The New Socialists and What They Say about America

Today's socialists aren't reviving Marx—they're replacing faith with politics and promising comfort instead of freedom.

In the roughly two weeks since the New York primary elections, conservatives—and other normies—have been understandably upset about the prospects of a socialist surge in American politics. Three candidates endorsed by New York City’s socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani won their congressional primaries easily, while Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)-aligned candidates around the state did quite well. In short, June 23 was a good day for socialists throughout the country, leaving many observers wondering if this will be a new date that lives in infamy, the date that marks the official start of the socialist-led collapse of the world’s quintessential capitalist, democratic republic.

As I say, this concern is understandable. Avowed socialists are winning big in cities across the country, not just in New York City but also in Seattle, possibly in Los Angeles, and almost certainly in the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. It has been well over a hundred years since the United States saw such a swell in socialist-affiliated political success. And this time, it’s highly unlikely that the leader of the Democratic establishment (whoever that is now) will be able to crush the nascent movement like his predecessor did last time, when Progressive patriarch Woodrow Wilson had the head of the Socialist Party of America, Eugene V. Debs, imprisoned for the crime of giving a speech. “Socialism” and its number of adherents will continue to expand for some time, at least until both major parties figure out how to refute their claims and prove the emptiness of their promises.

To that end, it is important to recognize just who and what it is the Republicans, the mainstream Democrats, and the nation at large are fighting. These are not your father’s socialists, to coin a phrase. Today’s DSA and yesterday’s SPA share much in common, but they also differ from one another in many significant and some definitive ways. Mamdani is not Debs. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not Josephine Conger-Kaneko. Bernie Sanders is not Morris Hillquit. Indeed, to a great extent, today’s “socialists” are socialists in name only. And recognizing that—and what makes them different—is the key to both understanding and defeating them.

The first thing to note about today’s socialists is that they are not Marxists, not really. They regurgitate the rhetoric, of course, and spout the proper platitudes, but they don’t know or care anything about the “means of production.” They think the state should have a greater role in the economy, but not because they believe workers are alienated from their labor or because they think society has arrived, dialectically, at the stage at which that alienation can be rectified through collective action. Rather, they think the state should have a greater role because they want stuff, stuff that they—or those whom they purport to represent—can’t otherwise have: low rents, cheaper groceries, free college education, and healthcare. In this sense, today’s socialists are less Marxists than Stirner-ites, not communists so much as “egoists.” Almost two-and-a-half years ago, in a column in these pages about Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness obsession, I spelled out some of the differences between Marxists and Stirner-ites this way:

Unlike most of his fellow Young Hegelians…[Max] Stirner was not a communist or even a socialist. He was, rather, an “egoist,” which is to say that he was concerned with himself and his needs, first and foremost, and believed that all men were, at heart, radically self-interested. Stirner mocked Marx, Engels, and their fellow communists, assailing their quasi-religious utopian dreams and insisting that man, once freed from the “bondage” imposed by the Christians and their God, would never willingly accept the bondage imposed by the communists and their pseudo-god. Instead, Stirner asserted, man would feed his ego, would satisfy his desires, and would be concerned principally with his own personal comfort.

Marx, for his part, grew to hate Stirner more, perhaps, than any other person on earth. In part, Marx resented the fact that Stirner mocked his utopia. In larger part, he feared that Stirner was right. He fretted that Stirner had a better grasp of man’s nature and that once all man’s basic needs were met by modern capitalist society, he would not demand control of the fruits of his labor or of the means of production but would, instead, demand the satiation of his ego.

Mamdani isn’t going to end commodity fetishism. He’s going to make bus rides free. He isn’t going to redirect surplus value to the proletariat. He’s going to provide city-subsidized child care so that people can go to work and not feel guilty or have to give up their venti lattes. This isn’t about labor vs. capital. It’s about getting “billionaires” and “trillionaires” to pay their “fair share” so that everyone else can live in rent-frozen apartments. Or something. The DSA, in its language and agenda, caters almost exclusively to its supporters’ desire for cheaper, state-controlled creature comforts.

At the same time, it’s also worth noting that today’s socialists both confirm and repudiate Stirner. This paradox is, in some sense, the key to combating the socialist surge over the long term. While Stirner was inarguably correct about modern man’s preoccupation with his ego and, thus, his general revulsion at Marx’s anti-materialist Utopia, he profoundly misunderstood man’s innate desire for meaning and belonging. Stirner argued that the workers of the world would reject Marx specifically because of the religious nature of the Marxist project. He mocked the Communists as religious zealots of a sort and rightly predicted that modern man would have no more use for this new religion than he had for the old ones. He was right in the narrow sense but mistaken about man’s nature more broadly. Man is selfish. There is little doubt about that. He has innumerable wants and desires, as Stirner rightly saw. Nevertheless, man is an innately religious being. That’s the primary cultural conflict in history: what can man do to live a good life and find meaning while combating his temporal urges? Stirner—a product of the Enlightenment and its attack on traditional religion and its search for meaning—missed man’s need for meaning entirely.

The United States has always had some handful of political figures who have flirted with “socialism” in its many forms. Starting with Debs and then carrying over to FDR’s administration and the postwar Soviet infiltration of the federal government, true, economic socialists were a part of the governing class. Starting in the 1950s and 60s, the Lukacs and Frankfurt School-influenced cultural Marxists began taking over the institutions (media, education, religion, entertainment, etc.), bringing a different, albeit far more successful type of socialism to the American experience. Over the last few years, the Sanders- and Ocasio-Cortez-led Democratic Socialists have garnered considerable attention by mixing ego-based economic promises with cultural Marxist rhetoric and grievance-mongering. Like the poor, socialists of some form or another we will always have with us.

The socialists today differ from their predecessors, however, in that they seem to appeal to a bigger and broader constituency. Young people in particular seem drawn to the Utopian fantasy now in far greater numbers than ever before. As a result, the threat seems more real and more immediate.

Part of this is that we, as a civilization, are experiencing some very real and unprecedented economic problems. Housing affordability and economic mobility—in part driven by unparalleled longevity—are two issues that are genuinely and negatively affecting Generation Z and pushing them toward radical political solutions.

At the same time, however, it is largely inarguable that the real surge in socialist affiliation coincides with the appropriation by the movement of authentic religious sentiment and fervor. Mamdani and his cohorts—and the movement more generally—are very much animated by the cultural spirit of Islam. When I say that, I don’t mean just the anti-Zionist/anti-Israel/antisemitic vocabulary and policies—although that is a huge part. I also mean the fact that Islam has, for at least the last half century, helped fill two voids in Western society.

It is, first and foremost, the ultimate form of rebellion against “white, Christian hegemony.” In 1978 and 1979, Michel Foucault, one of the most influential intellectuals of the postwar Western Left, traveled to Iran as a newspaper correspondent and, by his own account, fell in love with the revolution unfolding in front of him. He called Ayatollah Khomeini “the old saint in exile” and described the uprising not as the birth pangs of a theocratic police state but as a “political spirituality,” an authentic alternative to the exhausted, disenchanted rationalism of the West. He was far from alone. Much of the Western intellectual Left spent the early years convinced that Khomeini’s Iran represented liberation rather than its opposite. Only once the executions started did most of them quietly look away.

To be clear, it’s not Islam itself that appeals here. It’s the West’s fetishization of Islam’s revolutionary edge, which serves as proof of its authenticity. As the late, great Joe Strummer observed, by romanticizing Islam and ignoring its faults, Western radicals feed the Western misunderstanding of the religious tradition and empower tyrants (while also making themselves look foolish). When he wrote that “Now over at the temple, oh, they really pack ’em in / the in-crowd say it’s cool to dig this chanting thing,” he wasn’t describing Iran. He was mocking his Western contemporaries, the Western hipsters and fellow travelers, Foucault’s spiritual descendants, who found the whole spectacle thrilling precisely because it offended the right people.

Cat Stevens, to name one hipster, took the whole bit further than most, abandoning the hippie-laden Peace Train, converting to Islam, and joining Khomeini in calling for Salman Rushdie to be killed. The peace train had become passé, while hating heretics, apostates, and Jews represented hard-core rebellion. Loving Islam became the ultimate sign of nonconformist legitimacy.

The second void that Islam helps fill is the void of meaning. As Western Christianity has grown flaccid and doctrinally muddled, Islam has remained steadfast in professing a binary certainty: good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, redemptive vs. condemnable. As a result, Islam has grown in appeal not just to wannabe rebels but to lost souls as well. Almost exactly three years ago, when Sinead O’Connor died, I wrote a note to clients explaining how radically misunderstood she was. Most people—critics, fans, etc.—labeled her “antireligious.” But nothing could have been further from the truth. She was deeply religious and desperate for God in her life:

When Sinead O’Connor needed healing, forgiveness, and love, she was instead greeted with confusion and contempt. Even on the cultural Left, where her “bravery” was heralded, she was treated as something other than human. She was turned into a “secular saint,” a righteous warrior against the inequities and “fantasies” of organized religion, rather than the profoundly broken woman she was. The Church, in turn, continued its worldly cover-up of abuses, addressed the “evil” O’Connor identified legalistically, and exacerbated many of its problems by continuing its efforts to save souls through decidedly rationalist means.

This is why, when she died, her legal name was Shuhada’ Sadaqat. She, like countless other lost souls before her, had converted to Islam, specifically because it offered certainty and a version of security. Modern, post-Enlightenment Christianity had more or less abandoned her search for meaning, and so, she found it somewhere else.

There is a lesson here. People—young people, in particular—are lost and are searching. If nothing traditional provides them with the meaning and purpose they desire, they will fill that void with politics. And when the option is available, they will fill that void with a political force that arrogates the certainty of religion.

This isn’t to suggest that America’s youth will all be converting to Islam soon, but it is to say that the current iteration of socialism in this country provides many distinctive challenges—the search for meaning and hatred of Israel being the two most prominent.

As I said, today’s socialists are not your father’s socialists. They are something else entirely, which means that resisting their advances will require a strategy that is completely different as well. People need a purpose. Work, family, and faith—the bedrocks of the American experiment—all provide purpose. It’s long past time to rediscover and rebuild them—lest the socialists keep winning elections.

These articles that make the DSA and the candidates who actually call themselves “Socialists” a radical break from the past are fooling themselves. The Democrats have been moving in this direction for decades. The country has been moving in this direction for decades. It takes an incredible amount of mental gymnastics to claim that the Welfare State is not the handmaiden of Socialism. Or that the massive system of transfer payments that have been created, and that have been increasingly creating benefits not just for the poor but also for the middle class, are not Socialism. Government has been subsidizing companies and production, favoring certain industries and companies. Government regulation has created a quasi-Socialist environment in a lot of places. The DSA is just truth in advertising.

This is a good opportunity for the GOP to begin a narrative about the Left. Paint them as unpatriotic and America-haters. Force them to either admit it, or start their own narrative that they love this country. Either way, we win.

Down here in Texas, Low-T Talarico was immediately painted as someone who hates meat. He could’ve admitted it and just said he’s not a meat eater, but instead, his team put him out at a fair eating a large turkey leg. He did it with a napkin wrapped around it. He looked as phony as Walz with a shotgun and Dukakis in a tank.

I’ve known several people who lived in NYC. They see life and society very differently than my friends in rural Florida. They expect so much more from government. Thing is, they mostly complained about how government was failing to supply what they expected.

The GOP has about 10x the money that the Dems do...indeed, they have more debt than cash...and they need to spend it on those candidates who face Socialists in Nov. If they don’t, I fear the battle is lost and the GOP is front and center in its fall.

After several special elections in the past year, I read about the RNC boasting about how much money they had while the Democrats went into debt over the election. The RNC did not seem to care that the Republican lost the election.

I despise most of the bigs in Republican Party. They seem to be, esspecially in the Senate, an incumbent protection organization, and against the American people.

Nancy Pelosi was a DSA member and actively attended Socialist International summits in Europe. So the DSA has been in control of the Dems already, at keast as long as she was speaker.

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