For decades, Democrats had a simple rebuttal whenever Republicans accused their party of moving toward socialism: We're not socialists.
That defense is becoming increasingly difficult to square with a recent House vote, where Democrats once again refused to distance themselves from socialism.
On Tuesday, the House passed a resolution condemning “socialism in all its forms, including the Democratic Socialists of America.”
The final vote was 220-192, with two members voting present. Every Republican who voted supported the resolution. Among Democrats, only eight voted yes, while 192 voted no and two voted present. Democrat leaders Hakeem Jeffries (NY-08), Katherine Clark (MA-05) and Pete Aguilar (CA-33) all voted against it.
192 Democrats found a reason to vote against condemning socialism. Now voters have 192 reasons to question where their party is headed. pic.twitter.com/UVcTy6yQWS
— Nancy Mace (@NancyMace) September 1, 2026
Indeed, two Democrat House members defied Jeffries and voted to bring the resolution to the floor.
However, H.Res. 1490 was not simply a one-sentence declaration against socialism. Republicans also used it to endorse the SAVE America Act and affirm that American elections should be reserved for American citizens.
Democrats cited those provisions, particularly the election legislation, as reasons for opposing it.
It’s gross that a “Democrat Party” refuses to back free, fair, and legitimate elections. But it doesn’t automatically mean that the party has been taken over by its socialist wing. Yet.
Yet the Democrats’ plausible deniability becomes less persuasive when Tuesday's vote is placed alongside what has happened inside the Democrat Party over the last several years.
In February 2023, 109 House Democrats voted for a resolution condemning the “horrors of socialism.” In November 2025, 86 Democrats supported another resolution condemning socialism, including Jeffries. This week, just eight Democrats were willing to vote for a resolution explicitly denouncing socialism and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
But this isn't "smoking gun" evidence that most Democrats are socialist. A June vote along similar lines is much closer to that. 202 House Democrats refused to sign a centrist pledge upholding support for capitalism and distancing themselves from socialism.
More importantly, the politicians appear to be following their voters. A recent CBS News poll found that 58 percent of Democrats now view socialism favorably. Only 32 percent view capitalism favorably. Socialism was particularly popular among younger and college-educated Democrats, and CBS found Democrats increasingly believe socialism would improve their personal finances while capitalism makes them worse.
That is the real story behind Tuesday's vote. The question isn't whether 192 House Democrats have secretly filled out membership applications for the Democratic Socialists of America. Of course they haven't. Counting DSA cards is an increasingly useless way of measuring the ideological direction of the Democrat Party.
The better questions are: What does the Democrat electorate want? Who is winning Democrat primaries? Which faction is supplying the party's political energy? Which ideas are moving from the activist fringe into mainstream Democrat politics? And how willing are Democrat politicians to draw a line between themselves and an explicitly socialist movement operating within their own electoral coalition?
By those measures, something significant has changed. This is also why the standard response that there are only a few formal DSA members in Congress misses how political power actually works. The Democratic Socialists of America don't need to replace the Democrat Party. They have developed a strategy for using it.
The strategy has been discussed for years within socialist politics as the “dirty break.” The idea is straightforward. America's two-party system makes building a successful third party extremely difficult, so socialist candidates run on the Democrat ballot line, contest Democrat primaries and use the party's electoral infrastructure while building an independent socialist organization underneath it.
The eventual objective, at least in the traditional dirty-break formulation, is an independent working-class party. The DSA's 2019 convention explicitly endorsed building toward such a party while saying that this “does not rule out DSA-endorsed candidates running tactically on the Democratic Party ballot line.”
Some socialists now debate whether the “break” is even necessary. The alternative is sometimes described as the “dirty stay”: keep the independent socialist organization, but continue operating through Democrat primaries indefinitely because the strategy is working.
And why wouldn't they? In a safe Democrat congressional district, November may be little more than a formality. The real election is the Democrat primary. Defeat an incumbent there, and the socialist movement can effectively select another member of Congress without ever having to persuade anything close to a majority of American voters.
This is already happening. DSA-aligned candidates have defeated Democrat incumbents, while explicitly socialist politicians have become some of the most recognizable figures on the American left. The DSA itself now has roughly 120,000 members and more than 250 members holding elected office around the country, according to the research accompanying Tuesday's vote.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has been particularly useful in stripping away the euphemisms. After winning office as an open democratic socialist, Mamdani declared this summer that New Yorkers had now seen democratic socialism in practice and wanted to see more of it nationally.
“We don't have to ask ourselves what life looks like if a socialist wins,” Mamdani said. “I won last November, and over the course of these last six months, what we've delivered for working people are the very things we were told were impossible.”
“That's what it looks like to have Democratic socialism,” he added.
This is where Americans would be better served by dropping the semantic games altogether and asking a simpler question: What does socialism actually do?
Socialism isn't merely a synonym for government spending, nor is every welfare program socialist. At its core, socialism implies the state ownership and allocation of economic resources. Traditional socialism substitutes social or state ownership for private capital.
Modern democratic socialists usually express the idea through “decommodification”: progressively removing healthcare, housing, energy and other necessities from ordinary market allocation and putting them under public, that is, government coercive control.
But what about Scandinavian “socialism”? Let’s once again bury this myth.
Denmark, Sweden and Norway, however, are not centrally planned socialist economies. They are capitalist economies with substantial welfare states, private businesses, property rights, open trade and remarkably high levels of economic freedom. In fact, all three currently rank above the United States on some major measures of economic freedom.
The American socialist movement is proposing something more ambitious than Danish capitalism with a larger welfare state. Its agenda includes single-payer healthcare intended to replace private insurance, social housing, greater public control over energy and other industries, and the broader removal of essential goods from private markets.
But let’s put aside an ideological debate for now. Most Americans aren’t interested in philosophy; they are interested in results.
Socialist nations have given us consistent evidence that they fail to perform as advertised.
Venezuela nationalized industries, expropriated private assets, imposed price controls and expanded state management of its economy under “21st-century socialism.” The economy eventually contracted by roughly three-quarters from its peak, oil production collapsed, hyperinflation destroyed savings, and millions of Venezuelans left the country.
Cuba provides an even longer experiment in state economic control. Its economy collapsed by roughly a third after Soviet support disappeared in the early 1990s, and the country continues to struggle with shortages, weak production, blackouts and dependence on foreign support.
Economic incentives don't disappear when government takes control of an industry. Scarcity doesn't disappear. Humans don't stop responding to incentives. Soaring proclamations cannot repeal supply and demand.
Socialism can also produce the superficial appearance of economic equality while leaving ordinary people poorer.
The Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, is useful but easily misunderstood. A society can become more equal because people at the bottom become richer, or because people throughout the distribution become poorer.
Research on economic freedom suggests that freer economies can sometimes produce somewhat greater measured inequality while simultaneously raising incomes throughout the distribution.
The objective should not be equality for its own sake. It should be a society in which ordinary people can steadily become wealthier.
There is also an international dimension to socialism that deserves more attention than it generally receives.
Socialism has historically been an internationalist ideology. Its basic political unit is class rather than nationality, and socialist movements have traditionally conceived of solidarity as extending across national boundaries. That philosophical tradition remains visible in the contemporary socialist left, particularly in its hostility toward “America First” politics.
Now, a naturalized immigrant can be intensely patriotic, especially if his family fled a communist country. What we are talking about is ideological disposition.
It isn't surprising that an internationalist movement presents itself as multicultural. Democrat Reps. Ilhan Omar (MN-05) and Rashida Tlaib (MI-12), Mayor Mamdani and other prominent figures on the socialist left emphasize that America’s prosperity should be used to better the lives of immigrants and foreigners. This is an important distinction from Democrats of earlier generations.
America First argues that the first responsibility of the American government is to American citizens. Socialist internationalism is more inclined to regard economic need, class, and political solidarity as claims that transcend national borders.
That difference has enormous practical consequences because socialist programs ultimately require someone to finance them. In the United States, that means tapping the extraordinary productive capacity of American workers and businesses and the fiscal capacity of the American government.
There is a second reason socialist internationalism deserves scrutiny. Transnational ideological movements have historically provided opportunities for foreign governments to influence political movements abroad. The Soviet Union did this extensively during the Cold War, just as other governments have attempted to cultivate sympathetic political organizations overseas.
But the greatest problem with socialism may be neither foreign influence nor even economic performance. It is what socialism does to politics itself.
Markets allow enormous numbers of disagreements to be settled without political conflict. If you dislike a company, you can patronize another one. If your bank mistreats you, you can move your money. If a restaurant becomes too expensive, you stop eating there. Nobody needs to win an election first.
Economic competition gives people an exit. As government assumes control over more areas of economic life, that exit becomes harder. If government controls your healthcare system, dominates housing, determines energy prices, or directs investment, changing providers may no longer be possible. The only meaningful way to change the system is political.
Market competition is replaced by a battle for power. That makes politics much more dangerous.
If winning an election determines who controls healthcare, housing, employment and access to capital, losing political power becomes increasingly devastating.
Businesses have greater incentives to buy off politicians. Citizens have more incentives to fight over government benefits. Political parties are more tempted to abuse power to punish and oppress opponents.
That is not hypothetical; millions of Americans experienced this personally after Joe Biden was "elected."
That is the deeper reason Americans should pay attention to the Socialist Democrat Party.
Americans don't need to check everyone's DSA membership card to know the party is turning socialist.
They can look at where the party is going — and judge the results for themselves.
