There’s one big reason socialist voters may not get what they want
· Vox
The left is painting Blue America rose.
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In just the past two weeks, four insurgent left-wing candidates — including three socialists — have won Democratic congressional primaries. The latest victor, 29-year-old Melat Kiros, defeated 15-term incumbent Diana DeGette Tuesday night.
These wins capped a banner year for progressives in general and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in particular. Socialists will soon hold the mayorships of New York, Seattle, Washington DC, and Chicago. And progressives have won many hotly contested congressional primaries, with a left-populist securing the Democratic nomination in Maine’s Senate race. Meanwhile, Abdul El-Sayed, a longtime favorite of Bernie Sanders supporters, is overwhelmingly favored to win the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan.
To many on the left, all this signifies a shift in the bounds of political possibility. As the Guardian writes, “socialism is no longer a dirty word.” The dream of turning America into a Nordic-style social democracy (if not a communist utopia) suddenly seems more thinkable.
And yet, for the left’s core economic project, recent political trends are less auspicious than they appear.
To bring social democracy to America, it is not enough to sell Democratic primary voters on left-wing candidates. Rather, one must persuade Americans in general to accept higher tax rates, in exchange for more public services, like Medicare-for-all. This has long been a controversial proposition in the United States. And it has actually grown less popular in recent years, amid a bipartisan revolt against middle-class taxation.
The insurgent left’s victories could generate real change. They will quite likely shift the Democratic Party’s stance on Israel, render its leadership more deferential to the left, and make congressional progressives more procedurally radical.
Until the left sells voters on higher taxes, however, it won’t turn the United States into Denmark (let alone a socialist republic).
Americans want major change — but on the cheap
On many fronts, public opinion is moving in the insurgent left’s direction. Among Democrats, 62 percent have a favorable view of “socialism” while just 42 percent report the same feeling about “capitalism.”And more than two-thirds of Democrats under 45 say they are “more of a supporter” of the progressive movement than a supporter of the Democratic Party.
Among the broader electorate, “anti-system” sentiment is widespread. In a recent poll from Navigator, a Democratic data firm, 68 percent of voters said that America’s economic system needs either “major changes” or to be “torn down completely.” Throughout the 2024 election, the New York Times’s surveys yielded similar findings.
Further, voters sympathize with the left’s calls to soak the rich. In a January Pew poll, roughly 60 percent of voters said they were bothered by the wealthy and corporations not paying their fair share in taxes.
Many items on progressives’ social welfare agenda also poll well. And two-thirds of Americans believe that the federal government has a responsibility to ensure that everyone has healthcare coverage (although, in the same Pew poll, only 35 percent thought it should do this through “a single national government program”).
And yet, if American voters sound like Karl Marx when asked about “the system” or “corporations,” they increasingly sound like Ayn Rand when discussing their own tax rates.
Between 2020 and 2025, the share of Americans who consider their federal tax burden “too high” jumped from 46 percent to 59 percent in Gallup’s polling.
View LinkThis shift doesn’t merely reflect a resurgence of libertarian sentiment on the right. In January, independent voters were actually a bit more likely than Republicans to say their tax bill was too high.
View LinkWhat makes this trend so remarkable — and inauspicious for the progressive project — is that federal tax rates are already near historic lows. The lowest-earning 80 percent of Americans are paying much less in federal taxes today than they did 30 years ago.
View LinkToday’s level of middle-class taxation appears insufficient to sustain America’s existing welfare state, let alone to support a vastly larger one. Our nation’s $2 trillion deficit is already putting upward pressure on interest rates and prices. And the deficit is poised to rise dramatically over the coming decade, as population aging raises the costs of Medicare and Social Security. The former program is already paying out more than it takes in, while the latter’s trust fund is poised to run out in 2033. At that point, maintaining current benefit levels will require trillions in new taxes, spending cuts, or deficit spending.
Faced with such tradeoffs, voters indicate that they would prefer spending cuts to tax hikes (at least, on themselves). In a Gallup poll from last fall, 49 percent of Americans said that Congress should reduce the deficit “only” or “mostly” through spending cuts, while just 17 percent said it should do so “only” or “mostly” through tax hikes.
Other survey questions surface similar attitudes. Between 2020 and 2025, the share of voters who agreed that the federal government was “trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses” jumped from 41 to 50 percent, while the share saying that Uncle Sam should do more fell from 54 to 40 percent.
Of course, voters say a lot of things in surveys. And many of their avowed opinions are lightly held and irrelevant to their decisions in the ballot box. But anti-tax sentiment appears to be both widespread and salient. Or at least, elected officials seem to believe as much. In 2023 and 2024, state governments collectively cut taxes by $15.5 billion and $13.3 billion, respectively — the two largest annual reductions on record.
The best indicator of the tax revolt’s political relevance, however, may be progressives’ own behavior. On Capitol Hill, much of the congressional left has rallied behind plans for large middle-class tax cuts. And on the campaign trail, even socialist insurgents like Zohran Mamdani have called for tax hikes on the superrich, but not the middle class.
This may be a credit to progressives’ political savvy. But it is also a bad omen for their core economic project.
Social democracies support the middle class
Different left-wing factions define their economic agenda in distinct ways. But the Democratic left is united by a commitment to vastly expanding the American welfare state: establishing a socialized health insurance system, universal childcare, tuition-free public college, expanded social housing, more generous unemployment benefits, and a child allowance, among many other programs.
Unfortunately, this type of welfare state cannot subsist on billionaire taxes alone.
When asked to cite real-world models for their economic vision, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other progressives often cite Scandinavia’s social democracies.
And for good reason. Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland really have enacted the bulk of American progressives’ desired social programs. To sustain these benefits, however, Scandinavians pay much higher taxes than Americans do.
In 2024, the US government collected revenue equal to about 25 percent of American gross domestic product (GDP). By contrast, tax payments in Nordic countries added up to more than 40 percent of each nation’s GDP.
Critically, this gap does not simply reflect Scandinavians’ greater enthusiasm for soaking the superrich. To the contrary, Norway’s top tax rate is actually lower than America’s. The Norwegian government nonetheless reaps far more revenue than Uncle Sam because it imposes much higher taxes on its middle- and upper-middle-class households.
Consider a family with two children, in which the husband and wife each earn their nation’s average wage. In Norway, this household will owe $13,518 more in annual income taxes than it would in the United States, according to the OECD.
And this understates the difference between each family’s tax burden. Norwegians don’t merely pay higher income taxes but also a 25 percent value-added tax — essentially, a tax on their consumer purchases. Even with all of Donald Trump’s tariffs and states’ sales taxes, Americans still pay a far lower rate on our consumption. And this same basic pattern holds for the other Nordic social democracies.
American progressives might insist that we don’t need to import the Scandinavian model. After all, the US is richer than Sweden. And our super-rich command a far larger share of national income. So why can’t we just put our social democracy on Elon Musk’s tab?
But there are a couple of problems with this reasoning. For one, the point of offsetting welfare spending with taxes isn’t just to minimize deficits, but also to prevent inflation. And taxing the middle class does more to preempt price increases than taxing billionaires does.
For another, you can only squeeze so much revenue from the superrich. Raise their tax rates past a certain point, and they will start working less or shifting their capital overseas. Expropriate their wealth aggressively enough, meanwhile, and they will eventually stop being super rich.
Liberal Democrats aren’t the obstacle to incremental welfare expansions
This isn’t to say that taxes on the rich are insufficient for funding some expansions of the welfare state. America’s mega-millionaires and billionaires consume a wildly disproportionate share of resources. Slashing their incomes would free up space for some new programs.
And yet, the types of Democrats that the insurgent left keeps defeating — liberals like Adriano Espaillat or Diana DeGette — have long been on board with raising taxes on the rich to incrementally expand the welfare state. Both Espaillat and Degette voted for Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Act, which included a guaranteed income for working-class parents, universal pre-K, childcare subsidies, long-term care, and affordable housing, among other things.
In truth, the bounds of legislative possibility on social spending have not been set by liberal Democrats in safe blue districts, but rather, moderate ones representing purple-to-red jurisdictions. To date, the insurgent left has demonstrated little ability to win in the latter areas.
Nonetheless, some progressives insist that replacing congressional liberals with socialists could move the needle on social spending. They insist that their party’s left flank could force moderates to accept more of its terms, if only it drove a harder bargain. As prospective democratic socialist Congress member Chris Rabb put the point, “If there’s a small, even not-so-small Democratic majority, and there’s a disciplined progressive voting bloc, that’s power. Even if it’s just defensive power — saying, ‘No, we’re not voting for this, try again.’”
When it comes to welfare state expansion, however, this plan probably won’t work. The reason why moderates have historically set the terms of Democratic welfare policy isn’t that they’ve been more willful than their liberal counterparts. Rather, it is that — in any negotiation — the side that’s more comfortable with reaching no deal at all will have greater leverage. Thus, so long as the prospect of a Democratic government enacting $0 in new social spending is more offensive to progressives than to moderates, the latter will have the upper hand.
None of this means that the left’s recent victories are meaningless. Insurgent progressives could still shift Democrats’ budgetary priorities at the margin. And the left’s primary wins will likely influence the calculus of the party’s leaders and 2028 hopefuls on US policy towards Israel. In the longer run, the DSA’s gains could help the organization grow its membership, and thus its future clout.
But unless progressives start winning marginal Senate and House seats, they will struggle to realize even Joe Biden’s ambitions for the welfare state. And until the left makes middle-class tax hikes palatable to swing voters, American social democracy — much less, democratic socialism — will remain a pipe dream.