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Democratic Socialists of America march
As America celebrates her two hundred and fiftieth birthday, many are asking whether we will make it another two hundred and fifty? The answer depends on whether we protect the foundations that got us here or allow them to be dismantled from within. Those foundations are exactly what the so-called Democratic Socialists taking over the Democrat Party are aiming for.
Historian Victor Davis Hanson has identified the pillars of American exceptionalism: a constitutional system of federalism that distributes power rather than concentrating it; legal immigration that brings in people who want to become Americans, not transform the country into what they left; a free-market, private-property economy that produced the largest middle class in history; and a culture that views risk as opportunity rather than danger.
These are precisely the targets of the Democratic Socialist movement. They want to confiscate property, absorb the private sector into the state, control tenant-landlord relationships, and eliminate the middle class in favor of a two-tier system of elites and dependents. Down that path, America goes the way of the Soviet Union, Cuba, or Venezuela. This isn’t theory, this is history.
So who are these people? Hanson’s profile is striking. Most are urban, far removed from the farms, factories, and small towns where goods are produced. Many are first- or second-generation immigrants whose families fled failed states, yet seek to import the broken systems they fled. Many are college-educated with degrees that produced neither skills nor opportunity, leaving them credentialed, indebted, and angry. Few are married with children or have any personal stake in the communities they claim to represent.
Many of them, however, are hypocrites. New York’s new socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani, who rails against settler-colonialism, was born into the one percent elite Indian population that emigrated to Uganda. Bernie Sanders owns three homes. This movement’s financial backers are billionaires whose names would surprise no one.
This new wave of socialism is not America’s deepest problem — it is a symptom. The Founders understood that self-government requires a virtuous people, and virtue requires formation. George Washington tied a nation’s permanent blessing to its virtue. When that foundation erodes, movements like Democratic Socialism rush in to fill the void. The antidote is not merely political. It is spiritual, cultural, and deeply personal. It begins with recovering what made this country worth celebrating — a moral, religious, and virtuous people.
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