Screaming “socialism” is no longer an effective strategy, and it’s well past time Republicans recognized that.
As the Democratic Socialists of America have continued to consolidate power and progressive Democrat candidates have continued to win elections, Republicans have increasingly treated calling them socialists, or communists, as an effective strategy for opposing their economic policies. But last Tuesday’s results, like Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City a year ago, exposed the limits of that tactic. It did not work a year ago, and it did not work last week. The labels alone simply don’t work.
Over the weekend, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis explained why. First, young people like socialism. They support it, and they vote for it. Sure, you can blame education, but that’s an incomplete answer. According to DeSantis, young people are turning to socialism because they haven’t been offered a real alternative. On one side, they see socialists promising to help them. On the other, they see people who claim to defend the free market engaging in corporate favoritism, or “crony capitalism," a term that has become synonymous with genuine free markets.
"I think a big part of [why socialism has grown in popularity] is, what they're comparing is not free enterprise to socialism," the Florida governor said.
"What they're comparing is how government gets involved in business and you have crony capitalism. So the best kind of indirect supporters of socialism are some of these corporatist Republicans who propagate these crony policies, because the average person seeing that and say, wait a minute, you're trying to bend the government to funnel benefits to this corporation or that industry or this. What about having a competitive market?"
"If you have a competitive market and you truly have free enterprise, that's gonna benefit small businesses, it's gonna benefit individuals, you are gonna see the standard of living rise," DeSantis added.
But what young people are seeing instead, he argued, is more corporate cronyism. DeSantis pointed in particular to what he called a “10-year effective amnesty” that would prevent state and local governments from regulating AI data centers. While that specific example can be disputed, the broader point holds.
For decades, Republican economic policy has amounted to corporate favoritism, closer in kind to the corruption of communist countries than anything resembling a free market. Recent policy offers more of the same. Tariffs, for example, whatever their merits, allow domestic companies to charge more without lowering costs or becoming more competitive. That is a form of cronyism. So are corporate bailouts and federal ownership stakes in private companies. Ask yourself: when was the last time a conservative at the federal level built an economic agenda around encouraging competition, aggressively deregulating, or cutting federal subsidies?
We don’t hear those ideas championed often enough, or on a large enough scale, to call them the Republican Party’s economic agenda. As a result, not only has socialism continued to grow in popularity, but you’re even more likely to hear a young Republican defend government intervention than make the case for free markets.
This has been one of the greatest failures of Republican policymaking over the last quarter-century: we have championed a system we have refused to put into practice. The rise of socialism, on both the Left and the Right, is the price we now pay.
