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Guest Post by Evan W. Turk, American Rights Alliance
The socialist upset in Denver is not just another primary. It is a signpost on a road the world has traveled before, and the historical record already tells us, in detail and in blood, where that road ends.
DENVER — You already know what happened. A 29-year-old democratic socialist ousted a fifteen-term progressive congresswoman in one of the safest Democratic seats in the country, days after her allies swept a slate of primaries in New York City. The Democratic Socialists of America promised the East Coast one week and the Mountain West the next, and they made good on it. The result is not the story. The story is where this road leads, and why the people cheering loudest for it are the ones least willing to say the destination out loud.
Because this road does lead somewhere; it always has. The pattern is not a matter of opinion or partisan alarm. It is written into the theory the movement was built on, and it is confirmed by more than a century of hard experience across four continents. Anyone willing to read that record honestly can see the shape of what is coming.
Supporters call it democratic socialism, and they present it as little more than compassion with a policy agenda: a stronger safety net, healthcare guaranteed as a right, a fairer distribution of a wealthy nation’s resources. The adjective democratic is carrying almost the entire weight of that reassurance. It is there to promise you that this is not the socialism of ration lines and secret police, that this iteration will be gentle and lawful, and that it will halt precisely wherever a majority of voters decides it should halt.
But socialism was never conceived as a stopping point. In the theory that gave the movement its name, it is explicitly a stage of transition, a way station on the road to something further. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme, Karl Marx laid out two phases of the society he envisioned: a first, lower phase that later writers came to call socialism, and a higher phase, full communism, toward which the first was always meant to progress. Vladimir Lenin, in State and Revolution, made the sequence explicit and operational: socialism is the lower stage, communism the higher, and the passage between them is to be secured by what Marx had called the dictatorship of the proletariat, a period in which the machinery of the state is used to crush the old order and prevent its return.
“Denver just voted to send a 29yo recovering lawyer, barista, immigrant, democratic socialist to congress!”
—Melat Kiros who just unseated a 15-term incumbent pic.twitter.com/AqbiYJZYsS
— Brennan Murphy (@brenonade) July 1, 2026
This is not a slur invented by socialism’s opponents. It is the movement’s own founding architecture. The people carrying the banner today are the ideological heirs of that tradition, and the largest socialist organization in the country makes no secret that its ultimate aim is to move the United States beyond capitalism altogether. The comfortable distinction between socialism and communism, the one that lets an American voter tell himself he is endorsing Denmark rather than the Soviet Union, is far thinner than he has been led to believe. In the original blueprint, one was always designed to become the other.
The most common answer to all of this is a single word: Scandinavia. Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, the argument goes, are socialist, and they are prosperous, free, and happy. If that is socialism, what is there to fear?
The answer is that those countries are not socialist, and their own leaders have said so plainly. The Danish prime minister once felt compelled to correct American admirers directly, noting that Denmark is a market economy. The Nordic nations are capitalist countries with private ownership, competitive markets, open trade, and some of the most business-friendly regulatory environments in the world.
What they also have are large welfare states funded by broad and heavy taxation. That is a policy choice about redistribution layered on top of capitalism. It is not socialism in the sense the word actually means, which is public or collective ownership of the means of production. The distinction is not academic. A generous safety net leaves the private economy, and the independent civil society it supports, intact. Socialism, properly defined, does not, because it requires the state to seize and direct the productive capacity of the nation, and a state powerful enough to do that is a state powerful enough to silence anyone who objects.
The movement now winning American primaries is not campaigning merely for Danish tax rates. Its literature calls for social ownership, for breaking the power of private capital, for a fundamental restructuring of the economic order. When its candidates invoke Scandinavia, they are borrowing a reassuring image for a project that goes considerably further than anything Scandinavia has ever attempted.
You do not have to take the theory on faith, because the twentieth century ran the experiment repeatedly, on an enormous scale, with a grimly consistent result. Russia in 1917, China in 1949, Cuba in 1959, Cambodia in 1975, Venezuela at the turn of this century: each began with the vocabulary of equality and liberation, and each attracted sincere idealists who believed that this time the outcome would be humane. In each case the trajectory bent the same way.
The state took command of the economy in the name of the people. Scarcity followed, because central planning cannot replicate the information that free prices carry. Failure was blamed not on the system but on saboteurs and enemies. Dissent was criminalized. The press was captured or closed. And the population that had been promised liberation found it could no longer speak freely, worship freely, assemble freely, or in many cases leave at all.
The human cost was not incidental. Scholars who have attempted to tally the toll of twentieth-century communist regimes have arrived at figures in the range of 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. This is the record of the system whose lower stage the movement now ascendant in one of our two major parties openly champions.
Venezuela is the most recent and most instructive case, precisely because it is the one advocates cannot dismiss as ancient history. Hugo Chávez was elected, not installed by a coup. He rose on a popular movement and a promise to redistribute the wealth of one of the richest petroleum states on earth to its poor. Within a single generation the country was reduced to hyperinflation, collapsing public services, mass hunger, and the largest refugee exodus in the modern history of the Western Hemisphere, with millions fleeing on foot. The road there was democratic, popular, and lawful, right up until the moment it was none of those things. That is the point that should keep Americans awake. The turn does not announce itself. It arrives one reasonable-sounding step at a time.
Here is the mechanism every American needs to understand, because it is the part that touches us most directly. To move a society from socialism toward its intended higher stage, the movement must eliminate the people’s ability to say no. This is not an unfortunate side effect of the project. It is a structural requirement of it. A free press can expose the failures of central planning before they become catastrophes. Free assembly can organize resistance while resistance is still possible. Free speech can name what is happening while there is still time to reverse it. So these are the first liberties to be extinguished, every time, in every country that has walked this path.
The historical specifics are consistent to the point of monotony. The Soviet Union built an entire bureaucracy, Glavlit, whose sole function was the prior censorship of everything printed in the country, and it made anti-Soviet agitation a criminal offense that sent citizens to labor camps for the content of their speech. Cuba shuttered its independent newspapers within two years of the revolution and has jailed writers, poets, and journalists by the score ever since. Venezuela declined to renew the broadcast license of its oldest independent television network and passed sweeping media laws that turned criticism of the government into a legal hazard.
BREAKING: Democratic Socialists of America surpasses 120,000 members, making it the largest Socialist organization in American history.
The former title belonged to Eugene Debs’ Socialist Party in 1912.
It is now a better time to be a Socialist in America than ever before. pic.twitter.com/z7SjY9VPER
— Socialist News Media (@Socialist_Wins) July 5, 2026
In each instance the sequence was identical: first the regime taught the public that its critics were enemies of the people, and only then did it move to silence them. The propaganda came before the prison.
That ordering matters enormously, because it means the warning signs are visible long before the cell doors close. The dangerous moment is not when speech is formally outlawed. It is earlier, when a society grows comfortable with the idea that certain people and certain opinions are not merely mistaken but illegitimate, dangerous, unworthy of the protections the rest of us enjoy. Once that idea takes hold, the machinery of suppression follows almost on its own, and it follows with a great deal of public support. You do not need to jail your critics if you have first persuaded everyone else that your critics deserve it.
Americans who assume 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. In 2022 the President of the United States stood at a fundraiser and branded the governing philosophy of tens of millions of his fellow citizens as semi-fascism. Days later, in a prime-time address staged in front of Independence Hall and bathed in red light, he declared that his political opponents represented an extremism that threatens the very foundations of the republic. When his own press secretary was asked to specify how many of the 74 million Americans who had voted for Donald Trump the White House regarded as a threat, she declined to give a number.
That is the on-ramp. Not camps, not censors, not yet. But the steady normalization of treating ordinary political opposition as a danger to democracy itself, rather than as the lawful exercise of the most basic right a free people possesses, the right to choose their own government and to be wrong about it in the eyes of those in power. The far-left movement now capturing Democratic primaries did not invent this rhetoric.
But it is the faction most ideologically prepared to act on it. Its rising candidates have already shown, in their public refusal to condemn political violence directed at the people they oppose, exactly how they regard the other half of the country. When a would-be member of Congress cannot bring herself to call the firebombing of her political opponents antisemitic or wrong, she is telling you precisely where, on the spectrum of enemies and citizens, she has decided those opponents belong.
This is why the Denver result matters far beyond Colorado, and far beyond the fate of one long-serving congresswoman. The incumbent who lost was not a moderate by any honest measure. She wanted to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She campaigned on single-payer healthcare. She had spent three decades compiling one of the most reliably progressive voting records in the House. And she was cast out anyway, not for being too far left but for not being far enough. That is how the ratchet operates. Each cycle the standard of acceptable belief moves further toward the extreme, and it never moves back.
Today’s radical becomes tomorrow’s establishment sellout. The members who survive by tacking left this year become the targets of the purge next year. Multiply that dynamic across every safe seat in the country, in every deep-blue district where the primary is the only election that matters and a motivated activist minority can decide the outcome, and you do not get a handful of colorful outliers. You get a faction, then a bloc, then a governing wing of a major American party, staffed by people who were taught from their first day in politics that those who disagree with them are not fellow citizens to be persuaded but obstacles to be removed.
The American Rights Alliance exists to defend one freedom above all others, the freedom to disagree with your own government, because it is the freedom on which every other liberty depends. Lose it, and nothing else can be protected, because there is no longer any lawful channel through which to object. Every right you have is ultimately guaranteed by your ability to speak up when it is threatened. Take away that ability and the rest are promises written on paper by people who no longer have to keep them.
Socialism assures its followers that it will stop wherever they want it to stop. Communism is the name for what happens when it does not, and the verdict of history is very nearly unanimous that it does not. The theory points one direction. The historical record points the same direction. And the movement now winning elections in America openly draws on both while asking you to believe that this time, uniquely, the pattern will not hold.
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. We should use it now, clearly and without apology, while it is still unmistakably ours to use.
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The post First Comes Socialism. Then Comes Communism. And Your Rights Go With It. appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
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