As the 2026 midterms approach, its become clear that the Democratic Party has now explicitly abandoned any pretense about its intentions. Its “Progressive” welfare state agenda, which has always been a cloak, is gone. They have now rejected Capitalism, and by implication Americanism, and gone explicitly full totalitarian socialism. Why? The Democratic Party is now defined, if not fully taken over, by the once-fringe group and its most extreme-Left wing The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
Please don’t remind me that not all Democrats are Socialist. Yes, there are a few. But from the Democrat leadership on down, few will condemn the DSA or its candidates. “We are a big tent and welcome all ideas” is the usual mantra. But this is a thinly veiled endorsement.
There have been signals of this switch in recent years: See Seeking: Big Democratic Ideas That Make Everything Better—in which Biden “signaled anew that he was willing to reopen his policy platform, announcing six policy task forces . . . that combine his core supporters with left-wing [i.e. Socialist] allies of Senator Bernie Sanders”;—and Biden calls for transformation of America, in which Biden, in a subsequent campaign speech, laid out a “progressive message” that “echoes ideas from progressive [i.e. Socialist] Democrats, who have pushed behind the scenes for Biden to use this historic moment to rewrite the rules with drastically wider social safety nets and higher taxes on the wealthy,” a message that included a call for an “end to the era of shareholder capitalism”—a frontal assault against a foundational principle of Capitalism and Americans’ liberty, private property rights.
This means that the underlying philosophical battle of the past 120 years, socialism versus capitalism, is now front and center in the 2026 midterm election and beyond. Now more than ever, clearly identifying and defining one’s terms is vital. I think it’s indisputably important to understand clearly what one is debating, and facing. How, then, do we understand Socialism in the current political context?
It is in that context that I present to you two books; The Communistic Societies of the United States; Harmony, Oneida, the Shakers, and Others by Charles Nordhoff and History of American Socialisms by John Humphrey Noyes.
Published in the 1870s, Nordhoff and Noyes offer facinating first-person accounts inside more than six dozen socialist enclaves established in the United States in the 19th Century. We will examine these communities to see how they differ from the current Socialist uprising. Importantly, the terms “communist” and “socialist” are used more or less interchangeably, implying there is no fundamental difference between the two.
The societies the authors cover are based, in various ways, on the common ownership of all property, central economic planning, abolition of wages for labor, sharply regulated social life, including marriage and even sexual conduct, in exchange for loyalty to the common collectivist goals of the central authority. In exchange, everyone’s needs are provided for out of the common fund based on the principle of strict economic equality, but luxuries are forbidden or at least frowned upon. The communist societies are governed authoritarianly by an individual or small elite. Some kind of democratic process is generally involved. They differ in details and implementation, but all adhere to the basic socialist doctrines, usually rooted in Christian theology.
Importantly, these societies were strictly voluntary. They have their own constitutions, which conform to the laws of the United States. Everyone who is accepted in—some who apply are rejected—must contractually agree to the terms, agreeing to turn over all personal wealth to the society’s collective pot. People are free to leave, and when anyone does, they are usually compensated to some extent based on their original property contribution, or some other criteria established by prior contractual agreement. People can be expelled for non-compliance. No coercion or violence is ever used to keep people in, and disputes are resolved internally in a civil manner, although occasionally must be resolved in the courts of the United States.
These societies built and ran agricultural and manufacturing industries, and traded with the “outside” capitalist world. Profits are deposited into the common fund, and either used for the material needs or invested frugally, for the general benefit of the members. All members must learn skills and work, unless too young, or indigent. When needed, the rulers hire temporary outside labor for wages.
Interestingly, many of these societies were established by devout Christians who fled Europe in the 19th Century, which was still burdened by the tyranny of church-state unity. These people were persecuted, sometimes prosecuted, and even jailed because their practices differed from the views of the established religious/political authorities. So they emigrated to the United States, because the U.S. guaranteed their freedom to establish their socialisms.
This last point is crucially important. European socialists were coming to the Capitalist United States of America because this is where they found the freedom to practice their socialist creed. Melvin D. Barger, writing for FEE about another commune, Robert Owens’ New Harmony, said this:
The New Harmony movement also had wide support in the new American nation, and Owen had even been given an audience with President-elect John Quincy Adams and the Secretary of the Treasury when he arrived in Washington. There was a kindly tolerance of new ideas, and if New Harmony had been a sound and workable system, the United States had both the political freedom and the available land for thousands of such communal enterprises.
Then or now, nothing in the fundamental American idea was opposed to the socialistic communities of the early 19th century, since they were voluntary arrangements and used peaceful means. [My emphasis]
The American socialist movement of the 19th Century featured two primary branches, Owenism and Fourierism, referring to Socialist philosophers Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. There were religious, semi-religious, and non-religious manifestations. Some attempted to abolish the family as the primary unit, replacing it with 100% loyalty to the community. Others attempted to leave a place for the family. There was even one attempt to incorporate “sovereign individualism” into the communistic framework.
There were many different practical applications of the socialist principles. With few exceptions, they all failed to last very long. Noyes concludes that socialism in principle is synonymous with Christianity, and that the experience of the few that lasted the longest indicated that the path to socialism runs through religion, in particular, Christianity. Even socialisms that rejected organized religion were motivated by basic Christian moral principles.
But success or fail, they were—and again this is a crucial point of this essay and bears repeting—strictly voluntary arrangements, with none attempting to legally force their creed on others. And almost without exception, the socialisms failed.
Also without exception—presaging all future Socialists—the architects of the socialisms offered excuse after excuse for why their particular attempts failed. The 19th Century socialists blamed their failures on everyone and everything, except their own theories. “[T]he time had not yet arrived” [P. 312] for socialism, observed one architect. “[W]e very much fear,” observed another, “that [socialism] will be unsuccessful on account of the selfishness of mankind, this being the principal obstacle to be overcome.” “General Depravity, all say,” observes Noyes, “is the villain in the whole story.” Quoting another socialist historian, whom he relied heavily on in this book, Noyes writes, “[A.J.] Macdonald himself, after ‘seeing stern reality,’ confesses that in his previous hopes of socialism he ‘had imagined mankind better than they are [P. 646].’” And what was this “General Depravity?” Robert Owen, the first founder of this American movement and creator of New Harmony and The Yellow Spring Community, observed. . .
[S]elf love was a spirit that would not be exorcised. . .Individual happiness was the law of nature and it could not be obliterated; and before a single year had passed, this law had scattered the members of [The Yellow Spring Community] which had come together so earnestly and under such favorable circumstances, back into the selfish world from which they came.
Through it all, they never questioned or lost faith in the principles of socialism. “We will try and try again” [P. 346] was the sentiment. Does this sound familiar? Does the wail of the latest incarnation of socialism, today’s Democratic Socialists, that “real socialism has never been tried,” come to mind?
This failure of the socialists to acknowledge that it was their own moral values that were to blame reminds me of a passage in Atlas Shrugged, the saga of an America transforming into a Socialist “Peoples’ State,” in which a character tells a society in crisis:
Through centuries of scourges and disasters, brought about by your code of morality, you have cried that your code had been broken, that the scourges were punishment for breaking it, that men were too weak and too selfish to spill all the blood it required. You damned man, you damned existence, you damned this earth, but never dared to question your code.
Opposed to the free-wheeling Capitalism existing under American governing principles, a Capitalism they saw as “corrupt” and “selfish”, the 19th Century socialists saw themselves as pioneers. Their experiments were designed to find and demonstrate to the nation and world the path to a fully socialist society. Through failure after failure, they never lost faith, because faith was all they had. They believed that “years may be required, before we shall see the first red streaks of [Socialism’s] dawning. [P. 381]” But see it they would, they believed. In one chilling and foreboding passage, after one of the failures, Macdonald says in undying faith:
Yet my belief was as firm as ever in the coming abolition of conflicting interests, and the final harmonious reconstruction of society.
That sentiment weaves through the fabric of the 19th Century socialist movement. But neither Macdonald nor these benevolent Socialists could have envisioned the dark future that their pioneering hopes portended. They could not have foreseen the economy destroying, bloody Socialisms of their future disciples' attempts to realize the dream of that “final harmonious reconstruction of society.” They could not have imagined the nightmare of the political—that is, coercive—Socialism of the 20th/21st Century. From Communism to National Socialism to all of the hybrids right up to Chavez/Maduro Venezuela, they continued to try and try again--but without the burden of getting voluntary consent for all involved.
Despite the philosophical similarities with modern Socialists, there is an important distinction to be made between the 19th Century pioneers and their 20th Century successors. The 19th Century pioneers respected the American form of government. Noyes echoes Nordhoff in paying tribute to the United States of America, and by implication to the Founding Fathers. He observes,
The example of the Shakers [one of the longer-lived voluntary Socialisms] has demonstrated, not merely that successful Communism is subjectively possible, but that this nation is free enough to let it grow. [P. 669, my emphasis]
Where the 19th Century Socialists appreciated the government’s responsibility to secure their right to experiment with socialism, their 20th Century successors turned, like Al Capones run wild, to the government as their “hired gun” to forcibly impose Socialism on everyone.
Ironically—or, perhaps, logically—these voluntary Socialisms existed simultaneously with a vicious model of Socialism that portended the horrors of the 20th Century varieties that would grow out of the unification of economics and state—the Confederate slave plantations. These Southern farms featured cradle-to-grave welfare, equality of outcome, a guaranteed job, and coercive centralized control. One leading pro-slavery Confederate intellectual, George Fitzhugh—author of the widely read Sociology For The South: Or The Failure Of Free Society (1854)—defended the plantation slave system as “the beau ideal of communism.” Fitzhugh, an outspoken opponent of Capitalism and the free society, pointed by name to one of the pioneers of America’s voluntary utopian Socialism:
A well-conducted farm in the South is a model of associated labor that [Charles] Fourier might envy. One old woman nurses all the children whilst the mothers are at work; another waits on the sick, in a house set aside for them. Another washes and cooks, and a fourth makes and mends the clothing. It is a great economy of labor and is a good idea of the Socialists. Slavery protects the infants, the aged and the sick; nay, takes far better care of them than of the healthy, the middle-aged and the strong. They are part of the family, and self-interest and domestic affection combine to shelter, shield and foster them.
Fitzhugh explicitly articulated a slogan associated with the just emerging communist movement of Karl Marx. The Southern farm “is a beautiful example of communism, where each one receives not according to his labor, but according to his wants,” Fitzhugh wrote—two decades before Marx popularized the term, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” The Southern Slavocracy can be said to be Marxism before Marx.
Exploding the blatant lies of Socialism’s modern Leftist apologists that the Confederacy was Capitalism in action, Historian C. Bradley Thompson, author of America's Revolutionary Mind, documents the political ideology underpinning the Confederate slavocracy. Citing an extensive array of quotes of the most influential pro-slavery thinkers, Thompson thoroughly documents the Socialist essence of the state-imposed plantation slave system, as well as the "common intellectual heritage" that 20th-21st Century Progressives share with their 19th Century pro-slavery intellectual precursers. The South’s proslavery ideology centered on collectivism--the “good of society” over the individual, the “will of the people'' as expressed in elections, and the explicit rejection of unalienable individual rights (Epilogue, Pages 359-386). While the voluntary Socialisms observed the principles of America’s free society, the Confederacy was giving America its first demonstration of what I have coined Criminal Democratic Socialism.
But confronted with the choice explicitly, most Americans have not been willing to give up their “means of production”--their lives, liberties, property, businesses, and pursuit of personal happiness--to a central planning authority. Not many people will, when confronted with undiluted Socialism, go for it voluntarily (at least not yet). This is true even in societies that are highly conducive to Socialism in the abstract. Given the freedom to choose Socialism, in real life, very few people have, which means that the only path to a Socialist nation left to try is through political power--the power of the gun--totalitarianism.
And try the Socialists did. This goes to the heart of my point in this article. Socialism is perfectly compatible with a free Capitalist society, if everyone respects the rights of everyone else to live by their own values and judgement, and to freedom of association. Why? Because in a free society, like America in its Founding principles, the government neutrally protects that rightful liberty to live by one’s values by law and constitution, so long, as Thomas Jefferson explained, one stays “within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.”
Unfortunately, the 20th Century saw a new and malignant manifestation of socialism, political socialism. Instigated by Karl Marx, the Socialism we speak of in today’s debates is not the benevolent, peaceful, voluntary Socialisms of Nordhoff and Noyes I just wrote about. Today’s reality-blind, sociopathic Democratic Socialists of America is of the virulent, intolerant later variety of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenon, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Tung (aka Mao Zedong), Pol Pot, and other monsters. Today’s Socialism is a tyrannical, top-down system imposed by force on the entire society regardless of whether anyone wants it or not, and regardless of the long history of its horrendous results. This political Socialism is from beginning to end an organized crime enterprise. It is weaponized Socialism. It is Criminal Socialism.
Today’s Democratic Socialist movement is a manifestation of Criminal Socialism, because its proponents are acting through government force. Rationalized as “democratic,” it follows on the heels of Marxian Communism, Hitlerian National Socialism, Mussolini’s Fascism, et al. It rejects voluntarism, individualism, property rights, and free trade. It holds that enough votes to win an election is enough justification for imposing one’s Socialism on the entirety of society without everyone’s voluntary consent. Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani, and their ilk don’t seek to organize their supporters by voluntary consent. They go into politics. Why? Because they seek political power. Why political power rather than the power of persuasion? Because “Political power,” as one of Marx’s most loyal disciples, Mao Zedong, observed, “grows out of the barrel of a gun.” On “Why go into politics to advance your cause?”, today’s Democratic Socialists would answer—to paraphrase a quote attributed to a famous bank robber—because “that’s where the guns are.” Criminal Socialism is truly the system by and for sociopaths.
Here’s the bottom line, and the reason for this post: When the government remains in its proper, neutral, rights-protecting, American-ideal mode, Socialism, like religion, is a private personal choice. The millions of supporters of today’s Democratic Socialist movement don’t have to wait for politicians like Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to gain political power. They can live their Socialist dreams right now, by forming their own communities based on their common values. All they need to remember is to respect the rights of others. They can form their communities by the voluntary consent of all of their members, leaving anyone with different values free to go their own way unmolested. The Democratic Socialists don’t need political power. They want it, because they are, to be blunt, criminals. Any method, including by vote legislation, of forming Communistic or Socialistic associations, other than by universal voluntary consent, is the method of the criminal.
That’s worth remembering, because here is where we are today. Capitalism vs. Socialism is the underlying political battle of the United States of America.* But having studied the whole history of American Socialism, I have concluded that that characterization is not precise enough. The choice of Capitalism vs. Socialism is really a choice of a free society versus Criminal Socialism, since Capitalism is perfectly compatible with voluntary Socialist arrangements. Today the latest incarnation of Socialism, the Democratic Socialists of America, not content with the fact “that this nation is free enough to let it grow” because they can’t convince everyone to voluntarily agree to their collective goals, seek to impose it politically—that is to say, by forcibly exterminating freedom of choice, destroying the freest, most moral country in history, and forcing it through legalized criminality. Such is the evil nature of what we face today in the United States of America.
* [Which presupposes the fundamental philosophical battle, Individualism vs. Collectivism: Our Future, Our Choice—Craig Biddle.]
Related Reading:
QUORA: ‘Can you start a purely communist society in the US?’
Socialism's Totalitarian Nature Cannot Be Obscured by 'Democratic Socialism'
Capitalism vs. Socialism: Friedman or Rand?
Socialism vs. Welfare Statism: Why These Terms Matter
Democracy Fundamentalism vs. Americanism
Democratic Socialists Don’t Deserve the Moral High Road of ‘Good Intentions’
Atlas Shrugged—Ayn Rand
