Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign inspired young voters to embrace democratic socialism, but Sanders’ advocacy for socialism alienated older voters born during the Cold War. The latter connected socialism with the atrocities inflicted by the Soviet Union. Voters who were born after the Cold War did not associate socialism with totalitarianism. They identified it with modern countries that provided extensive social services to their citizens.
Sanders’ 2016 campaign was unable to persuade older voters that democratic socialism was any different from Cold War-era socialism, but Sanders was able to sway younger voters when he stated that the United States should look to other countries that have done a better job of providing universal healthcare and free college.
Younger voters were particularly drawn to Sanders’ ambition to eliminate wealth inequality. Sanders suggested that America should prioritize providing financial resources to working people rather than consolidating wealth in the hands of billionaires.
Sanders didn’t win the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, but his campaign sparked a new wave of progressive politicians committed to democratic socialism.
U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders are both members of the Democratic Socialists of America. Joe Raedle/Getty Images
The first to gain national prominence was U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). In 2019, she told an audience that a system that “allows billionaires to exist” while other Americans live in poverty is immoral. She concluded that billionaires are the byproduct of soaring economic inequality and urged that Americans should stop striving to be “super-rich.”
Zoharan Mamdani, 33, is the latest democratic socialist to receive national attention after winning the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City. If Mamdani wins the general election, he will become the city’s first Muslim and Indian-American mayor. His campaign proposed public child care, fare-free city buses, and city-owned grocery stores. In an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Mamdani echoed Rep. Ocasio-Cortez when he said, “I don’t think that we should have billionaires because, frankly, there is so much money in a moment of such inequality, and ultimately, what we need more of is equality across our city, across our state, and across our country.”
Interviewers continue to press Mamdani to explain why billionaires should not exist, but they should ask more penetrating questions, such as, what are the philosophical underpinnings of this concept, and are billionaires the only target? Only then would the public learn about the darker elements of Mamdani’s bright ideas.
In 2024, the Los Angeles Times published an opinion piece by Belgian/Dutch philosopher Ingrid Robeyns called: No More Billionaires? We can be more ambitious than that. No one needs more than $20 million. It summarized her 2023 book Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth.
Robeyn quoted Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, saying, “Every billionaire is a policy failure.”
“I support this too,” Robeyn continued. “I call this ‘limitarianism,’ in which societies define a cap on how much personal wealth an individual can accumulate. But we should be morally more ambitious than only wanting to get rid of fortunes that are more than $1 billion. If we look carefully at the reasons for limiting personal wealth, we might well agree on a much lower maximum limit.”
She gave three reasons why society should limit excess personal wealth.
1) Excess wealth traps the poor in poverty while inequality rises. 2) Excess wealth undermines democracy because the super-rich spend a lot of money on lobbying, giving them more influence over political decisions. 3) Because of their lifestyle, the rich are disproportionately responsible for climate change.
Then she said, “Although many believe that what they reap in the market is what they deserve, no one can morally say that they deserve their fortune. Wealth is, to a large extent, the result of factors that we can in no way take credit for. We should acknowledge the huge influence of good or bad luck in our lives, including the ‘natural lottery’ ticket that we were given when we were born, the family we were born into, and the parents and teachers who influenced us deeply. Inheriting a vast fortune, the source of wealth for so many rich people, is also pure luck and thus undeserved. Much economic success has been facilitated by the work and investments from previous generations, and none of us can take credit for those achievements.”
Steward Lansley, a visiting fellow at the University of Bristol’s School of Policy Studies, reviewed Robeyn’s book.
He wrote, “Robeyns is making a conceptual case. She doesn’t give much detail of how limitarianism might work in practice … There are plenty of questions of detail that would need to be settled. How, as a society, would we determine the appropriate ‘rich lines’ above which is too much? Would the ‘undeserving rich,’ whose wealth is achieved by extraction that hurts wider society, be treated differently from the ‘deserving,’ who, through exceptional skill, effort, and risk-taking, create new wealth in ways that benefit others as well as themselves?”
Democratic socialists want to build a society with monetary equality, but they can only do so by first dividing society between the deserving and undeserving.
Who deserves to be labeled undeserving, and who deserves to do the labeling?
The democratic socialist will undoubtedly answer that $20 million question incorrectly.
