December 26, 1991. That date helps explain the current fascination with “democratic socialism” leading to the victories of Melat Kiros in Denver, New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, and others.
That date marks the fall of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I was twenty. The Berlin Wall, built to keep people from fleeing the horrors of Communism, fell in 1989.
The median age of Coloradans is about 40, which means an increasingly large share of the population has no personal memory of living through the Cold War. Kiros was born in 1997. As Santayana observed, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Today’s socialists conveniently forget that the two worst mass-murderers in history were leaders of Communist-socialist regimes, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, who collectively slaughtered scores of millions of people, with Mao in particular far exceeding even the atrocities of Hitler.
Speaking of Hitler, socialists usually cast fascism as the antithesis of socialism. But, as I pointed out a few years ago, the Nazis, or “National Socialists,” were, as they themselves understood, indeed socialists of a sort. Recently economist Bryan Caplan took another look at economic data and found the Nazis “embraced extreme socialist policies as soon as they gained power.” The right way to look at this is that “socialism” is the broader category that includes various subtypes, including Communism and fascism.
Socialism continues to wreak havoc
The fade of the Soviet Union into history cannot fully explain the current fascination with socialism, though. The worst hell-hole on Earth remains Communist North Korea.
Venezuelan socialism is recent. Daniel Di Martino wrote for the Manhattan Institute in 2019, “The mass starvation and exodus faced by Venezuelans are the natural consequence of the socialist policies implemented by dictators Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro,” particularly “widespread nationalization of private industry, currency and price controls, and the fiscally irresponsible expansion of welfare programs.”
Interestingly, Cuba, home of the mass-murdering socialist Che Guevara, now has taken steps toward privatization. Nora Gámez Torres reports for the Miami Herald, “Cuba’s communist government will open key economic sectors such as banking and energy to private capital and foreign companies and begin privatizing state companies through share sales. . . . The reforms proposed significantly expand the private sector six decades after Cuba’s communist leaders forbade all private business—even frita stands—and adopted a centrally planned economy model that ended up ruining the country and dragging Cubans into a severe humanitarian crisis.”
Reaction to MAGA
It does not help that Elon Musk is doing everything he can to turn himself into a cartoon-villain version of a capitalist. After Nicholas Kristof blamed Musk’s DOGE efforts for cutting off USAID and killing kids, Musk called Kristof “an utter piece of shit and a liar” and “utterly evil.” But Kristof brought receipts.
Even if various criticisms of Musk are overstated, Musk’s actions here and his broader ties to Trump, along with his obsession with race and his personal repopulation efforts, make for an illuminated punching bag for the left.
And then there is Trump, who ran as a businessman, even though, as Steve Simpson argues, he’s better seen as a villain from an Ayn Rand novel. Here is a recent headline from the Wall Street Journal: “Trump Made $1 Billion on Crypto Deals While His Fans Lost a Fortune.”
Just as big-government projects such as ObamaCare helped spur the MAGA reaction, so the ascent of Trump has poured fuel into the socialist movement. If Kamala Harris had won instead, we’d now see more-conservative candidates on the rise. In this way, Kiros is very much a product of the times.
What is ‘democratic socialism?’
On her website, Kiros brags that she was endorsed by Democratic Socialists of America as well as by the Denver branch of that organization.
Of course the “democratic socialists,” even as they typically ignore the horrors of socialist regimes, also tend to say those regimes were “not real socialism” or at least not the right kind of socialism. The sort of socialism they favor never could lead to such abuses, they claim.
Marxist socialism involved the nationalization of the means of production, meaning businesses, productive lands, etc. If you think this sort of thinking is old-fashioned, consider that Claire Valdez, the “proud democratic socialist running for Congress” in New York, recently said “we need to nationalize the airline industry.” But many “democratic socialists” don’t go so far.
Caplan proposes that we view socialism as on a continuum, with more socialism meaning more collective, centralized, or governmental control of economic activity. A more-capitalist economy, then, better-respects private property and private contract rights.
What does Kiros believe? Largely she wants to expand the welfare state. On her website, she calls for “Medicare for All,” “universal” (i.e., government-run) childcare and eldercare, and “publicly owned, mixed-income social housing.”
Kiros does not call for the classic socialist program of nationalizing the means of production. However, it’s unclear how far democratic socialists would go in placing businesses under control of government.
Denver DSA says “both the economy and society should be run democratically.” What does that mean? Does that mean that people can vote to confiscate someone’s business? Or does it just mean that people can vote to impose more regulations on a business? “Democratic” control can mean anything from the status quo to complete Communism.
Notice a basic contradiction in the democratic socialist agenda. While these socialists call for more “democratic” controls over the means of economic production, they flatly reject the idea of “democratic” controls over the means of child production, i.e., women’s bodies. I, on the other hand, recognize that people have rights to their own bodies as well as to their productive efforts.
I’m all for democracy in the context of constitutional republicanism, but I also support individual rights and recognize moral limits to proper democratic action.
The DSA and Kiros promote unionization, not outright nationalization. The DSA ridiculously asserts that “workplaces are fundamentally authoritarian” absent unionization, forgetting that, under capitalism, people are free to quit their jobs whenever they want (unlike in various socialist regimes). Although voluntary unions play an important role in capitalism, the fundamental driver of improved conditions for workers is market competition and growth.
Trump has advocated the partial nationalization of certain businesses; it’s unclear to me whether and to what degree Kiros follows Trump in that sort of socialism.
Kiros’ silly conception of socialism
Let’s return to Kiros’ lengthy interview with Kyle Clark. (I discussed aspects of this previously; here I won’t get into Kiros’ troubling comments regarding Israel, antisemitism, and terrorism.)
Here is Kiros’ central pitch: “We already have socialism, right? It’s in the roads that we drive on, it’s in our fire stations, it’s in the public schools we send our kids to. What I’m calling for is the same security that we have in those institutions to be in our health care, to be in our access to nutritional food, to be in making sure that we have universal child care and universal elder care…We need to make sure that people’s basic needs are protected and that’s only through programs that would be socialist.”
To a large degree this is a silly semantic trick. If government spends money on anything whatsoever, Kiros implies, then we already have “socialism,” so we might as well have government spend money on a bunch of additional things. But Kiros’ ridiculous approach cannot differentiate between a “night watchman state” and Marxist Communism.
To be sure, I know plenty of libertarians and Objectivists (followers of Rand) who indeed say roads and fire protection should be free-market services, and their case is not as ridiculous as many presume. However, it’s definitely crazy to say that government providing those delimited services, arguably “natural monopolies,” is socialism.
I’m personally willing to concede that public education is socialist. Should the government be running education? That’s a different question. Regardless, a little socialism does not, contra Kiros, justify a lot of socialism.
As I have pointed out, the public schools are basically a failure, given that not even half of students can read or do math at grade level. Is this really the model on which we want to base much of the rest of the economy? Ah, but socialists ever cry, we just need to spend more tax dollars on the failing programs in question, and then surely they will work better.
When it comes to two of her signature issues, health care and housing, Kiros pretends that markets are to blame for current problems when in fact government is to blame.
Government has systematically undermined the health-insurance market for decades, starting with federal tax policies that pushed insurance into an employer-offered model. My wife and I bought health insurance at a reasonable price until ObamaCare pushed our plan off the market.
On housing, the fundamental problem is that cities impose severe restrictions on the building and use of housing, driving up costs. But Kiros is largely blinded to such problems by her narrow ideology.
Kiros, of course, endorses rent control, which would only make the housing problem worse by discouraging the building of the new housing and the improvement of existing housing.
The passion of Melat Kiros
Kiros inadvertently described the benefits of American capitalism: “My Dad had nothing to his name when we first moved here, and so I watched him and my mom work two to three jobs at a time. I watched them try and figure out how to stretch those dollars for our rent, to stretch those dollars for me and the resources that I needed and even when my little sister came. And then I saw him be able to graduate from pharmacy school and be able to build out the American dream.”
But then Kiros notes that her high-end law firm fired her for refusing to take down a post critical of Israel. She says, “I did make the choice to go to a PhD program to do the work that actually mattered to me. But I think that’s the world that I believe in, right? I should be able to choose something that I’m actually passionate about and to be able to do that comfortably rather than having to go into a choice, into a job, just because that’s the only thing that’s going to be able to meet my basic needs.”
Obviously earning a living and following one’s passion are not inherently at odds; plenty of people figure out how to earn a living while doing something they love.
Kiros’ point is deeper. She’s saying that someone should be able to pursue their “passion” even if it contributes nothing to others, at the cost of others. In other words, Kiros believes someone should be able to confiscate the resources that others have earned, or rely on government officials to confiscate those resources, so they can earn nothing and instead play video games all day, paint blotches on paper, or pursue vanity college degrees. This is “passion” by means of theft.
Thank goodness the “democratic socialists” for the most part don’t advocate classic or full-fledged Marxist socialism. But the fact that they advocate socialism at all, meaning anti-social policies of confiscating people’s wealth and dictating their economic decisions, puts our liberty and our prosperity at risk.
Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.
