The Socialists Winning Democratic Primaries Are Too Young to Remember Why Socialism Fails

Robert Owen Bought a Town to Prove Socialism Works. The DSA Should Study What Happened.

Something is happening inside the Democratic Party, and it is no longer subtle. In Denver this spring, Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old, foreign-born, self-described democratic socialist endorsed by both Denver DSA and the national Democratic Socialists of America, defeated longtime Rep. Diana DeGette in the Democratic primary for CO-1, running on Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, and a slate of ambitious economic planks. In upper Manhattan, 32-year-old Darializa Avila Chevalier, NYC-DSA’s candidate for NY-13, toppled Rep. Adriano Espaillat. In Brooklyn’s NY-7, Claire Valdez, a 36-year-old UAW organizer and former NYC-DSA membership chair who calls herself a proud democratic socialist, captured the Democratic nomination. In Philadelphia, Chris Rabb, a DSA member endorsed by the national organization, won the primary in a seat so blue that DSA’s own publication is already calling him the next Democratic Socialist in Congress.

These are not isolated flukes. They join a movement with sitting members. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in NY-14 and Rashida Tlaib in MI-12 appear on DSA’s own list of federal officeholders, and more challengers are lined up behind them. Oliver Larkin, a 33-year-old DSA member since 2020, carries the organization’s first federal endorsement of 2026 into FL-23. Donavan McKinney, a 34-year-old state representative who publicly brands himself a democratic socialist, is challenging Rep. Shri Thanedar in MI-13. Cori Bush is mounting a DSA-backed comeback in Missouri alongside Hartzell Gray, an open democratic socialist running in MO-4. In Sacramento, DSA-endorsed Mai Vang has advanced to a November runoff against Rep. Doris Matsui. And hovering above the whole wave is the prospect that party insiders now discuss without embarrassment, Ocasio-Cortez, the movement’s model and its most famous member, as a serious presidential candidate in 2028.

Notice the ages. Kiros is 29. Avila Chevalier is 32. Larkin is 33. McKinney is 34. Valdez and Ocasio-Cortez are 36. Nearly all of them were born after the Berlin Wall came down. None of them stood in a Soviet bread line, watched Cambodia starve, or saw Venezuela, the richest country in South America, ration toilet paper. For them socialism is not a memory but a brand, and the brand is selling. That is precisely the danger. A generation that cannot remember the failures must be shown them, and here the American record is more useful than the foreign one, because it cannot be waved away as the fault of dictators, embargoes, or the CIA. America tested socialism under the most generous conditions imaginable, decades before Marx published a word, and the test results are buried on the banks of the Wabash River in Indiana.

In early 1825, the wealthy industrialist Robert Owen paid the Harmonist religious community $150,000 for the town of Harmony, roughly 20,000 acres of cleared farmland together with the houses, dormitories, mills, workshops, and orchards the Harmonists had built since 1814. Owen did not have to fell a tree or raise a barn. He inherited a functioning economy the way a new tenant inherits a furnished house, and he set out to run it on socialist principles. When he returned that April, between 700 and 800 residents were waiting. On February 5, 1826, the community adopted a constitution establishing a Community of Equality, promising equal rights, equality of duties, common property, and the rational planning of economic life through 6 departments covering agriculture, manufacturing, domestic economy, general economy, commerce, and education. Nor did the town lack brains. On January 26, 1826, a keelboat admirers called the Boatload of Knowledge arrived carrying the geologists, naturalists, and educators whom William Maclure had recruited, briefly giving the village one of the densest concentrations of scientific talent on the continent.

If socialism could work anywhere, it should have worked here. There was no war, no blockade, no hostile press, no capitalist sabotage. There was a rich founder, a ready-made town, national publicity, and elite intellectual capital. Within about 2 years the experiment was dead. By March 1827 the project was acknowledged as a failure, by 1829 the community had dissolved and the property returned to private hands, and Owen had reportedly spent about $200,000 buying the land and paying the community’s debts.

Why? The deepest answer came from Owen’s own son. All cooperative schemes which provide equal remuneration to the skilled and industrious and the ignorant and idle, Robert Dale Owen wrote, must work their own downfall. Notice who is speaking. This is not a hired critic but the founder’s son, a believer who watched the dream die. When effort and idleness receive the same reward, effort declines, and the decline is not a moral failing of particular individuals. It is the predictable response of ordinary people to the terms offered. The skilled blacksmith who watches the lazy theorist draw equal rations from the common store is not corrupted by greed when he leaves for Cincinnati. He is responding to an insult, and the insult is structural. Robert Dale Owen described the population his father attracted as a heterogeneous collection of radicals, enthusiastic devotees to principle, honest latitudinarians, and lazy theorists. Josiah Warren, an original participant, recalled that the community tried every conceivable form of organization and government and ended in despair. The failure was not a drafting error. No arrangement of words can repeal the logic of incentives.

Common property compounded the problem. When everyone owns the mill, no one repairs the mill, because no one bears the full cost of neglect or captures the full benefit of care. Private ownership is not a license for selfishness. It is an assignment of responsibility, and New Harmony’s overcrowded housing and flagging production were the ordinary condition of assets that belong to everybody and therefore to nobody. A century later Ludwig von Mises supplied the theory, concluding that socialism is the renunciation of rational economy because without ownership and market prices no one can calculate whether any use of resources is worth its cost. F.A. Hayek added that the knowledge an economy needs is dispersed across millions of minds and cannot be gathered by any planner. New Harmony’s 6 departments were Hayek’s problem in miniature, an attempt to give a single administrative mind the information that prices generate automatically. Thomas Sowell states the general rule: judge policies by the incentives they create, not by the hopes that inspired them.

Nor was New Harmony an outlier. Plymouth Colony began with communal property and near starvation, and within 3 years it abandoned the common store for private plots, after which the harvests improved. Early Jamestown survived only by moving from company-controlled ownership to private holdings, including 3-acre grants. Brook Farm adopted Fourierist socialism and went bankrupt by 1847. The Oneida Community lasted longer precisely because it built real businesses, and it ended by converting itself into a joint-stock company, which is to say, by becoming capitalist. America ran the experiment repeatedly, and the results replicated every time.

The new socialists will object that they are democratic socialists, that they want Denmark, not a commune on the Wabash. But the objection runs backward. Owen’s socialism was the easy case. It was voluntary, small, and lavishly funded, 800 idealists on 20,000 acres of paid-for land, every one of whom chose to be there and shared the founder’s hopes. If the incentive problem destroyed the easy case in 2 years, scaling the system up to 330 million people who did not volunteer does not solve the problem. It adds coercion to it. And the planks on the 2026 slates, government-monopoly health insurance, sweeping rent regulation, public ownership and planning of ever-larger sectors, all rest on the same two wagers New Harmony lost: that rewards can be detached from contribution without effort collapsing, and that planners can replace prices without waste exploding. Denmark itself, as its own prime minister has insisted, is a market economy, and a rather ruthless one, ranking near the top of the Heritage Foundation’s index of economic freedom. The DSA platform is not Denmark. It is Owen with better graphic design.

The moral claim deserves a final word, because socialism’s appeal has always been moral rather than economic. Equality sounds like justice. But look at what the Community of Equality actually equalized. It transferred the fruits of the diligent to the idle and called the transfer fairness, and the diligent recognized the injustice quickly enough to leave. The young nominees now marching toward Congress are not villains. Most are earnest, energetic, and convinced they are the first generation compassionate enough to make the old dream work. Robert Owen was earnest too, and far better funded. The American alternative is not a utopia and has never claimed to be. It is a modest set of protections, for property, family, work, faith, and voluntary cooperation, that takes human nature as it is and channels it toward production rather than pretending it away. Owen spent $7 million and 2 years demonstrating what happens when those protections are dismantled, and he did it with advantages no DSA candidate will ever enjoy. Before the Democratic Party hands its 2028 standard to the movement’s most famous member, its voters might visit Indiana. The tuition has already been paid. The least this young generation can do is decline to enroll in the course again.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Data in sponsored partnership with Polymarket.