Six years ago, the rise of the “Bernie bros” supporting avowed socialist candidate Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) raised the question of whether decades of soft indoctrination about the “horrors” of capitalism by the Democrat-media complex and the oft-promised but never delivered benefits of socialism had finally produced enough voters willing to elect their way out of free enterprise.
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Fortunately, that didn’t happen. However, in 2026 the evidence supporting that question is harder to wave away. A self-described democratic socialist now runs City Hall in the nation’s largest city, and a slate of Democratic Socialists of America-endorsed candidates is on ballots nationwide for Congress, statehouses, and mayor’s offices. The question is no longer academic. It is on the ballot on November 3.
Zohran Mamdani’s November 2025 victory in the New York City mayoral race was the biggest win for the DSA since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 upset, built on a platform of rent freezes, city-owned grocery stores, free buses, and steep new taxes on the wealthy. DSA leaders have called it proof that “democratic socialist ideas are very popular.”
Heading into the midterms, at least eleven DSA-aligned candidates are running for offices from Colorado to Rhode Island, Ocasio-Cortez just won her own House primary with 87 percent of the vote, and Rashida Tlaib is on the ballot again in Michigan. Even sympathetic Democrat strategists are nervous about the label. One Third Way official has even conceded that socialism hands Republicans “a pretty potent set of weapons” in competitive races. A CBS News poll found only 22 percent of Democrats actually support socialist economic positions, which tells you the argument inside the Party is far from settled.
That makes this exactly the moment to make the case against socialism from the outside, too. Most of the pushback on socialism is economic or historical, and both cases are strong. However, there is a different argument, rooted in older and more fundamental conflict between individualism and collectivism, that should be carefully considered by all Americans before going to the polls this year.
The purpose of this article is to educate, inform, and proselytize against socialism in all its forms.
WHAT IS COLLECTIVISM?
A useful academic definition calls collectivism “a cultural value characterized by emphasis on cohesiveness among individuals and prioritization of the group over self.” Ayn Rand’s definition is sharper and remains the most honest one available: collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group—whether a race, a class, or a state makes no difference—for the sake of what gets called “the common good.”
Nobody who uses that phrase ever quite explains who decides what the common good is or on what moral basis. The term itself only entered common usage in the 1920s, popularized by Lenin and the Bolsheviks as a key foundational component of Marxism-Leninism, meant to forge a “New Soviet Man” willing to be sacrificed for and fully replaced by the collective.
That philosophy had a body count, and it is worth restating plainly because the people citing “democratic socialism” today rarely do. Collectivizing Soviet agriculture meant destroying the kulak class outright. By some estimates, six million people were murdered or starved to death. Forced industrialization dragged millions into the Urals and Siberia; forced-labor camps swallowed millions more.
China’s experience under Mao Zedong was worse still: as many as 65 million dead across his reign, with 30–40 million of those (roughly the population of California) starving during the grimly misnamed “Great Leap Forward,” when profitable farms were forcibly converted to meet unworkable grain and steel quotas that official lies could never meet.
“Collectivism” eventually fell out of favor in the West because it was too easily heard as a synonym for communism, which it largely was. What replaced it in polite conversation was the softer word “socialism,” which is defined as a political and economic theory holding that production and distribution “should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.” Think about that phrase for a second: “regulated by the community as a whole” is collectivism wearing a nicer suit. It still means submerging the individual into the state, which does the actual regulating on everyone else’s behalf.
Every strain of this—past, present, ever promised—whether it be collectivism, communism, or “democratic” socialism, shares a common enemy in capitalism. The old adage remains true despite the caterwauling of the socialists: capitalism is the worst economic system in human history, except for every other one ever tried. Paired with the personal and economic freedoms enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, capitalism has produced the broadest and most durable prosperity the world has ever recorded.
Argentina offers a live experiment running the other direction. After decades of Peronist collectivism wrecked the peso and hollowed out its middle class, Javier Milei’s libertarian shock therapy has pulled inflation down from triple digits toward single digits in about two years. Reform away from collectivism, when it happens at all, is rarer and far slower than the original slide into it.
INDIVIDUALISM
By contrast, individualism is the dictionary’s “habit or principle of being independent and self-reliant” and “a social theory favoring freedom of action for individuals over collective or state control.” More than that, it holds that a person’s life belongs to him; he has the right to live it by his own judgment, keep what he earns, and pursue values of his own choosing, free from a state claiming a prior right to any of it.
That is the moral core of modern American conservatism, and it is the essence of the entrepreneurial instinct in human nature. It is arguably far more reflective of human nature than any collectivist system has ever managed to be. It is why individualism and capitalism are two sides of the same coin. Individualism begets entrepreneurialism and its twin, capitalism (also known as free enterprise or free market economics).
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The U.S. has produced more than 425 Nobel laureates, by far the most of any country and roughly 40 percent of the world’s total. Red China, with four times the population and a state that has poured enormous resources into prestige science, has produced a small fraction of that number (and only one from the Mainland). The light bulb, refrigeration, the automobile, the internet, the iPhone, and other modern marvels were conceived or mass-produced first in a country organized around individual initiative rather than central planning.
That is not an accident of geography or luck. The mechanism is straightforward, and the Hoover Institution has laid it out plainly:
- In a modern capitalist economy, hundreds of thousands of enterprises produce millions of distinct products—far too complex for any administrative body to allocate rationally, no matter how much computing power it commands.
- Without market prices, planners have no way to know what is genuinely scarce and what is abundant, so they cannot plan well even granting them the best of intentions.
THE ELEMENT OF HUMAN NATURE
Individualism is closely aligned with human nature. It starts with the fact that people notice, invent, trade, and take responsibility as persons, not as interchangeable units of a plan. When each person is free to use their own knowledge, bear the costs of their mistakes, and keep the gains from their efforts, the motives already built into human nature, including curiosity, ambition, caution, and pride in work, get pointed toward useful results.
Markets and private property turn that local knowledge into prices and voluntary cooperation, so talent is sorted by what actually works rather than by what a committee prefers. In contrast, collectivist systems try to override those same motives and then wonder why effort, honesty, and innovation dry up. Individualism does not assume people are angels; it assumes they are agents, and it designs institutions that make agency productive.
Collectivism fights human nature directly. It strips the moral element out of economic decision-making and dulls the risk-taking that actually grows economies. The failures pile up without a documented exception, including the USSR, the Soviet bloc, Mao’s China, Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela (before 2025).
Western Europe’s “soft socialism” gets held up as the counterexample, but its GDP growth still lags the U.S., high taxes and regulation depress entrepreneurship, single-payer health care rations care rather than expanding it, and most of the continent has sheltered under the U.S. defense umbrella since 1945 while funding only a token share of its own collective defense.
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY EMBRACES COLLECTIVISM
None of those failures stopped the Democrat Party from drifting hard toward the European model during the Obama years. No single year of his presidency reached 3 percent GDP growth, and food stamp enrollment hit historic highs. The Biden years continued the collectivism with a twist. Biden’s approach showed up less as formal nationalization than as directing private activity through the state. This included large industrial subsidies and content rules in the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS Act, “whole-of-government” climate and equity mandates on agencies and contractors, attempts to cancel or redistribute student debt by executive action, heavier labor and environmental regulation, and Buy American/prevailing-wage preferences that treated investment and hiring as instruments of group policy rather than as deals between firms and workers.
In 2026, the DSA has pulled a slice of the Democrat Party past Obama-Biden managerial liberalism into open advocacy of social ownership and planned allocation. They are pushing Medicare for All instead of Obamacare, a Green New Deal framed as industrial command rather than a carbon price, rent freezes and public development as first-line housing policy, and candidates who treat profit and private capital as problems to be subordinated rather than engines to be taxed. DSA-aligned officials and platforms push the Party’s activist core toward community or state control of major sectors of the U.S. economy and society in general.
AT STAKE IN NOVEMBER
Individualism/capitalism is a fundamentally different animal from the collectivist alternative being offered this fall by the DSA-influenced Democrat Party because the two systems are competing on what each believes a person is for. One treats you as an economic actor with your own judgment and your own claim to what you produce. The other treats you as a unit to be planned around, taxed for “the common good,” and told which businesses are allowed to exist in your neighborhood.
That is the real choice on November 3: not just which party wins which seats, but which theory of the individual gets a little more room to operate for the next two years, as well as control of Congress, which decides how much room either side actually has to shape America going forward.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
The DSA’s 2026 class is not a fringe curiosity; it is a governing model already installed in America’s largest city and being tested in districts from Colorado to Florida. Every one of those races is a small referendum on the same question posed above: whether enough Americans have absorbed the collectivist pitch to actually vote for it.
Do we want Zohran Mamdani, or the DSA’s incoming class of legislators, or the congressional “Squad” arbitrarily deciding how to run New York’s grocery stores, or Colorado’s economy, or Pennsylvania’s, or Michigan’s? None of them has ever run a business. We already have a preview in New York, where even Albany’s Democrat legislature (who are not exactly capitalism’s shock troops!) is balking at funding Mamdani’s wealth tax wish list because they can see the arithmetic doesn’t make sense.
History’s plainest lesson is that societies vote their way into collectivism far more easily than they ever find their way back out of it. Reversal tends to be slow, expensive, and far more painful than the original vote that started the slide. Milei’s Argentina is proof reversal is possible; it is also proof of how much has to be broken first before anyone is willing to try. Do we want to repeat that experiment in the U.S.? I think not.
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