Below is my column in The Hill on the familiar bust-and-boom cycle of socialism, where failure is used to call for even more radical changes. While House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries this week reaffirmed that Democratic Socialists are part of the Democratic Party, radical figures are demonstrating how extreme this agenda is for some. For example, Socialist State Assemblywoman Emily Gallagher has declared that stealing should be legal for those in need. If socialism takes hold in New York, many will indeed need five-finger discounts in the Big Apple.
From New York to California, the American left is proving that nothing succeeds like failure. In areas ranging from immigration to taxes to health care, politicians are playing to their past fiascos to push an even more radical agenda.
Take immigration. Many, including the Democratic Socialists, have called for open borders or disbanding ICE. After the Biden administration chose to allow millions of undocumented people to enter the country, most Democrats are now calling for “pathways” to make them citizens. After all, they argue, there are too many to deport.
We now know the open border was a choice. The Trump administration immediately stopped crossings using the same laws Biden had refused to enforce. As expected, Democrats are expressing horror at the thought that the government would try to deport the millions that they allowed and even encouraged to enter the country.
The same is true on public health policy. Remember when ObamaCare was going to reduce health care costs and improve health care options? While insisting that they did not want government-run single-payer healthcare, Democrats promised that ObamaCare would lower costs while allowing you to keep your own doctor and health care plan. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised his plan would “lower your premiums by up to $2,500 per family per year.”
By that measure, ObamCare, or the Affordable Care Act, is a colossal failure. Premiums have nearly tripled since the law took effect, and deductibles have more than doubled. “The cost of coverage for a family of four has increased by more than $10,000,” according to studies.
In 2026 alone, median premiums increased by 20 percent, and that has already risen by another 15 percent in 2027. Meanwhile, enrollments continue to plummet across the country.
Democratic leaders and advocates are now responding to that failure by calling for more regulations and “Medicare for all.” As with immigration, the failure is the basis for doubling down on bad policy with even worse policy.
The same is also true of public education, which has failed families in major cities for generations. The solution has been to increase budgets while lowering proficiency standards. The one thing teachers unions and school districts oppose is a market-based system that lets families choose between programs through voucher systems. The solution is, again, more staff, more funding and more control over families’ options. The system gets worse and more expensive, and the teachers unions get more powerful, including greater ability to block reforms.
No one has perfected the politics of failure more than Zohran Mamdani. In New York, chaos only undermines the status quo. For example, his demand for free buses has predictably led to thousands of commuters — including affluent citizens — skipping fares, costing the Metropolitan Transportation Authority tens of millions of dollars. After all, only a chump would pay a fare that is about to be eliminated.
As the transit budget implodes, the calls for greater state subsidies will only increase — as will calls just to accept the reality and make public transportation free to the user (and expensive to the taxpayer).
Then there is rent reform. With Mamdani promising rent controls, landlords are predictably raising rents. Rent costs have reached their highest level ever under Mamdani, with the average apartment now costing $4,965 per month — and $6,655 per month in Manhattan.
So Mamdani can now push for even more significant regulations and rent controls by pointing to the rise in housing costs in an endless loop. As rent control inevitably constrains supply and prices for market-rate apartments skyrocket, he can call for even greater controls.
Failure can also solve problems through attrition. Mamdani was recently booed off stage at a law enforcement event in New York. The officers and their families are clearly upset with his embrace of figures calling for the defunding of police and his long hostility toward law enforcement. The result, however, is precisely the downsizing that many on the left have wanted. The NYPD has been losing as many as 300 officers a month.
What is true for police officers is also true for wealthy taxpayers. Mamdani has taunted affluent citizens with his new taxes and attacked them as not “paying their fair share.” As a result, the wealthy are fleeing New York and taking tax revenues and jobs with them.
Success through failure is especially evident in the housing policies. Mamdani has brought in socialists who called for “seizing the means of production” (as he has) and wiping out private ownership of housing.
Most recently, Mamdani has embraced figures such as Tracy Rosenthal, the privileged daughter of a well-known music industry figure who has refused to pay rent. Despite her family’s wealth, she has been effectively squatting on property. The co-founder of the Los Angeles Tenants Union and co-author of “Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis,” Rosenthal is a darling of the far left. In New York, she declared that rent is “a ransom,” and “We pay rent at the peril of our need.”
Rosenthal portrays landlords as bloodsuckers and rallied the left to refuse to pay rent even though “if we don’t make this payment, our landlords can call on agents of state violence who can use physical force to throw us outdoors.”
Rosenthal has perfected not only the squatter culture but also the use of regulations to take effective control of properties. In allegedly squatting in California, Rosenthal reportedly pushed to get her building placed under the Housing Preservation Department’s Alternative Enforcement Program. Under that, a landlord must fix problems or risk losing the property.
Mamdani is pursuing a similar model. He has ramped up tenant coordination to bring complaints to his advocacy offices. As landlords are hit with snowballing complaints and costs, they can be forced to surrender their properties or have them seized by the city. The Mamdani administration wants those failures to result in tenant or non-profit ownership of businesses. What it will do is ensure that fewer rental units come on the market, making the problem worse and creating new excuses to take further harmful action.
This pattern of success through failure has manifested itself on an even larger scale in history. Socialists often destroy economic conditions, resulting in greater unemployment and greater demand for government subsidies. That expansion of government power continues until conditions grow so severe that emergency actions are needed.
In “Rage and the Republic” I discuss how this pattern played out in Great Britain and France in the last century, when socialist policies devastated those countries’ respective economies. Great Britain ultimately had to be rescued by the International Monetary Fund, as if it were a third-world nation.
This bust-and-boom cycle is now repeating itself. As these policies fuel decline in these areas, demand grows for expanding the policies and government controls. If McDonald’s were to offer ever-shrinking food items at ever-increasing prices, it would go out of business. Government is the only industry that grows with failure.
For radicals, social and economic upheaval is not a tragedy but an opportunity. Lenin told the Bolsheviks to “utilize” crisis to “hasten the collapse of the rule of capital.”
The future seems bright for the American socialists. After all, with just a little more failure, who knows what Mamdani and others can achieve in America.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.“
The “Communist Control Act of 1954” is still “on the books.” Why isn’t it being enforced against the former “democrat” party? This movement could destroy our nation–thus, the need to use federal laws that are still enforceable! Our constitutional republic could easily be destroyed by these traitors-within-our-borders!
It’s not a question of forgetting history but, instead, of not knowing history, which is just as bad. Many of today’s DSA aficionados come from countries with dysfunctional systems of government led by corrupt and evil leaders. Used to tyrannical government, they cannot accept that American freedom is a people’s government, by the people, of the people, and for the people. There must be a catch. Thus are the seeds for anarchy planted in fertile ground.
A century ago, many Americans were impressed with the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia and the Civil War that followed. It was advertised as a worker’s revolution but in the end it was more like the French Revolution than the American Revolution. Today’s DSA adherents are more like the French Jacobins or Russian Bolsheviks who simply want to take control of the government by displacing the one in power with their radical mutation.
The people? Oh, they are just useful idiots whose support can be bought for the promise of cheap bread or, to update the cause, cheap gasoline. Fortunately, the American devotees of the French and Russian Revolutions, and later the Spanish Civil War, lived to see their dreams of a workers’ paradise shattered by the hard, cold facts of tyranny. An apologia was created to soothe the troubled souls. The ideas, they said, were good, but the people in charge were not! As a force to be reckoned with, they folded quickly and became little more than a fringe group. We will see history repeat itself this fall when the DSA fades from the spotlight to resume its hermetic existence.
Apparently, anything not up to their utopian standards must be destroyed and rebuilt their way, even if they built the failed mess to begin with.
Building up from reality is hard work but generates results. Building down from utopia is doomed before it even starts.
How about we start with flushing out waste and corruption? What happened to DOGE? Did everyone run crying to Trump that unemployment would skyrocket if there was no waste or corruption? How to disguise the dole for middle America?
question….did Obamacare lower or raise cost of healthcare?
Huh? You don’t know the answer to that?
let Democrats enjoy their “socialism” BUT 1st end all federal aid to where they do it!
Currently the worse they make Camden NJ, the MORE money they get! Same Philly, NYC, Chicago, etc
Instead…FORCE THEM TO FUND their OWN Failures!
Each government intervention creates distortions that lead to demands for further government interventions to correct the distortions. As a result, the government eventually takes over more and more of the economy. This is a dynamic that Ludwig Von Mises identified long ago.
Daniel,
Great point.
Unfortunately, in both public education and higher education, better known as higher indoctrination, that kind of education is not taught.
Democrats count on two things to win power: people listen to promises and vote based on hope, and people have very short memories. They promise anything and everything, and, when the reality doesn’t match the promises, they simply move on to the next promise, blaming the failures on everybody but themselves. The media are complicit in this, failing to hold Democrats accountable for their many failures. Here come the fast and free buses. lmfao
“liberal… blaming the failures on everybody but themselves…” So conservatives never in the history of the USA had failures in their policies?
Iran sounds like a policy failure.
Democrats have funded Public Unions…their political army of failure.
Time to OUTLAW that Political army!
I love it that Schumer and Jeffries have declared over and over again that “we are a big tent party.” That they welcome the DSA is like some small California town inviting in the Hell’s Angels. What they’ll get is all manner of chaos. The current Dems are the “lock-step” party, where everyone votes by command. No exceptions. No deviations. What they’re getting is a wild motorcycle gang of disrupters and malcontents, who will vote as they please, while revving their bikes right there in the tent. Just maybe a few of the regular type Dems may begin to think, “If they can do what they want, maybe I can too.” In the meantime, Schumer and Jeffries may be looking for the sheriff.
DSA = Hell’s Angels? Seriously?
Yes! It’s that serious
Oh oh, another crazy, seeing the end of mankind because a bunch of Americans are disatisfied with their lots.
Liberals want everything to be “free”, which means other people will pay it, not them.
That’s an obviously very stupid remark. I’m a liberal and I pay for myself and family. We expect nothing to be free, because nothing is free.
Then you are not a liberal.
So you mean that anyone who wants something for free is a liberal? So, when someone offers a Conservative a $100 bill, they always reject it?
What about all those corporations that suck up billions of dollars of government freebies, they’re all liberals?
So if your district in the general election is a DSA Democrat versus a MAGA Republican who are you voting for?
MAGA!!!
Not the MAF Make America Fail Democrats!
Democrat!
So democrats can’t be conservative?
phantomboldly,
With respect, I am going to have to disagree with you on that point.
My sister is a liberal. While she is a believer in social safety nets, she knows someone else has to pay for it.
Now, these so-called democrat socialists, they on the other hand want everything free and tax anyone in the middle class and up, to pay for it.
We know this by their words and actions. Started out as “tax the rich!” Billionaires! Then it became, “anyone making over $500M!” Now we are seeing calls for, “anyone making over a million!” Given enough time, and when their economic policies fail, “anyone making over $100k!” Then it will be “you dont need that much to retire on! Tax their 401k, their IRAs!” “Everyone has to do their fair share!”