The recent primary election in Colorado's 1st district has sent shockwaves across the country, as 29-year-old democratic socialist Melat Kiros defeated 15-term Rep. Dianne DeGette in a stunning upset. The victory marks a significant shift in the Democratic Party's trajectory, and it is a signpost on a road that has been traveled before.
The road in question is one that has led to the erosion of individual freedoms and the concentration of power in the hands of the state. This is not a theory or a partisan alarm, but a pattern that is written into the very fabric of the movement that has just won one of America's safest Democratic seats.
Supporters of democratic socialism claim that it is a compassionate ideology that seeks to create a more equal society through a stronger safety net, guaranteed healthcare, and a fairer distribution of wealth. However, the historical record tells a different story.
The theory of socialism was never conceived as a stopping point, but rather as a stage of transition on the road to full communism. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme, Karl Marx laid out two phases of society: socialism and communism. Vladimir Lenin, in State and Revolution, made the sequence explicit, stating that socialism is the lower stage, communism the higher, and the passage between them is to be secured by the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The largest socialist organization in the country, the Democratic Socialists of America, makes no secret of its ultimate aim to move the United States beyond capitalism altogether. The distinction between socialism and communism is thin, and those who claim that socialism is merely a policy agenda are ignoring the historical record.
The Nordic nations, often cited as examples of successful socialism, are actually capitalist countries with private ownership, competitive markets, and open trade. Their large welfare states are funded by broad and heavy taxation, but this is a policy choice layered on top of capitalism, not socialism in the classical sense.
The movement now winning American primaries is not campaigning for Danish tax rates or Scandinavian-style social democracy. Its literature calls for social ownership, the breaking of private capital, and a fundamental restructuring of the economic order.
The 20th century has run the experiment of socialism repeatedly, with grimly consistent results. Russia, China, Cuba, Cambodia, and Venezuela all began with the vocabulary of equality and liberation, but ended with the concentration of power, the suppression of dissent, and the erosion of individual freedoms.
The human cost of these experiments has been staggering, with tens of millions of deaths from execution, forced labor, and state-engineered famine. The exact number is debated by historians, but its order of magnitude is not seriously in dispute.
The mechanism of suppression is always the same: first, the regime teaches the public that its critics are enemies of the people, and then it silences them. The propaganda comes before the prison, and the warning signs are visible long before the cell doors close.
Americans who assume that this history could never touch them should look honestly at how much of the groundwork has already been laid here, by people who hold or recently held the highest offices in the land. The normalization of treating ordinary political opposition as a danger to democracy itself is a clear and present threat to the freedom to disagree with your own government.
The voters of a single Denver district have taken one step down a road that other nations have walked all the way to its end. Americans still possess the freedom to refuse that road, to argue, to organize, and to vote against it. But that freedom rests entirely on the one right this movement has always come for first.
