Something is happening in the Democratic Party that is making party leaders and media pundits take notice. It became impossible to ignore with Zohran Mamdani’s 2025 election as mayor of New York City. Now comes Angie Nixon’s stunning victory in Florida’s Democratic Senate primary, where she defeated an establishment opponent who outspent her by more than ten to one.
Candidates challenging capitalism are finding a receptive audience, especially among younger Democrats. They are no longer easily dismissed as isolated insurgents in liberal enclaves, though their victories do not mean socialists are taking over the party.
Republicans and much of the mainstream media portray this as evidence that the party is dominated by the extremist left. That misses the larger story. Democratic socialism’s rise tells us less about Americans’ enthusiasm for socialism than about their disgust with MAGA populism, capitalism run amok, and the Democratic establishment’s failure to offer a convincing alternative. Socialism is gaining strength not because it is a proven cure, but because it gives a name to what many voters believe is wrong.
An American Tradition
Despite America’s free-market reputation, socialism has influenced its politics before. The Progressive Era arose partly in response to America’s first Gilded Age, when capitalists like John D. Rockefeller produced extraordinary wealth alongside dangerous workplaces, urban poverty, and enormous political power. Reformers proposed different remedies, but they agreed that unrestrained capitalism was trampling democracy.
Indiana’s Eugene Debs gave the socialist critique its most prominent national voice. He ran for president five times and received nearly 6 percent of the vote in 1912. Socialists also won state and local offices. Though they never came close to winning national elections, they put workplace protections, industrial unionism, and economic inequality on the political agenda.
Wisconsin’s Robert La Follette, though not a socialist, shared many of the movement’s concerns about monopoly and corporate power. His 1924 presidential campaign united progressives, labor unions, farmers, and socialists. Endorsed by the Socialist Party on Debs’s recommendation, he received almost 17 percent of the national vote.
Their Midwestern roots matter. The old left also drew strength from farmers, railroad workers, industrial laborers, and small-town reformers across the heartland.
While these movements failed to win national power, they forced the major parties to confront problems they preferred to ignore. Progressive taxation, antitrust enforcement, labor protections, and Social Security did not abolish capitalism. They strengthened it by placing democratic limits around it.
The DSA’s Long Game
The Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, was established in 1982, but its lineage reaches back to Debs’s Socialist Party. Founder Michael Harrington rejected Soviet-style communism and building marginal third party. He argued instead that socialists should work with labor unions, civil rights organizations, feminists, and liberal Democrats.
The DSA’s relationship with the Democratic Party is therefore nothing new. Democratic socialists run as Democrats because America’s two-party system leaves little room for a successful left-wing party. So, they maintain a separate organization and use Democratic primaries to challenge the party establishment.
This is the latest version of an old debate: Should the left build its own party or work within the two-party system? The DSA, from the start, has chosen the latter. Its recent victories raise a deeper question: Why is this decades-old strategy only now gaining traction, particularly among younger Democrats?
Why Socialism, and Why Now?
Younger Americans were promised that education and hard work would produce security. But as Noam Scheiber explores in Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class, many instead encountered debt, precarious and unfulfilling work, and homeownership beyond reach. The gap between promise and reality has fueled political disaffection.
In a 2025 Gallup poll, 66 percent of Democrats viewed socialism positively, while only 42 percent viewed capitalism positively. Yet 81 percent of Americans still viewed free enterprise favorably. The apparent contradiction is revealing. Many voters are not rejecting markets, private property, or entrepreneurship. They are rejecting the concentrated wealth and corporate power they see embodied by Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
MAGA populism and democratic socialism offer rival responses to this loss of confidence. Both argue the system is rigged, elites have betrayed the public, and ordinary people are being cheated. But they identify very different villains. Trump directs anger toward immigrants, bureaucrats, universities, and cultural elites. Democratic socialists direct it toward billionaires, corporations, landlords, and the political establishment.
The movements are not morally equivalent, but they draw energy from the same institutional failure. Neither party’s establishment has convinced Americans that the current system can provide economic security or govern in the public interest. Socialism is gaining support less because voters have embraced collective ownership than because it offers a language for condemning an economy that no longer seems to work for them.
A Warning, Not a Cure
The insurgents on the left have correctly identified the economic system’s failures: extreme inequality, concentrated corporate power, weakened workers, and the rising cost of living. But identifying a disease is easier than curing it. Socialists sometimes underestimate what markets do well, what their programs would cost, and how difficult sweeping promises can be to carry out. Winning a Democratic primary is also not the same as winning the country.
Establishment Democrats make the opposite mistake when they treat socialist victories as radical one-offs rather than political warnings. Lecturing voters about socialism while defending an economic order that has failed to provide affordable housing, healthcare, and security will not restore confidence in the party.
We do not have to embrace socialism wholesale nor dismiss it entirely. Democrats, like the Progressive Era reformers and the New Deal, must curb capitalism’s abuses while preserving its capacity to create wealth and opportunity. Earlier reformers regulated monopolies, protected workers, and provided security markets could not reliably deliver. They made capitalism work better for more people.
If today’s Democrats cannot do the same, democratic socialism will continue to attract voters, not because it has proved that it can govern, but because the existing order has repeatedly demonstrated that it cannot.
Robert Cropf is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Louis University.
