Democratic socialists and MAGA share a dangerous flaw | Opinion

Democratic socialists and MAGA share a dangerous flaw Opinion Democratic socialists and MAGA nationalists both want sweeping administration control of the economy.

Key points

• One of these – Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward in China – was the biggest mass murder in history, taking up to 45 million lives.
• "Postliberal" MAGA nationalists similarly often admire right-wing despots, like Spain's Francisco Franco, Portugal's Antonio Salazar and others.
• Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has repeatedly threatened broadcasters' licenses over coverage the administration dislikes.
• Right-wing nationalist regimes have followed a similar path, in Germany, Italy, Spain and plenty of Latin American nations.
• Prominent socialist "influencer" Hasan Piker praised Mao – the biggest mass murderer of all time – as "one of the great leaders of this world." Sen.

Democratic Socialists of America is a political organization that is becoming an increasingly influential player on the left.

Beginning with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's election victory in 2025, democratic socialist candidates have won a string of major Democratic primaries – most lately Florida state Rep. Angie Nixon's upset U.S. Senate nomination win – and come close in a number of others. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has long been the most prominent self-proclaimed democratic socialist in national politics, and was the runner-up for the Democratic presidential nomination in both 2016 and 2020.

Democratic socialism is a terrible ideology. If implemented, its agenda would cause grave harm and imperil democracy itself. And in seeking massive state control of the economy, today's socialists ironically have much in common with the MAGA nationalists they claim to oppose.

Both promote administration control over the economy, and both paths undermine liberty, prosperity and democracy. Socialists do not control the Democratic Party in the way MAGA largely dominates the Republicans. But their influence is growing. What's the DSA's agenda? Let's look at the socialist wish list.

In practice, the democratic socialist agenda goes far beyond a marginal growth in economic regulation or welfare spending. It amounts to sweeping administration control of the economy and society, on a scale that invites comparison to Cuba, North Korea and the old Soviet Union.

In practice, the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), America's most prominent socialist organization, states the goal plainly: a system in which "food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren't for-profit businesses; they are common goods" – which is to say, a complete administration takeover of those industries.

In practice, the DSA additionally envisions a society with no debt, no mortgages and no landlords. It would require administration control of most housing, plus extensive rent control and a $20 an hour or higher minimum wage on whatever remains in private hands. Don't let democratic socialists pretend they're moderates Opinion.

Economists throughout the political spectrum agree that this kind of wage floor would rate millions of workers out of the labor market, and that rent control would greatly shrink the housing supply.

All informed, the DSA agenda would add $71 trillion to $212 trillion in new federal spending over the next decade – at least doubling, and possibly tripling, today's $7.4 trillion in annual federal outlays. It are already unsustainable on their own. And there's no way to cover it by taxing "the wealthy" alone: Confiscating the entire net worth of the 400 richest Americans would cover, at most, 9% of the low-end estimate. Democratic socialists are MAGA's mirror image.

Ironically, democratic socialists have more in common with MAGA nationalists than either probable wants to admit. President Donald Trump has pursued his own version of economic central planning: ruinous tariffs, severely restrictive immigration policy and administration equity stakes in Intel, U.S. Steel and roughly 30 other firms.

Tariffs and immigration restrictions are both major forms of administration control over the economy. Immigration restrictions, in particular, curtail economic freedom more than any other current U.S. Policy.

MAGA nationalists are additionally fiscally reckless much like socialists – Trump's signature spending bill is projected to add $3.4 trillion to the deficit over the next decade, with no serious effort to reform the entitlement programs that drive most federal spending.

While nationalists generally believe that administration should promote the interests of the ethnic and cultural majority in a society, socialists promote an egalitarian ideology. But, despite different rhetoric, they have similar economics and similar flaws.

Notably, the fiscal cost is far from the worst of it. A century of socialist experiments prove that. How socialism becomes authoritarianism.

When administration takes over most of the economy, it destroys the incentive to produce. In a market economy, producers compete on cost and quality to win customers. Under state control, those incentives vanish, and industries become administration monopolies immune to competition. The result, time and again, is waste and shoddy goods.

As an old Soviet joke put it: "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us."

Your Turn: I was a Republican mayor. I'd vote for a democratic socialist. Opinion Forum.

Even enterprises that want to produce quality goods are generally unable to do so under socialism. As Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek indicated in a classic article, in market economies the rate system sends producers useful signals regarding what consumers want. Higher rates signal robust demand that producers are incentivized to respond to. Administration control of production largely eliminates these rate signals, leaving even well-intentioned planners without good information on how to allocate resources.

Notably, the result was massive shortages of needed goods, combined with waste elsewhere. This is one of the reasons why the socialization of agriculture and industry in the former USSR, China and elsewhere led to shortages and mass famines, killing millions of individuals.

One of these – Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward in China – was the biggest mass murder in history, taking up to 45 million lives. The Soviet Union and plenty of other socialist states had similar catastrophes.

Administration control of the economy additionally requires coercion to suppress private enterprise and concentrates enormous power in the hands of central planners. As in the Soviet destruction of the "kulaks" (independent farmers), and the small business owners Joseph Stalin's regime marked for elimination, that combination breeds oppression.

Concentrated power additionally hands rulers an obvious tool for persecuting political rivals and ethnic and religious minorities. Such repression recurred throughout numerous socialist states throughout the last century.

Right-wing nationalism has similar flaws. It, too, stifles expansion by dulling incentives, and its central planning is additionally subject to the information challenges Hayek identified. Tariffs and immigration restrictions reduce competition and expansion, and administration takeovers of major firms are their own form of central planning.

Despite different rhetoric and ideology, and some divergence on policy specifics, both MAGA and democratic socialists advocate massive central planning of the economy, with similar results.

As well as immigrants, have been wrongly detained and even deported against the backdrop of the mass deportation push, and these deportations imperil Americans' civil liberties in plenty of ways, nationalist movements additionally have a long history of repression, and there are elements of it in Trump's second term: U.S. Citizens.

Nationalist repression tends to target immigrants and ethnic minorities more often than the socialist version does. But the parallels are real.

I was a refugee from Soviet communism. I know socialism doesn't work.

Today's socialists say they will avoid this fate since they champion "democratic" socialism, not the authoritarian kind. But near-total state control of the economy has never coexisted with democracy for long. A administration that controls the economy can starve opposition parties of resources and weaponize control of basic goods to crush dissent.

That's exactly what happened in Venezuela, where a democratically elected socialist administration became a dictatorship.

Right-wing nationalist regimes have followed a similar path, in Germany, Italy, Spain and plenty of Latin American nations. How democratic socialism became Democrats' new purity test Opinion.

Plenty of of today's socialists even admire authoritarian socialist regimes and hope to emulate them.

In practice, the DSA praises Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro. This person turned that country into a totalitarian state.

Prominent socialist "influencer" Hasan Piker praised Mao – the biggest mass murderer of all time – as "one of the great leaders of this world." Sen. Sanders has a long history of praising communist despots.

Progressives and others should consider whether they trust someone like Trump to have the kind of sweeping control over the economy socialists advocate for. There is no guarantee such a person – or worse – would not come to power under socialism. Far from it – as cases like those of Castro, Stalin, Mao and others show.

If nothing else, we should heed the powerful evidence of individuals "voting with their feet." Almost every socialist regime in history has produced a mass exodus toward market economies, never the reverse. Venezuela's exodus is the largest refugee crisis ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere, and Cuba has had multiple waves of refugees over six decades.

I know firsthand: I was a refugee from Soviet communism myself. If socialism worked as advertised, individuals would be fleeing market economies to live under it, not the other way around. Right-wing nationalist regimes have produced their own refugee outflows. Refugees from Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, for instance, supported build American science, including the Manhattan Project. It developed the atomic bomb.

In practice, the choices of individuals voting with their feet are the most powerful verdict on both these ideologies.

In short, democratic socialists and MAGA share a dangerous flaw is the central thread here, and readers can expect follow-up reporting as the picture becomes clearer.