off allegiance to the papacy entirely than to continue battling it for control of prosperous dioceses. On the other hand, to take another religious example, the same cannot be said for the rise of Islam. As Max Dumont put it in Jews, God and History (1962):
Marxist and other materialist historians would be hard put to explain the phenomenon of the eruption of a Muhammadan empire in the Arabian desert in the seventh century A.D. The mode of production of the Bedouins in that century had not changed from that of previous centuries. The climate was the same then as it had been before.
In other words, socialism may be correct that the mode of production is the most important factor in the private and public spheres, but there is no reason to assume it can shape those spheres to the extent posited by socialism. Parallels between the mode of production and other phenomena may be coincidental or the result of even deeper influences.
Giving socialist theory the benefit of the doubt, it’s a simple matter to explain how a socialist state can easily become authoritarian. If the mode of production is the hinge on which everything else in the state turns, and the mode of production is firmly controlled by the state, then the state logically must exercise considerable control over everything in the state as a result. The only way to avert an authoritarian outcome, in that case, is to ensure that the state remains democratic. The more democratic the state, the more the mode of production will be controlled by the citizenry, and, by extension, the more the citizenry will control its own affairs.
Democracy, however, like every other form of political freedom, is difficult to achieve and even more difficult to maintain. The more direct the democracy, the less is delegated to representatives, hence the more work the citizenry must do. It would be difficult enough for most of us to find the time, energy, and patience to vote on or otherwise participate in making most of the decisions currently made by local governments. Imagine, to use the United States as an example, how the workload would increase as one attempted also to participate at the county, state, and nationwide levels, on top of all the other personal responsibilities which ordinary citizens have. There are numerous flaws in the American system of representative democracy, but one cannot hope to make it too direct and decentralized while preserving the unity of the country at the same time.
Political freedom in its purest sense, in other words, requires a level of commitment to politics from all affected citizens which history and psychology alike indicate is unachievable. Of course, most democratic socialists today probably do not envision a particularly direct democracy. The DSA advocates various electoral reforms which fall considerably short of such an ideal. A socialist government in the United States representing the DSA’s ideals and operating within the sort of state organism it envisions would therefore, in theory, be more democratic than the American system at present but would still place the mode of production in the hands of a strongly centralized state.
Admittedly, there are socialists who reject the state model. Libertarian socialism (I kid you not, this is a real thing) advocates the abolition of the centralized state and private property in favor of self-management by workers and direct democracy. This makes sense as a way to avoid authoritarian socialism, yet, in addition to the problems already discussed regarding political freedom past a certain point, this school of thought is maddeningly vague regarding how a modern, complex economy could possibly function without a strong organizing force at the helm.
In the libertarian socialist Maurizio Lazzarato’s The Making of the Indebted Man (2012), a work whose sophisticated verbiage attempts to disguise that it has little to say about debt that is not intuitively obvious to anyone who has ever borrowed five dollars from someone, one observation stands out. In any decentralized enterprise, trust among the relevant parties is obviously crucial, yet in the modern credit system:
Trust, the condition for action, becomes universal distrust, turning into a demand for ‘security.’ The circulation of private debt is a circulation of selfish and individual interests. It presupposes, in the guise of another person’s recognition, a preliminary distrust, since the other person is a rival, a competitor and/or a debtor.
Yet how are we to avoid distrust when, in an extended macroeconomy, the vast majority of participants will never even meet, much less know, each other? Personal intimacy is a precondition for trust, and the number of people the average human being can intimately know is at most a few hundred. This is why we tend to trust the members of our own tribe (a social division linked by personal, economic, religious, or blood ties) more than anyone perceived as an outsider, and even within the tribe, trust can be difficult. Decentralization might increase intimacy within various in-groups, but, for this reason, seems bound to diminish trust between groups. How are we to avoid such an outcome? Lazzarato offers no suggestion. Moreover, regarding unions, the closest thing most places have to worker self-management, Lazzarato can merely snivel that:
During protests in France involving intermittent workers as well as those of the unemployed in winter 1997/1998, both groups attempted to break the union-employer duopoly in order to bring ‘precarious’ workers poorly represented by unions into the management of unemployment insurance. The unions, however, think and act solely in the defense of full-time wage-earners’ rights.
Yes, what a surprise that unions tend to prioritize the interests of their full-time members, which just happens to be exactly why socialists tend to advocate unionization in the first place.
All of this, mind you, has been grounded in the assumption that socialists are correct regarding the significance of the mode of production. If not, the picture is even worse, for then a socialist revolution would produce a regime founded on an illusion, incapable of achieving its stated aims and with no way to maintain itself in power except through brute force. This should sound uncomfortably familiar to any student of modern history.
Might there still be a middle ground between the state socialism of China, the libertarian socialism of Lazzarato, and the social democracies of Europe where a genuinely socialist socioeconomic system could flourish democratically? Personally, I cannot see how. As discussed above, states tend to fall straight from the top to the bottom of democracy indexes as soon as they cross over from social democracy to genuine socialism. If a convincing theory for a system occupying a democratic socialist middle ground exists, I have yet to encounter it. Of course, I’m hardly an expert on the subject. However, I’m surely far from alone in being troubled by the issues I’ve raised here. These are the sorts of issues that “democratic socialists” should be addressing if they are serious about winning sufficient popular support to enact their agendas.
None of this should be taken as implying that I disagree with most of the political positions of the DSA, Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, and so on. I voted for Sanders in the primaries both times he ran for president. If I lived in NYC, I probably would have voted for Mamdani. After all, what the American left defines as democratic socialism, and this applies to the aforementioned “socialists,” generally bears a lot more resemblance to social democracy. The key tenets of their policies – rent control, gun control, free public transit, free healthcare, universal childcare, electoral reform, correctional reform, abortion access, legalization of marijuana, legalization of sex work, infrastructure investment, climate action – are fully reconcilable with social democracy and have almost nothing to do with what socialism actually means.
In the proper sense of the term, therefore, a socialist revolution in the foreseeable future is improbable, even if today’s self-styled democratic socialists continue to expand their political influence. This does not make the allegedly growing appeal of socialism to young voters any less worrisome. Good intentions, after all, can easily bring out our worst impulses. What would make it less worrisome would be any convincing evidence that these voters have actually studied history and economics, that they understand what socialism really means, that they sincerely value democracy, and that their political convictions are grounded in deep, critical, constructive thought.
