Dinesh D’Souza posed a chilling rhetorical question in his 2020 book, “United States of Socialism”:  Think how insane it would be if someone said, ‘Let’s try slavery again. Slavery didn’t work in the past because we didn’t have the right people to implement it. But this time we’re going to have the right people, and this time we’re going to get it right.’ Yet this is exactly what the socialists say about socialism. He is still correct six years later. Democrats and their fellow travelers, however,  seem to have doubled down on this backward thinking and are proceeding full steam ahead into socialist waters. The ultra-progressive Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) released a new poll — their first formal poll, in fact, a telling sign of their extending tentacles into the mainstream — showing that 53% of Democratic voters prefer politicians described as similar to Senator Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, while only 33% favored those similar to Senator Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi. These numbers aren’t an anomaly; they are a trend. Since 2016, rank-and-file Democrats have grown increasingly hostile toward the system that built this country. According to recent Gallup data, the gap has expanded to a staggering 24 points, with 66% of Democrats viewing socialism favorably compared to just 42% for capitalism. What exactly do these voters find agreeable about the ultra-left, socialist wing of their party? For starters, the lofty ideals that big government should be in control, that billionaires are evil, that corporations and high-income earners should be taxed into oblivion, that Congress should enact more regulations on workers and consumers, and that housing, healthcare, and utilities should fall under the purview of the public sector. To conservatives, most Independents, and even some Democrats, these goals portend only bureaucratic bloat, delays, and the stifling of innovation. Most proponents of capitalism believe the private sector is best equipped to improve Americans’ lives. They generally support lower taxes, oppose government regulation of businesses, and want the private sector to own key industries — like housing, healthcare, and utilities — as confirmed by the DSA’s own poll. A staggering 74% of likely Democratic voters said democratic socialism comes closest to their viewpoint. That means America will be seeing a rise in the Bernie, Mamdani, and AOC type — and with it, a severe stifling of growth and innovation, a rapid spike in taxation, and an influx of leftist agenda items into the mainstream. Bernie Sanders — the unproductive socialist Senator from Vermont, and a man who has added precious little of significance to his state or his country in his decades in office — is now using the socialist wave to push his latest agenda item: a federal moratorium on the construction of new AI data centers, with his collectivist companion AOC in tow. This moratorium, like so many of the policies this pair champion, would erect burdensome bureaucratic roadblocks that frustrate innovation and squander entrepreneurism. In Bernie’s world, we should fear millionaires — no wait, billionaires (he’s now a millionaire himself) — technology, and climate change at all times. Better yet? Just stay in your home until further notice. This new wave of socialism will also bring suffocating taxes and a collectivist mindset — because, as comrade Mamdani proclaimed, the blanket of collectivism is so warm and cozy. Bernie and his proletariat wouldn’t just tax the billionaire class; they would enact wealth taxes across the board. Taxing “unrealized gains” or net wealth forces billionaires to sell their stocks, which can crash market prices and reduce the capital available for businesses to expand and hire. IRS data shows that the top 1% already pay roughly 40% of all federal income taxes. The Democratic Socialists want you to believe that poor people pay all the taxes and the wealthy get off scot-free — they have it completely backward. They would simply like to take $10 billion from a technology company or its founder and pour it into a government black hole of bureaucracy, where Sanders and his friends reside. Leave that money with founders, entrepreneurs, and innovators, and it goes into rockets, electric cars, and global internet access. As Margaret Thatcher wisely noted — and Elon Musk has echoed — eventually, they run out of other people’s money, and then they come for you. The final and perhaps most alarming aspect of this modern socialist resurgence is its Trojan Horse delivery system. Under the banner of the DSA, we see a conglomerate of radicalism — where traditional Marxists, climate extremists, and anti-western agitators coalesce into a single political force. By quietly installing hundreds of activists into local school boards, city councils, and state legislatures, they are executing a long march through the institutions. This isn’t just a policy shift — it’s a calculated, multi-level erosion of the capitalist fabric our founders painstakingly cultivated. Apparently, they didn’t anticipate the “watermelon coalition” growing so rapidly, or that its mission — to dismantle the American capitalist empire from within the “belly of the beast” — would find willing participants at every level of government. The good news is that Democrats have tried their socialist playbook before, and while it performs reasonably well at the local level, the national stage has been another story entirely — as 2024 made clear. But that isn’t stopping them. “What the mainstream of the party wants is both democratic socialism as a value system and democratic socialist politicians,” said Gabe Tobias, executive director of the Democratic Socialists of America Fund, to POLITICO. Democratic socialism is a pretty way of blending class-based Marxism with modern identity politics. It is no longer just about the proletariat — it’s about mobilizing a coalition of the oppressed to overthrow the oppressor and pave the way for state-sponsored redistribution. It won’t work. It never does. But it looks like the American left is going to have to find that out the hard way.