The Blogs: Democratic Socialism Can Save the United States from Itself

On November 4, 2025, as the results of this “off-year” election became clear, we witnessed the real possibility of the beginning of the end of Donald Trump and MAGA’s impact on U.S. politics.

Though Republicans will still maintain power in the House of Representatives, Senate, the White House, and in the Supreme Court, the 2025 Blue Wave reaching tsunami proportions could portent a Democratic takeover next year in national and state legislative elections.

Democrats won big in Virginia taking back the Governor’s mansion with Abigail Spanberger. Virginia Democrats also won the Lieutenant Governor and Attorney General’s offices. In New Jersey, Democrat Mikie Sherrill has become the Governor-elect.

California voters overwhelmingly voted in favor of their Governor, Gavin Newsome’s, mid-decade electoral redistricting plan, which could add an additional five Democratic U.S. Representatives to that state’s Congressional delegation. Newsome initiated this ballot initiative in an attempt to counter Texas’s action in drawing districts giving Republicans an overwhelming advantage by adding Republican representation.

Possibly the election with the highest national visibility was in the race for New York City. A charismatic progressive populist, a Muslim who self-identifies as a “democratic socialist,” Zohran Mamdani, beat the much better-known former New York Governor, Andrew Cuomo, who ran as an Independent after Mamdani beat him in the Democratic primary.

At his victory speech, Mamdani announced:

“Tonight, you have delivered a mandate for change, a mandate for a new kind of politics, a mandate for a city we can afford.”

Two days prior to Mamdani’s election, President Donald Trump, on CBS’s “60 Minutes” issued a threat to the people of New York City if they elected Mamdani:

“It’s gonna be hard for me as the president to give a lot of money to New York,” he warned, “because if you have a communist running New York, all you’re doing is wasting the money you’re sending there.”

During a press conference on November 6, 2025, Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson continued the long-standing “Red Scare” perpetrated in the United States since the end of the Second World War:

“The old guard has been repudiated, and the radicals are taking over the Democratic Party,” he warned. “And just this morning, you’ve seen the headlines, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi has announced her retirement this morning….Even the famous San Francisco liberal isn’t far left enough for the neo-Marxists.”

Either Trump is ignorant of the very real differences between “communism” and “democratic socialism,” or he is attempting to confuse and scare people. But how many people in the United States actually understand socialism? For that matter, how many of us are well-versed in our own history?

David Bentley Hart, in his February 24, 2020 Commonweal article “Three Cheers for Socialism,” indicts the public for its ignorance on matters of history, social movements, and economic theory:

“Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth,” he argued. “They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.”

On Democratic Socialism:

While economic disparities plague all of the nations across the planet, nowhere among the richer nations in the world are these disparities more extreme than in the United States. The top 1% of the population has greater wealth — and with an average annual income of $1,316,985 — than the entire bottom 99% with an average income of $50,107. So, when is enough, enough?

When Congress and President Trump passed their misnamed “One Big Beautiful Bill” continuing the massive tax credits to the uber-rich, and seriously limiting nutritional assistance and rising rates for healthcare insurance on the Affordable Care Act, thereby effectively eliminating insurance while substantially increasing healthcare costs, when is enough, enough?

When the military industrial complex marches to the beat of industry, when an educational system based on standardization and allegiance to corporate needs, and a prison industrial complex that perpetuates the racial and socioeconomic class inequities pervasive throughout the society, then when is enough, enough?

Even before the Cold War and the so-called “McCarthy Period” (named after Wisconsin Senator, Joseph McCarthy), individuals and groups on the political and theocratic right have flung the term “socialist” from their metaphoric sling shots into the faces of their political opponents to discredit their characters and dismiss their political ideas and policies, and to sway the electorate toward a conservative agenda.

“Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country….Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.”

As destructive and as freedom-killing as the right would have us believe, according to the World English Dictionary, socialism involves “a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole,” where each of us has a stake and advances in the success of our collective economy.

Maybe if more of us challenged the widening and inhumane inequities, where each of us understood that we all have a stake and advance in the success of our collective economy, then enough would definitely and finally be enough!

So, what are some strategies to narrow the gaps in wealth and income between the economic classes in the United States:

a governmental single-payer quality universal health care system not tied to individuals’ employment, which includes safe and reasonably priced prescriptions and over-the-counter drugs.
guaranteed protection and enhancement of our Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid safety nets that are not taxed.
a system of parental leave, paid sick leave, tax credits and governmental supplements for quality child day care services, as well as universal Pre-K education for all young people.
guaranteed equal pay for equal work between the sexes, and the raising of the minimum wage so workers can significantly raise their standard of living.
further nationalization of our parks, forests, mountains, rivers, streams, shores, and offshore waters, rather than allocating increased corporate mining, drilling, and timber rights.
free and quality education, not only through grade 12, but throughout higher education and after for everyone who desires and works to achieve their fullest potential.
government-sponsored programs that guarantee our seniors a retirement system that ensures a high quality of life free from economic burdens.
guaranteed rights of workers in all industries to organize and to collectively bargain for better wages and working conditions.
elimination of workplace and larger societal inequalities based on race, nationality, citizenship status, age, sex, sexual identity, gender identity and expression, disability, socioeconomic standing, religion, and other social identities.
guaranteed comfortable and secure place to live, and governmental policies that actually prevent a banking system that forecloses people’s homes through scurrilous business practices.
severe restrictions on the political process to prevent mammoth contributions by individuals and corporations to buy and own politicians and to influence public policy, while locking out individuals and groups unable to amass large political funds.
challenge to the military industrial complex that marches to the beat of industry, and a prison industrial complex that perpetuates the racial and socioeconomic class inequities pervasive throughout society.
true progressive tax structure where everyone pays their fair share, one that inhibits massive inequities in the overwhelming accumulation of wealth by the top income brackets.
Most basically, effective restrictions on the so-called “free market” economic system that enables the creation and enhancement of mega monopolies, outsourcing of jobs, manufacture of defective products, and inhibition in the development of clean renewable energy technologies.
a free and fair electoral process with equity-drawn voting districts without the fraudulent inclusion of gerrymandering, increased early voting options, increased use of mail-in ballots, reinstatement of deleted provisions by the Supreme Court and enhancement of the National Voting Rights act of 1965 to ensure bias-free and the non-partisan running of elections.
the passage and enforcement of fair immigration and refugee-status legislation to provide rights and protections for qualified applicants, without fear of unwarranted arrest or deportation.

If the United States does not act to narrow the massive gaps in wealth and income between sectors of the population, I believe a class war – hopefully non-violent — is imminent in the United States until and unless we radically change direction.