Six hundred Democratic Socialists spent last weekend in a Chicago ballroom telling one another they were winning. For once, they weren’t exaggerating.
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A new CNN poll found that a third of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents now call themselves Democratic Socialists, and delegates at the DSA’s convention left Chicago having knocked off two House incumbents this cycle, flipped a Michigan legislative seat, and won the Democrat nomination for Ann Arbor mayor. Co-chair Ashik Siddique said he never thought he’d live to see it. Neither did I, and I remember the 1980s fondly.
I grew up on Reagan’s description of the Soviet Union, studied constitutional and political theory at Northeastern, and spent better than thirty years managing money for families who built things instead of arguing about how to redistribute them. So I get the reflex on the right this month to reach for “Red Scare” and mean it literally. Before we go there, it’s worth remembering what the original Red Scare got right and what it got badly wrong. That distinction decides whether conservatives win this fight or hand the other side another martyr story.
The Soviets really did run agents inside the U.S. government, and the proved it. American cryptanalysts cracked a sliver of Soviet cable traffic from the 1940s, fewer than 3,000 messages, and still uncovered a network reaching into the Manhattan Project, State, and Treasury. Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenberg ring were confirmed operations, not McCarthyite fever dreams. But Venona had limits, with a decryption rate of roughly 49 percent of 1944 KGB traffic and under 2 percent of 1942 traffic — far less than McCarthy’s accusations assumed. The threat was real. His sloppy accusation-slinging still discredited an accurate concern for a generation.
That history should make conservatives careful. Today’s Democratic Socialist movement isn’t a Kremlin directorate. It’s homegrown, which is exactly why it can outlast a spy ring. The DSA topped 120,000 dues-paying members this July, with chapters in all fifty states, and its “Workers Deserve More” platform lays out an actual program: public ownership of large corporations, abolishing the Senate outright, publicly financed elections, and a longer project of remaking core American institutions. It’s posted on their website, and reading it beats clutching pearls about it on cable news.
Start with the economics. Nationalizing or broadly socializing ownership of major firms doesn’t just move wealth from one pocket to another; it strangles the investment and price signals that create wealth in the first place. I’ve spent a career in wealth management, and capital is a coward. It runs toward property rights and flees the moment it senses expropriation. Ask anyone who watched Venezuela nationalize its oil majors how that ended for the workers who were promised the moon.
The institutional program should worry conservatives more than the economics does. The platform doesn’t stop at abolishing the Senate — it calls for replacing the president and the Supreme Court with leaders picked by Congress, and abolishing ICE and the prison system outright. That’s a rewrite of the constitutional order the Framers built to frustrate exactly this kind of majoritarian enthusiasm. Madison designed the Senate because unchecked democracy tends to eat itself, and the DSA platform treats that design as an obstacle rather than a feature.
Internal discipline tells you more about a movement than its platform ever will. A grievance-based coalition needs an endless supply of grievances, which is why members who solve their own problems tend to get purged rather than praised. In 2024, DSA’s national political committee threatened to pull its endorsement of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over what it called insufficient opposition to Israel. That’s a loyalty test, and loyalty tests are how movements calcify into cults.
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There is a thread that ties the old Red Scare to this one. The Soviets never needed to win an American election; they played the long game through entertainment and education, the two industries that shape how a population thinks before it reaches a ballot box. KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov described exactly that in a 1984 interview, claiming that 85 percent of Soviet intelligence work was ideological subversion, not spycraft: a fifteen-to-twenty-year project aimed at manipulating education and media. Critics dispute his rank, but the mechanism holds up.
That playbook didn’t die with the USSR. Walk into a curriculum meeting or a writer’s room today, and you’ll find people running it without ever alighting on a page of Marx. The difference between 1948 and 2026 isn’t the target. It’s that this version has volunteers.
California is the preview, and I’ve had a front row seat since landing in Los Angeles in 1990, back when the state still ran a functioning two-party system and an economy good enough to pull grown men out of Boston. Single-party rule metastasized from there into the regulatory overreach, punishing taxation, and homelessness crisis that now define the state outside its own press releases. That took exactly what the DSA is building in Michigan and elsewhere: one school board, one city council at a time.
The polling complicates the “America goes socialist” headline. Gallup has only 39 percent of Americans viewing socialism favorably against 54 percent for capitalism, and the gap runs almost entirely along partisan lines: two thirds of Democrats like the label; 14 percent of Republicans do. What’s actually happening underneath is simpler. Specific policies, capping drug prices, building affordable housing, and strengthening union bargaining power poll fine once stripped of the socialist label and sold as plain affordability fixes. Most Americans aren’t voting for Marx. They’re voting for lower rent.
I don’t begrudge anyone worried about housing costs or a health system that can bankrupt a family over a broken arm. I buried a father and a brother to cancer and watched what medical bills do to people already grieving. Real problems deserve real answers, and conservatives who meet every affordability complaint with a lecture on free markets are losing an argument they should win outright. The answer is better policy, delivered with the discipline Reagan brought to this fight forty years ago, and a refusal to hand the other side sole ownership of the word “fairness.”
Brandeis said sunlight is the best disinfectant, and he wasn’t just talking about banking. The fix isn’t a House committee dragging DSA organizers before cameras. It’s reading their own platform out loud and asking affordability-minded voters sympathetic to the label whether they actually signed up for abolishing the Senate and nationalizing industry. Conservatives who draw that distinction, offering functioning markets and the rule of law as the cure, will win converts.
Conservatives who yell “Bolshevik” at every rent-control proposal will lose the room. The tell this time isn’t a coded cable to Moscow. It’s a platform page, in plain English, that nobody in Chicago bothered to hide.
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Image: nrkbeta via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.