[K-Dog]

USATODAY.COM 2026-09-03

Democratic socialists and MAGA share a dangerous flaw

Democratic socialists and MAGA nationalists both advocate sweeping government economic control which historically causes stagnation shortages and democratic erosion as seen in Cuba Venezuela and Soviet Union examples.

The False Equivalence as Ideological Operation: A Critique of Ilya Somin

The first thing to be said about Ilya Somin's column is that it is not an argument; it is a positioning exercise. It deploys the vocabulary of "liberty" and "democracy" to defend a particular set of class interests — those of the financial aristocracy he serves as a Cato Institute chair and George Mason law professor — while pretending to be above the partisan fray. The conceit that "democratic socialists" and "MAGA nationalists" are mirror-image threats is the classic centrist gesture: it flatters the reader into believing there is a sane, moderate middle (of which Somin is the spokesman) while the actual content of the piece is a full-throated defense of the market and an attack on any political force that challenges it. Let me take the five points in order.

1. Biases: The selective geography of "socialism's" failures

Somin's evidentiary universe is a carefully curated list of catastrophes: Cuba, North Korea, the Soviet Union, Venezuela, Mao's China. What is systematically absent is every case that contradicts the thesis.

The Nordic social democracies — Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland — which for decades combined strong welfare states, high union density, and substantial public-sector provision with high living standards and functioning parliamentary democracy, are never mentioned. Germany's "social market economy," with its co-determination and universal health care, is absent. So is the entire postwar Keynesian consensus in the United States itself — the era of the highest marginal tax rates, strongest unions, and most rapid middle-class income growth in American history, which Somin's own ideological forebears denounced as creeping socialism.

This omission is not an oversight. It is the structural requirement of the argument. If "government control of the economy" reliably produced stagnation and tyranny, the Scandinavian evidence would have to be explained. It cannot be, so it is excluded. The bias is not merely toward anti-statism; it is toward a definition of "socialism" so elastic that it absorbs any state intervention whatsoever, while simultaneously being so narrow that it admits only failed or deformed regimes as examples. This is not analysis; it is the construction of a straw man with a pre-selected body count.

2. Logical fallacies: The false equivalence between nationalization and tariffs

The central logical operation of the piece — and its most dishonest — is the claim that socialist planning and MAGA tariffs are "similar economics." This is a category error dressed up as even-handedness.

A tariff is a tax on imports levied by a capitalist state to protect domestic capitalist firms. It presupposes and reinforces private ownership, the profit motive, and the market. It is a policy instrument within capitalism.

Nationalization — the transfer of major industry from private to public ownership — is an attack on the property relations of capitalism itself. To equate the two is like equating a change in the rules of a poker game with the abolition of poker. Like comparing apples to oranges.  The only thing they share is that both involve the state, which is to say nothing at all, since under capitalism the state is implicated in every economic transaction from patent law to the Federal Reserve to the military procurement that sustains entire industries.  Praise Freedom!

Somin knows this, which is why his own examples betray him. He lists Trump's "government equity stakes in Intel, U.S. Steel" — that is, the capitalist state bailing out and subsidizing capitalist corporations — as evidence of "central planning."

By this logic, the $4.5 trillion the Federal Reserve pumped into financial markets after 2008, the bank bailouts, the COVID-era corporate subsidies, the Pentagon's role as the largest single purchaser in the world economy — all of this is "socialism." The term is emptied of all content precisely so that it can be used to smear any use of state power that benefits anyone other than financiers.

Note also the asymmetry in the "both sides" framing. Somin spends paragraph after paragraph detailing socialist crimes — Mao's "45 million," Stalin's kulaks, Castro's "totalitarian state." For the right-wing side, the "parallels" are... Brendan Carr threatening broadcast licenses, and "elements" of repression in deportations.

La-de-dah.

The equivalence is asserted, never demonstrated, because it cannot be demonstrated. The rhetorical weight of the piece falls entirely on one side of the scale while the author maintains the pose of balance.

3. Rhetorical tactics: Loaded terms and the Hayek alibi

The article is saturated with pre-loaded vocabulary. "Mass murder." "Totalitarian." "Despot." "Central planning." "Government monopoly." These terms are not defined; they are detonated. "The biggest mass murder in history" attaches to Mao without any historical context.

No mention of the famines that occurred under colonialism, under British rule in India, under the very market economies Somin celebrates. The Irish famine, which killed a million people under the most market-orthodox regime of the nineteenth century, is invisible in his accounting. Famine, for Somin, is a property of socialism alone.  If starvation happens in capitalism it is dismissed as a bad work ethic.

The invocation of F.A. Hayek is the intellectual tell. Hayek's "knowledge problem" — that central planners lack the price signals to allocate resources efficiently is presented as a decisive, settled finding of "Nobel Prize-winning" economics. It is nothing of the sort. It is the ideological manifesto of the Austrian school.

A doctrine whose predictive record is catastrophic and whose policy prescriptions (deregulation, privatization, austerity) produced the very 2008 collapse and the decades of stagnation, inequality, and social decay that Somin's own Cato Institute helped engineer. Hayek is not a neutral scientist quoted for balance; he is the patron saint of the class Somin serves.

The "we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us" joke is deployed as if it were a verdict on planning per se, rather than on a specific, bureaucratically deformed regime. It is the rhetorical equivalent of quoting a joke about the DMV to prove that roads are impossible.

4. Omissions of counterexamples

Beyond the Nordic omission already noted, consider what else is absent. The Soviet Union that Somin fled was, for most of its existence,

a country that industrialized at a rate unprecedented in world history, defeated Nazi Germany, achieved full literacy and universal healthcare, and — critically — was not the product of democratic socialist reform but of a bureaucratic counter-revolution that destroyed the workers' democracy of 1917.

Somin's entire framework depends on the Stalinist conflation: socialism = Stalinism. The possibility that the Soviet catastrophe was the failure of a genuine workers' state, the degeneration of the October Revolution under the bureaucratic caste, is never entertained, because it would destroy the syllogism.

Likewise omitted: the fact that the "market economies" to which refugees "vote with their feet" are precisely the societies producing the present crisis — mass homelessness, collapsing life expectancy in the United States, the opioid epidemic, the largest transfer of wealth to the top 1% in history. Somin presents migration toward capitalism as a "verdict" without asking what the migrants find when they arrive: low-wage exploitation, deportation, and the very precarity that his own policy prescriptions deepen.

The "foot voting" argument is itself a fallacy of composition dressed as empiricism. It assumes that people migrate toward the ideology of a destination rather than toward its wealth — wealth accumulated, in the case of the United States, through slavery, genocide, and imperial plunder. The refugee fleeing Venezuela is fleeing an economic collapse engineered in significant measure by US sanctions; Somin presents this as a spontaneous lesson in the virtues of the market.

5. The refugee autobiography as epistemic authority

Somin's personal history — "I was a refugee from Soviet communism" — is deployed strategically, as a shield against the charge that he is merely an ideologue. The implication is that his experience confers a kind of direct, unmediated knowledge of socialism's evils that abstract argument cannot match.

Two things must be said. First, his experience is real, and the Stalinist regime he fled was indeed a tyranny. No one should minimize that. But second, personal suffering is not a theory of political economy. A refugee from the Soviet Union is no more automatically correct about socialism than a refugee from Pinochet's Chile is automatically correct about capitalism — and the victims of Pinochet, of the Argentine junta, of the Indonesian massacres, of US-backed death squads across Latin America, number in the millions and receive no sympathy from Somin's "liberty" tradition, which in fact supplied the ideological cover for those regimes (Hayek himself defended Pinochet).

The autobiography functions here as what rhetoricians call an appeal to authority that cannot be interrogated.  To question it would seem to question the man's suffering.

But the opposite is true: it is precisely because his suffering was real that the conflation of Stalinism with socialism, and socialism with any state intervention whatsoever, must be examined ruthlessly.

The bureaucratic caste that drove his family into exile was the enemy of the revolutionary socialism of 1917, not its fulfillment. The Trotskyist movement — the Marxist tradition Somin's Cato colleagues are paid to bury — was the first and most consistent opponent of that bureaucracy, and its members were murdered by the very regime Somin now uses to discredit socialism.


Conclusion: The propagandistic framing

The column is propaganda in the precise sense: it is not an attempt to discover truth but to foreclose a question. Its function is to place "socialism" — even the mildest, most domesticated, Democratic-Party-managed reformism of the DSA — beyond the pale of legitimate politics, so that the only conceivable alternative to MAGA nationalism is the continuation of the status quo that Somin represents.

The "both sides" structure is a device for this purpose: by equating a reformist caucus inside the Democratic Party with a fascistic nationalist movement, it delegitimizes the former while laundering the author's own defense of the market as mere moderation.  It is a very slick trick.

There is an irony that Somin cannot see. He is right that the DSA and MAGA share something.  But it is not "socialism." It is that both are factions within the capitalist political order, both ultimately subordinate to the ruling class, both channels for diverting popular anger into safe bourgeois channels.

The DSA is not socialist, it is a pro-capitalist pressure group operating inside the Democratic Party, whose function is to block the development of an independent working-class party. Somin's attack on it as "socialist" is doubly dishonest: the DSA is not the thing he says it is, and the thing he says it is (Stalinist tyranny) is itself not socialism!

The real threat to democracy is not "government control of the economy" in the abstract. It is that the economy.  Thhe banks, the monopolies, the military, the media.  Are controlled by a tiny class whose wealth Somin's Cato Institute exists to defend, and that this class, when its rule is threatened, has repeatedly shown itself willing to abandon democracy entirely in favor of fascism.

That is the historical record Somin omits. The working class does not need a defense of the "free market" from a Cato chair; it needs the political independence to take power and establish a workers' state on the ruins of the capitalist order that Somin speaks for. On that question, his column offers nothing but misdirection.