Democratic socialism will eventually fade, but the problems sparking its surge may not
Comments: by Harlan Ullman, opinion contributor – 08/17/26 12:30 PM ET
A patron puts a bill in a donation bucket, which features a red rose symbol, during a meeting of members of the Southern Maine Democratic Socialists of America in Portland, Maine, Monday, July 16, 2018. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
Sweeping across America as if it were a Marxist spectre — which it is not — is the Democratic Socialists of America organization. Perhaps a more appropriate moniker for the DSA acronym would be “Dysfunctional Selective Amnesia,” since the organization and its ideology is based on the idea that everyone will just forget history.
Fortunately, the socialist movement will most likely pass, even though the conditions and circumstances causing it will not. Those are the repeated failures of both political parties to govern. That catalyzed the Make America Great Again movement and the meteoric rise of the MAGA commander-in-chief Donald J. Trump. But the Democratic Socialists of America organization has no Trump-like figure to fill that role; merely Grade B pretenders.
If the socialists are serious, then their argument is that our Constitution and its system of checks and balances are not working and are no longer fit for purpose in the 21st century. Many reasons could be cited in its obituary, but Trump is the final agent of its destruction.
The legislature — the Constitution’s Article I — is missing in action. The Republican majority in Congress lacks the backbone to carry out their duties as elected officials. Democrats lack the brains to respond or provide an alternative. Capitol Hill has become an extension of the White House and deserves to be gutted, just as the East Wing has been already.
Article III, the judiciary, is now making decisions that rival Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson as nadirs in American jurisprudence.
The consequence is that only Article II now governs: the White House. And where the courts may have put in place temporary roadblocks, each is being breached by executive orders on birthright citizenship, attempts to illegally fire statutory board members and the installation of special grand juries in Washington to persecute political enemies, real and imagined, of the president.
The socialists’ solution would be a form of democracy wherein the public votes directly for leaders instead of through an artificially structured and obsolete Electoral College. Yes, there are problems with parliaments, as there are with every political system. But if our political calamity is due to the government’s inability to represent average Americans and its kowtowing to the rich and the president’s chums, this could be a reasonable argument.
Absurdly unrealistic initiatives such as defunding the police, eliminating jails and prisons, ending Immigration and Customs Enforcement, opening borders, granting full amnesty to those who entered the country illegally and fleecing the super-rich to pay the nation’s bills are indeed insanity. But free speech of course allows this discourse — and fortunately, the vast majority of Americans are sensible enough not embrace such nonsense. The question is whether common sense will prevail against the madness of the extreme wings of both parties.
Republicans will assert that the socialists have provided their party with the weapon for Democrats’ destruction: communism. They say the Democratic Socialists of America is a communist-inspired organization whose ultimate agenda is for everything to belong to the state. And where has socialism or communism ever worked?
In all this, we must embrace the First Amendment. But freedom of speech does not assume the requirement to listen or absorb. Perhaps most Americans do not know the definition of communism, if surveys and test scores on civics and other core subjects are to be believed.
The MAGA movement — as the Tea Party has done and as the Luddites did — will pass. The crisis, however, is that the government’s resounding failure to govern will not pass so easily. Amnesia ensures failure. And some of the wackiest solutions border on insanity.
What to do? Most American voters are moderates. This majority cohort must demand a return to sensible politics for their parties and nominees.
Harlan Ullman is senior adviser at Washington’s Atlantic Council, chairman of a private company, and principal author of the doctrine of shock and awe. His next book, co-written with Field Marshal The Lord David Richards, former United Kingdom chief of defense and due out this Fall, is “Who Thinks Best Wins: How Decisive Strategic Thinking Will Prevent Global Chaos.”
