My New USA Today Article On Dangerous Similarities Between “Democratic Socialists” and MAGA Nationalists

USA Today just published my op ed entitled “”Democratic Socialists and MAGA Share a Dangerous Flaw.” Here’s an excerpt:

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 recently Florida state Rep. Angie Nixon’s upset U.S. Senate nomination win – and come close in several 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 government 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.

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

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

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

 

The rest of the article explains how both socialist and nationalist forms of government control of the economy run into problems of knowledge and incentives, and why both threaten liberty and democracy. I also explain why adherents of these ideologies cannot paper over their flaws by claiming they favor democratic versions of them, rather than authoritarian ones:

Today’s socialists say they will avoid this fate because they champion “democratic” socialism, not the authoritarian kind. But near-total state control of the economy has never coexisted with democracy for long. A government 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 government became a dictatorship.

Right-wing nationalist regimes have followed a similar path, in Germany, Italy, Spain and many Latin American nations.

Many of today’s socialists even admire authoritarian socialist regimes and hope to emulate them:

“Postliberal” MAGA nationalists similarly often admire right-wing despots, like Spain’s Francisco Franco, Portugal’s Antonio Salazar and others.

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….

I end with this point:

If nothing else, we should heed the powerful evidence of people “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….

If socialism worked as advertised, people 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, helped build American science, including the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb.

I addressed some of the issues covered in the article more fully in previous writings, such as “The Case Against Nationalism” (coauthored with Alex Nowrasteh), and “Perils of Democratic Socialism.” See also my recent piece on the contradictions of socialist prison abolitionism.