An unattributable aphorism says, “You can vote your way into socialism, but you have to shoot your way out.” Most Americans of just a decade ago would think it no more than a witty phrase. It couldn’t happen here, right? We wish we could be sure of that today, but we can’t.

New York City elected a self-identified Democratic Socialist who denies he’s a communist but whose policy platform is dead red, his playbook tracking with Karl Marx’s nasty polemic.

Seattle elected Katie Wilson to be its mayor. Her wish list reads as if it could have been written by Eugene V. Debs, the socialist who ran five times for president but, mercifully, never received a single electoral vote.

Minneapolis almost elected a Somali socialist from the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party as mayor, but instead voted in incumbent Jacob Frey – who inspires no confidence among the defenders of liberty and capitalism.

As disturbing as these events are, more concerning are the results of a poll that show 51% of likely voters from 18 to 39 want a democratic socialist to win the 2028 presidential election. The Rasmussen Reports survey, sponsored by the Heartland Institute, found that only 36% in that age group aren’t wishing for a democratic socialist to win in 2028, while 17% simply don’t know. 

How did this happen? More than half, 54%, of those who want a socialist president, “said their parents or guardians were favorable toward democratic socialism to the best of their recollection when they were growing up.” 

Sounds like the offspring of the many – far too many – university professors who no longer teach academics but see their role as proselytizers twisting young minds toward hard-left dogma.

If not their parents, they were influenced by what they were fed in academia: 52% of the under-40 voters said that while “attending school, most of their teachers and professors were favorable toward democratic socialism, including 22% who say their teachers were very favorable toward it.”

This is alarming. Socialism is nasty and unsuitable to humanity for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it attracts the worst among us, the sort who thrill in having control over others, to be its leaders.

“They are precisely the kind of people who elevate power over persuasion, force over cooperation,” says economist Lawrence Reed. “Government, possessing by definition a legal and political monopoly of the use of force, attracts them just as surely as dung draws flies.”

Reed wrote that almost 20 years ago. But he could have been writing about Democrats today and the blue state voters who “have a penchant for voting for the worst that their party has to offer.“

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali who grew up under that country’s socialist boot before she fled to the Netherlands, saw firsthand how socialism fails to “see individual human beings as having inherent dignity.” Based on this concept, socialism divides “society into two clashing, competing classes: the group that was economically oppressive (the capitalists) and the group that was economically oppressed (the workers).”

“In this worldview, individualism as a concept became not merely meaningless but suspect,” she says.

A Pew Research poll from 2019 indicates that positions on socialism have shifted in just a few years. That survey found that 55% of Americans had a negative view of socialism, and their reasons were on the mark. They opposed socialism, they said, because it undermines the work ethic and increases dependence on government, and they noted its unbroken line of historical failures.

The 42% who had a positive view of socialism said they held that opinion because it “creates a fairer, more generous system.” But nowhere has socialism created a fairer system, and there’s zero generosity in forcibly taking from some to give to others.

It’s discouraging that so many Americans fall for the fables of Karl Marx that the likes of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani preach. (This short list of cranks confirms the assertion that the worst always end up at the top in socialist systems.)

Socialism in any form is tyrannical, requiring submission to the state. It crushes souls (see North Korea, the Soviet Union, Cuba, and East Germany, for starters). It makes a few, its “leaders,” fabulously wealthy, while holding the masses in poverty. Its promises are cruel lies intended to deceive.

We hope we never reach the point where those of us who don’t want to be part of the commune that is ordered about by kakistocrats have to shoot our way out of socialism. That would be tragic, but less so than living with a hammer over our heads and a sickle at our throats.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board

Editor’s note: The editorial originally misstated the city that elected Katie Wilson to be its mayor. It’s been corrected.