I am writing this to address all fellow Americans, but especially those who tend to vote for Democratic candidates.
I am not trying to persuade anyone to be a Republican or not be a Democrat, but I hope to illuminate what socialism brings when implemented and encourage everyone to pay attention to politicians' actions, not just their campaign promises, and understand who the socialists in the Democratic Party are before voting.
In this first blog of a three-part series, I try to summarize how socialism gains power in free societies and the outcomes of socialist regime implementations around the world. I hope to offer the reader an idea of what to expect if socialism takes hold in the U.S.
Part two covers a research of the major countries that tried socialism, and the last part looks at supporters of socialism in the U.S. and their expectations from socialism.
It’s worth clarifying the relationship between socialism and communism.
Socialism: Government ownership of the means of production.
Communism: Equality of Outcomes: From each according to his abilities, and to each according to his needs.
Socialism and communism are not the same thing, but in Marxist-Leninist countries, socialism was presented as a necessary step toward communism. Communism was described as the long-term goal, while socialism was the system used in the meantime. That is why many socialist countries were governed by Communist parties.
This can be confusing in the West. People often refer to the former Soviet Union as “communist,” while calling countries like Denmark and Sweden “socialist.” In fact, the Soviet Union and all the Warsaw Pact countries were socialist states led by Communist parties. The official name of the Soviet Union was "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics," not "Communist Republics."
Denmark and Sweden, by contrast, are capitalist democracies with high levels of social trust, high taxes, and generous safety-net programs.
Socialists use cues, civil wars, and even democratic processes to get to power. I want to focus on how they gain acceptance and later power in democratic, free-market economies like the former Czechoslovakia and now the United States, because it's most relevant to current affairs. In democratic countries, socialists and communists decry capitalism as an oppressive system. They divide society into oppressors and oppressed, then they proceed to fight the "oppressors."
Socialists employ many tried-and-true tactics to gain power. Exploiting any issue at hand to their ends is on display in the US and Europe today. If an issue is already in public awareness, they work to make it seem more prevalent, represent a greater injustice, and seem more important than the actual case, and they blame it on capitalism. If there is no convenient issue on hand to exploit, they manufacture some issues on behalf of the "oppressed" and blame it on capitalism and the "oppressors."
The tactics change often, but they all support their long-term objective of gaining power. This is important to realize because a casual observer may not notice that as one issue withers out, another issue emerges - and they always have one thing in common: the issue lies with the "oppressors" and capitalism.
Issues like defund the police, the Me Too movement, transgender issues, and countless others have emerged in the US and Europe. They all share a common theme: the oppressors are doing something to the oppressed. If it was not socialists who pushed these issues into mainstream media awareness, they still clearly exacerbated and inflamed them - while doing nothing useful for their proclaimed victims. It is an important point to remember. They do not care about the issues or demographics they claim to want to help. They just need to create chaos and discontent - and blame capitalism.
Here are some examples. The defund the police movement hurt the poor and black people most. The Me Too movement delegitimized horrible experiences of women who were abused and raped because, all of a sudden, they were in the same category as women to whom someone said, "nice sweater," and winked. The transgender movement threw the actual transgender people, who represent a minuscule percentage of the population and just wanted to blend in, into a political whirlpool, while driving thousands of confused adolescents below the age of consent to take puberty blockers and undergo surgeries that changed their lives forever - and not in a good way.
Saul Alinsky describes many of the tactics in his 1971 book Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. There are dozens of tactics and examples, but one long-term strategy is fueling them all: Infiltration of schools, governments at all levels, the media & entertainment industry, and other public domains.
It’s fair to say that the most mainstream media in the U.S. and Europe fail to do journalism and instead engage in activism for the left. It has been largely infiltrated by socialists and socialists' sympathizers. As a result, it does a poor job of scrutinizing socialist ideas. They give way to activism, allowing socialism to be judged by its promises rather than by its real-world record.
The result is an uneven comparison: socialism is measured by what it claims to want to achieve, while capitalism is judged by its worst failures. But socialism failed in every place where it has been tried. And many of the problems blamed on capitalism are not necessarily caused by free markets themselves, but by governments interfering in markets in poorly designed or politically motivated ways.
Government's role is to provide regulation that is sensible, carefully thought out, limited to solving real problems, and aimed at making markets work better—not to advance political agendas, but that is what we have today. In my opinion, the solution to suboptimal capitalism is to fix capitalism, not switch to a sure-to-fail socialism.
In this political and epistemic environment, socialists get away with promising equity to the masses and painting a wonderful, loving world under socialism, without being seriously challenged.
Once in power, socialists remove the opposition by intimidation, harassment, suppression of free speech, imprisonment, and even killing. Once the transformation is complete, a small political or military elite ends up holding decision-making and all power. Disastrous central planning takes over, and the decline begins. The "oppressed" who were promised equity almost have it - they are equally poor and getting poorer, while the new ruling class, much more ruthless and corrupt than anything capitalism produced, has all the power and wealth.
The gap between rich and poor is widest in dictatorships, including socialist regimes. One major difference between socialism and a free-market system is how many people get ahead and how they do it.
In a free market, people can improve their lives by working hard, making good decisions, building skills, and benefiting from their own labor. The system is not perfect (no system ever is), but it gives people room to create, compete, and move up.
In socialist dictatorships, advancement does not depend on talent or hard work but on loyalty to the ruling system. To get ahead, people need political connections and must become part of the ruling machine. And poor people do not have those connections.
At best, the poor may try to gain favor by informing on neighbors or showing loyalty to the regime, hoping for small benefits from those in power. That kind of system does not lift people up—it turns ordinary citizens against one another while the ruling class keeps control.
I remember walking into a restaurant in Prague with my father when I was a boy. The place wasn’t busy, but there still wasn’t an empty table available. There were plenty of seats, just no table we could have to ourselves.
My father pointed out how strange and sad that was. He said that before the Communist Party took over, when people were free, it would have been the opposite. If we walked into a restaurant and saw one person sitting alone at a table, we would simply ask if we could join them—and we would keep each other company.
Socialism damaged even that small part of everyday life: the simple trust and friendliness between strangers.
Initially, some regimes with very low initial economic output achieved rapid gains from that low starting point in:
Heavy industry
Literacy
Basic health campaigns
Electrification
Military production
Female education and employment
Infrastructure.
This was especially visible in the USSR, China after 1949, some Eastern European countries, Cuba, and Vietnam. However, these gains were short-lived. In cases where socialism was implemented in developed countries (which previously experienced a period of capitalism), stagnation or decline followed immediately after the socialist takeover. Economic output and the availability of even basic goods and services then steadily declined, accompanied by rising prices and stagnant incomes.
Centrally planned economies commonly suffered from:
Incentives to meet centrally dictated quotas rather than consumer needs and suppression of price signals
Chronic shortages of basic goods
Low productivity and poor-quality goods, agricultural inefficiency and lack of innovation
Wasteful investment
Corruption and black markets
Environmental damage
Political interference in economic decisions
Some socialist countries improved significantly, but only after market reforms that abandoned the core command-economy mechanisms - which effectively made them not socialist anymore. China after 1978 and Vietnam after 1986 are the clearest examples, though both countries retained one-party communist political rule, so income inequality and abuse of human rights continued or increased.
The contrast between divided societies is historically significant.
West Germany vastly outperformed East Germany
South Korea vastly outperformed North Korea
Taiwan became far richer than Mao-era mainland China before China’s market reforms
Market-oriented postwar Western Europe grew faster and provided greater consumer abundance than Eastern Europe (My native Czechoslovakia had the 10th most productive economy in the world with just about 14 million people, but it became an economic basket-case within a decade of implementing Socialism.)
Sure, these comparisons are not perfect because geography, institutions, war damage, foreign aid, and starting conditions varied, but they strongly illustrate the long-term weakness of rigid command economies - and there is no example of a command economy outperforming a free market economy.
When Americans talk about preferring socialism over capitalism, they often bring up concerns about human rights. However, the socialist countries throughout the world have some of the worst human rights records on the planet. The one-party socialist regimes generally restricted or abolished:
Free elections
Independent courts
Free press
Independent unions
Freedom of religion
Freedom of association
Freedom to emigrate - Yes, emigrate (leave) as opposed to immigrate. You may want to contemplate why people would want to leave socialism, and why they had to be prevented from doing so.
Opposition parties
Academic freedom
Private civic organizations
Political prisons
Internal exile
Censorship
Party control of employment and education
Propaganda in schools and media
Collective punishment
Confiscation of property
Show trials
Ideological campaigns
The severity differed between the states, but all used the same instruments of oppression. Stalin’s USSR, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, North Korea, and Mengistu’s Ethiopia were among the most extreme. Hungary after 1960, Yugoslavia after the Stalin split, and Tanzania under Nyerere were comparatively less murderous but still politically restrictive.
Socialist regimes claimed to abolish class privilege. In practice, they created a new ruling class: party officials, security chiefs, military leaders, managers of state enterprises, and their families.
Exclusive housing
Country villas or dachas
Chauffeurs and official cars
Exclusive hospitals
Exclusive stores with imported goods
Access to foreign currency
Better schools for children
Travel rights denied to ordinary people
Protection from ordinary law
Control over finances, appointments, jobs, and housing
Direct corruption and hidden fortunes.
In the Soviet Bloc, privilege was often bureaucratic rather than openly capitalist. Elites controlled access rather than formally owning assets - so they enjoyed free things that someone else would have to pay for, except that ordinary citizens were not permitted to own the same luxurious assets. In places such as Angola, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and post-Mao China, political connections also enabled enormous personal enrichment.
The gap between leaders and citizens was especially stark during famines or shortages. Stalin’s inner circle, Mao’s leadership, the Kim dynasty, Ceaușescu’s family, Castro’s elite, Mengistu’s regime, and Maduro-era officials had privileged access and lived in luxury, while ordinary people faced rationing, hunger, poverty, and repression.
Famine caused or worsened by state policy
Forced collectivization
Mass executions
Forced labor camps
Deportations
Political purges
Civil wars linked to revolutionary seizures of power or ideological conflict
State terror
Suppression of uprisings
Preventable deprivation caused by policy failure.
Soviet famine of 1921–1922
Soviet collectivization famine of 1932–1933, including Ukraine and Kazakhstan
Stalin’s Great Terror and Gulag system
Mao’s Great Leap Forward famine
Mao’s Cultural Revolution
Cambodian genocide under the Khmer Rouge
North Korean famine of the 1990s
Ethiopia’s Red Terror and famine under the Derg
Military repression in Eastern Europe, including Hungary 1956 and Czechoslovakia 1968
Cuban political imprisonment and exile
Venezuelan state repression and humanitarian collapse
Civil wars in Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua, and elsewhere
Exact death totals are debated because archives are incomplete, governments concealed evidence, and scholars use different methods. But the total number of deaths caused or worsened by these regimes’ policies in the last century is in the tens of millions.
When Americans speak favorably about socialism, they often imagine a society that provides “free” goods and greater income equality: free health care, free education, perhaps even free housing. But in practice, socialism has never delivered that promised panacea. It always makes people worse off, and the poor usually suffer the most.
There may be less income inequality between, say, a doctor and a laborer—but only because both are made poorer. Meanwhile, the gap between the ruling class and everyone else is enormous.
If you believe that power corrupts—and that absolute power corrupts absolutely—then socialism should be a non-starter for you. Under socialism, a small government elite has the authority to decide nearly everything. That is an extraordinary amount of concentrated power, and given human nature, government corruption is inevitable.
Historically, socialist regimes did sometimes achieve rapid modernization from poor starting points, especially in basic literacy, industrial capacity, public health campaigns, and military power. But these gains came with severe costs (political dictatorship, censorship, forced labor, mass surveillance, coercive economic controls, restricted movement, and recurring humanitarian disasters), and they never lasted.
Economically, command systems could mobilize resources for state priorities but performed poorly at producing consumer abundance, innovation, agricultural efficiency, and long-term productivity. The most successful surviving communist-led states, especially China and Vietnam, improved economically only because they introduced major market mechanisms and reduced central planning, effectively ceasing to be socialist by moving away from centralized planning and government ownership of the means of production.
Politically, these regimes always concentrated power in a ruling party and its security apparatus. Human rights were subordinated to party control. Leaders and party elites enjoyed luxury and privileges that ordinary citizens were prevented from enjoying, despite official claims of equality.
The historical record shows that when socialism was implemented, with state ownership of means of production and central planning, the results were coercive class politics, authoritarian government, economic inefficiency, government elite privilege, and mass suffering.