Day: August 11, 2025

Ten years ago on this site, I documented the rise of America’s most prominent socialist, Bernie Sanders, from his surprising victory in a mayoral election in Burlington, Vermont, to becoming a member of the House of Representatives, then the US Senate, and now a leading national left-wing politician. I called his version of socialism “genteel” and asked if it really had any relationship with the hard-edged revolutionaries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America who wanted to confront the owners of capital, take control of industries, and fight for unions and working people.

Whether they are consciously copying Sanders’ footsteps to becoming the leading advocate for overthrowing America’s “oppressive” capitalist system or not, we now have three individuals who either call or align themselves with socialism serving as mayor or in a very strong position to become mayor of large American cities. Like Sanders, these individuals espouse some very left-wing policies. But can someone serving as a mayor, even the mayor of America’s largest city, really pursue “socialism”? Can local politics ever be socialist?

Chicago’s Brandon Johnson won the general election just two years ago, and now in New York City, Zohran Mamdani is the winner of the Democratic primary, which will likely give him the keys to Gracie Mansion. Then just last week in a very surprising outcome in Minneapolis, another socialist, Minnesota State Senator Omar Fateh, won the endorsement of the Minneapolis Democratic party at a convention, rejecting the incumbent Jacob Frey because he failed to support a resolution calling for an end to the Israel-Hamas conflict last year and not supporting policies such as carbon taxes and rent control. Arguing, correctly, that they don’t work.

Socialism has been growing in popularity and favorability among the two groups that carried Mamdani to victory in New York—Democrats in general and young people in particular. The day after his stunning victory, The Wall Street Journal reported that it was an army of young volunteers who helped organize his campaign and push him over the finish line, convincingly defeating former governor Andrew Cuomo.

Socialism has steadily become more popular among young people and the left in recent years. A Pew poll from 2022 showed 57 percent of Democrats have a favorable impression of socialism, and that a majority of Americans aged 18–29 preferred socialism to capitalism. Drilling further into the data, the poll found that young Democrats in particular were predisposed towards socialism because it would redistribute wealth and use state power to provide a plethora of various services and other “freebies.”

Mamdani’s bread and butter policies were chosen to appeal to younger left-leaning voters in New York, specifically rent control, subsidized public transportation, government grocery stores, and other superficially appealing (and ultimately disastrous) proposals. Fateh has a similar vision for Minneapolis.

Part of the problem is that for a long time, there was at least one party that staked out a fairly consistent position in favor of less government and more markets, in its rhetoric. That was the Republican Party, coming out of the roots of the Goldwater Revolution through the Reagan presidency up through the end of George W. Bush’s two terms in the White House. The party of the “right” was fairly consistent in at least talking about capitalism and limited government positively. But the GOP now supports tariffs, economic planning, and huge domestic spending programs, alongside strengthening the military. That shift allows Democrats to move further left on a wide range of issues, and the election of these two individuals offers a glimpse of one potential future of American national politics.

Leaving aside national politics, an interesting question remains: Why are we seeing socialism become popular at the local level, particularly in these three cities? First, in the case of New York and Minneapolis, these candidates were successful through unconventional electoral processes—ranked-order voting in Mamdani’s case and a nomination by a local party in Fateh’s. Second, all three of these candidates have won in very blue cities in which socialism is more favorably viewed, but none with the support of blue-collar voters. In Chicago, Johnson was the former head of the teachers’ union, which is one of the most politically powerful organizations in the state. In New York, Mamdani won with support from the “a little rich” boroughs of Brooklyn and other areas filled with highly educated elite voters who believe they are the underpaid relative to their fellow elites on Wall Street and in tech. Resentment by them fueled his victory while working-class voters in the Bronx and Staten Island rejected his calls for government grocery stores, housing the homeless in subway stations, and rent control. Fateh won the support of hard-left party delegates in a city that was the birthplace of the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of the George Floyd killing.

There is one more key reason why socialism is becoming more popular among heavily blue cities, and Fateh mentions it prominently on his campaign page when he begins his “Vision” by noting that the White House is occupied by Donald Trump. Of course, this is in conjunction with Trump’s policies. He says he wants to create a Minneapolis that is “the last line of defense” against President Trump and what he calls his “posse of unelected billionaires” in a nod to Elon Musk. I would wager that Mamdani enjoys a similar tailwind in this election. It’s also worth noting that Sanders was elected mayor in 1981, just as Ronald Reagan was to begin his first term in office. Coincidence?

Expecting the mayors of their cities to lead the resistance, though, is naive. It’s like signing a punter to solve a football team’s passing game. Mayors have limited powers to take on the national government and a responsibility to handle local policy challenges, not to issue proclamations in support of Middle Eastern policies.

Any thoughtful citizen needs to see what this posse of soon-to-be-elected, self-proclaimed socialists is selling. They have little managerial experience; they are rehashing failed policies that will simply lead to a larger public sector that none of these cities can afford. What’s more, increasing public sector spending in many of the areas they are suggesting has never been effective at addressing the problems these individuals are claiming to solve. That is why blue cities have been losing population and Democrats are bleeding blue-collar support in metropolitan areas.

So, will placing socialists in charge of large American cities help drum up support for the ideas and principles of socialism? That’s going to depend to a large degree on what people think of as “socialism.” Historically, socialists have advocated for the abolition of privately held property that would be replaced by collective ownership and central control of the distribution of goods through central planning rather than markets. This has led to decreases in inequality, basically by making everyone tremendously poorer, for example, in the Soviet Union, North Korea, and elsewhere.

Modern advocates for socialism promote it as a much milder version of the Soviet communist model, but the principles share a lot of similarities. Consider Mamdani’s calls for the abolition of privately owned housing and government provision of retail food. Those are steps towards intervention in two critical areas of daily life. Of course, he lacks the power to confiscate people’s homes and build large public housing projects on 5th Avenue. So can a mayor really be a socialist?

The founders of the Bloomington School of political economy, Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom and her husband Vincent, were always reluctant to describe local politics using sharp divisions between “markets” and “government.” They correctly recognized that the market is an institution that needs some third party to maintain property rights and enforce contracts. Governments need some form of wealth creation to pay for services. They argued that neither can exist in a vacuum without the other.

Rather, cities and localities offer different bundles of services, with individuals exercising choice to decide how those services are provided. Take something simple like trash collection. A city can hire a bunch of full-time employees and equipment, then build its own landfills to handle trash removal and waste disposal fully publicly. Or they could work with private sector providers to pick up trash, contract out with private landfills, and deposit the garbage with them. Most city services can now be provided by private companies, and most cities use some mix of public and private. Here in Indianapolis, the parking meters are run by a private company. Education is moving towards a mix of public and private.

And as the Ostroms correctly noted, it is mayors and city councils who decide how those services are provided. All three of the socialist-ish mayoral candidates seem to be in agreement with the broad principle that more public provision of things is good. For example, Johnson in Chicago is fighting to curtail school choice and protect public teachers’ pensions and salaries, which may be a principled belief, but it also satisfies his strongest group of supporters. Mamdani’s goals of rent control and “free” public transit, along with curtailing police power, might also be principled but satisfy his core supporters. But none of those are necessarily “socialist”. In fact, it looks quite a bit more like a lot of urban governance during the 1960s and ’70s—a period of notoriously poor performance by most major American cities.

That period of failed governance included what became known as “white flight,” when large numbers of city dwellers fled to the suburbs when faced with unsatisfactory governance. Exit is always an option for citizens when it comes to localities. To pay for these “socialist” policies, taxes will increase on “the rich,” who will undoubtedly flee the city to avoid those higher tax rates. At this moment, both Chicago and New York are in tenuous fiscal positions because of unfunded pension funds for government employees. While Minneapolis is in a somewhat better position, it also has approximately $100 million in debt from such pension commitments to government workers.

While the music of the 1960s and 70s is something to enjoy, its urban governance, bankrupt cities, crime-ridden streets, and poor public services are not. And no matter what label you put on them, they will not bring the workers’ paradise socialism promises.

Any opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of Liberty Fund.

The ongoing clash of the titans, President Trump and Elon Musk, is bringing into high relief the question of whether even the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth can stand up to vast private wealth allied to the power of advanced technology. Can mere political power—the checks and balances of constitutional government—ever hope to control the apparently limitless ability of technology billionaires to alter everyone’s lives? Will Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, having created entirely new digital societies, succeed in making themselves the gatekeepers of those societies? Will the new subjects of the new generation of tech builders get a democratic veto on the future being planned for us? Or will we wake up one day to be notified that installation of a brain-machine interface (BMI) is a “required update,” without which we will be unable to make a phone call or access our investment account? Will space travel soon require no government authorization, and colonies on the Moon or Mars be founded, not by NASA, but by the wealthy few who dominate aerospace technology?

We live in revolutionary times because technology is transforming every aspect of our lives—including not only how we work, but also how we connect with each other and find a sense of meaning. Tech founders and venture capitalists—the creators of artificial intelligence, space technologies, social media, cloud, and data platforms—are becoming global power players, whose tools are not just products, but networks that influence how societies function, how people think, how wars are fought, and how peace is made.

As in the socialist revolutions of the last century, the common people have yet to be consulted about these drastic alterations to our way of life, these new directions being set for our future. Socialists justified the lack of democratic accountability by claiming that the proletariat clung to the past owing to “false consciousness.” They could not be expected to discern the Shining Path that lay ahead, so they would have to be driven along it by force. Similarly, the tech titans of today assume that the vast multitude of tech users, many wedded to outmoded ways of life, will resist but will ultimately accept a future in which tech will give them unimaginable wealth and freedom. For now, they will have to be subject to tyrannous updates. Only Elon Musk, with over 222 million followers on his X account, seems concerned about legitimizing this tech future by founding an “America Party.” How successful his latest venture will be remains to be seen.

For now, the gap between Silicon Valley’s mindset and the rest of humanity is widening. The venture capitalists who invest in the most disruptive technologies tend to be techno-optimists like Marc Andreesen or transhumanists like Peter Thiel. All our personal and social problems, such men believe, are now capable of technological solutions. Human beings no longer have to be satisfied with the traditional limits of human nature or the vagaries of democratic politics.

Many tech entrepreneurs, understandably, are done with waiting for government to solve our problems. Elon Musk believed DOGE could save us from catastrophic levels of public debt, but the politicians wrecked his beautiful dream. Why waste any more time in Washington, DC, when the real solutions will be found through disruptive tech such as generative AI or new space technologies? Why rely on faulty human intelligence when we can create a superintelligent and invisible god in the cloud that can govern us, perhaps via BMI implants, far better than we govern ourselves?

Meanwhile, back on Earth, the rest of us could do with a little less disruption as we struggle to come to grips with the tech revolution. We are having breakdowns from all these breakthroughs. We worry that the tech billionaires are more interested in their own success, measured in dollars, than in our welfare. We are alarmed when the logic of finance drives venture capitalists to prefer dual-use technologies—those with both civilian and military applications. Military tech cries out to be used, which means war. As Prince Talleyrand, Napoleon’s chief diplomat, once remarked, the only thing you can’t do with bayonets is to sit on them.

Private adventurers getting out in front of public authorities are, to be sure, nothing new in Western history. The Dutch and British empires were launched by entrepreneurs who left the political constraints of their home countries to make fortunes in foreign lands. In time, their governments found it necessary to deploy ever more military power to protect their new overseas interests. Presently, they found themselves with empires. As the historian John Robert Seeley wrote of the British Empire in 1883, “We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.” In North America, the restless expansion of British and French colonists ended up triggering the French and Indian Wars, an extension of the European Seven Years’ War that neither the British nor the French governments welcomed. Unplanned imperial overstretch nearly bankrupted both colonial powers, creating the preconditions for two revolutions, the American and the French.

The ambition to transcend the limits of human nature is also nothing new. In the 1660s, shortly after the formation of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, Robert Boyle jotted down what many scholars have seen as the Society’s to-do list. This was inspired by his mentor Francis Bacon, who wanted to reorient the sciences to more practical aims, principally “the relief of man’s estate.” More than a few items in this list sound strangely familiar:

• The Prolongation of Life.
• The Recovery of Youth, or at least some of the Marks of it, as new Teeth, new Hair colour’d as in youth.
• The Acceleration of the Production of things out of Seed.
• The Cure of Diseases at a distance or at least by Transplantation.
• Potent Drugs to alter or Exalt Imagination, Waking, Memory, and other functions, and appease pain, procure innocent sleep, harmless dreams, etc.

Some items would be described today as dual-use technologies:

• The making Armor light and extremely hard.
• A Ship to saile with All Winds, and A Ship not to be Sunk.

It wasn’t called the Royal Society for nothing. Kings and princes had been sponsoring new technologies since Prince Henry the Navigator developed a new naval vessel, the caravel, to explore commercial opportunities on the coasts of Africa. Scientific advances in Renaissance Europe from the beginning were linked with military competition between rival powers.

Entrepreneurs seeking to escape the constraints of government, then, are nothing new. Inventors have been trying to transcend the limits of human nature for centuries. Dual-use technologies are as old as warfare itself. What is new in our time is the combination of extraordinary, life-changing technological prowess with a political system that is nearly paralyzed by partisanship and hurtling heedlessly towards financial ruin. Never before have the masters of technology had such power at a time when the public has so little trust in traditional institutions. Will the tech titans soon become the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, as Percy Bysshe Shelley famously said of poets? And if so, what can we do about it?

There have been other times in history when ruling institutions were weak and distrusted, and powerful individuals, lacking political legitimacy, have stepped into their place. Another great poet, Francesco Petrarch, spotted the problem in the fourteenth century, following the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire and the discrediting of the Papacy’s moral authority—the two great universal institutions of the Middle Ages. He came up with a solution that sparked the Italian Renaissance, among the most glorious periods of cultural achievement in the Western tradition. For Petrarch, the problems of his day could be solved by a revival of ancient virtue, meaning the lost moral, intellectual, and spiritual excellence of the ancient world. Educating the new leaders of Europe in the classics, he believed, would bring about a general reformation of society and political life. Could a similar strategy be used today?

A decade or so back, tech entrepreneurs started organizing themselves to promote what they called “Peace Tech.” The idea was not to ease consciences by investing in progressive causes, like ESG investing. Rather, venture capitalists would incubate startups that would create “dual use” innovations of a different kind. These technologies, sometimes called “triple use”, included peace as a third pillar. They aimed to build a movement of tech entrepreneurs, coders, developers, and investors committed to using technology to save lives, predict conflict, mitigate violence, mediate tensions, and support post-conflict recovery.

There are all too many reasons to fear political capture of initiatives like Peace Tech, but perhaps a similar model could be used to launch a Petrarchan reform among the new generation of tech entrepreneurs. The Renaissance revival of ancient virtue succeeded by convincing the most prestigious leaders of Renaissance Italy that they could only bring order to the chaos of the times by creating a new class of men and women. This new elite would dedicate itself to moral and intellectual excellence. The governments of that time suffered from a deficit of legitimacy, but virtue—supreme competence, wisdom, and firm moral grounding—could build a legitimacy of its own. The peoples under their rule would willingly accept effective leaders who showed care for people of all classes as well as loving custodianship of sound Western traditions inherited from the past.

A true aristocracy of virtue in tech, or even a few individuals with humanistic leadership skills of an exceptional order, could alter the worldview of the new technocracy, and place technological advance in the service of humanity and the common good—rather than the other way around. In the Renaissance, some powerful but illegitimate rulers like Lorenzo de’Medici sought the good of their peoples without sharing power with them. By contrast, the Founding Fathers, many of them virtuous men trained in the classics, took the European tradition of aristocratic republics and made it more responsive to the will of the people. As is written in the Book of Wisdom, “A multitude of the wise is the salvation of the world.”