What Is Democratic Socialism? (And How It's Different From Communism)

Democratic socialism means the economy answers to voters, elected the ordinary way, rather than to a single party that has already decided the answer for everyone. Bernie Sanders put the plainest version of that claim on the record at Georgetown University on November 19, 2015:

Democratic socialism means that we must create an economy that works for all, not just the very wealthy.

Nothing in that speech asked the government to run the auto industry, seize farmland, or ban a rival party. The gap between what democratic socialists actually propose and what people assume they propose is wide, because the word socialism spent most of the twentieth century standing next to the Soviet Union in newspaper photographs.

What democratic socialists actually want

DSA’s own definition, posted on its website, describes an economy and a society both run democratically, aimed at meeting public needs rather than producing profit for a narrow ownership class. Sanders drew the same line from the opposite direction, ruling out the version most Americans picture when they hear the word:

I don’t believe government should own the means of production, but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal.

That sentence carries the weight. Factories, banks, and firms stay privately owned under the democratic socialism practiced in American politics today; what changes is the floor guaranteed to everyone standing near them: health care as a right, a stronger union movement, higher taxes on large fortunes, public investment where private markets underfund basic needs. In the same speech, Sanders pointed to Franklin Roosevelt’s record as precedent, noting that programs now taken for granted, Social Security, the minimum wage, unemployment insurance, and the forty-hour work week, were denounced as socialist when Roosevelt proposed them.

How it differs from a Nordic welfare state

People reach for Denmark and Sweden as the model, and the countries are relevant, just not for the reason usually given. Denmark and Sweden are social democracies: capitalist economies with heavy taxation funding a strong welfare state, most businesses staying in private hands, no plan on the table to change that arrangement. Democratic socialists want similar protections but treat them as a stop along a longer road rather than the destination; the stated aim is an economy run democratically at the level of ownership too, through cooperatives, public ownership of specific sectors, and workplace democracy. In practice, in the United States in 2026, the two camps back nearly identical near-term policy: universal health care, higher minimum wages, stronger unions. The disagreement sits further down the road, past the next bill.

How it differs from communism

The older, plainer comparison sits inside American labor history itself. The Socialist Party of America, the party of Eugene Debs’s presidential campaigns, held together until September 1919, when the Bolshevik Revolution’s example pulled its left wing away. Members convinced that Lenin’s model, a single vanguard party seizing state power and then running the economy through central planning with no legal opposition, was the answer walked out and founded the rival parties that, through further mergers, became the Communist Party USA, aligned with Moscow’s Communist International. The members who stayed decided that elections, a free press, and more than one legal party were not obstacles to socialism but requirements for it. That 1919 argument is still the argument. Democratic socialism keeps competitive elections and civil liberties as non-negotiable; the Marxist-Leninist states that followed the other model, from the Soviet Union to Cuba to North Korea, have run a single party controlling both government and economy, with dissent criminalized.

Where the American version came from

The Socialist Party never recovered its footing after the 1919 split, and what remained of it spent decades shrinking; by 1972 the remnant had renamed itself Social Democrats, USA, chasing a foothold inside the Democratic Party’s coalition instead of running its own candidates. Michael Harrington, whose 1962 book The Other America helped push the Kennedy administration toward an anti-poverty agenda, broke from that renamed group in a dispute over how fully it should back the 1972 McGovern campaign and ally with the era’s civil rights, feminist, and anti-war movements, and founded the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee that October. In 1982, DSOC merged with the New American Movement, a separate group that had grown out of the New Left, and the combined organization took the name it still carries: the Democratic Socialists of America, founded at a convention in Detroit on March 20-21, 1982, with about 6,000 members, Harrington leading the merged group from the start. The rose on DSA’s own materials arrived by a different road: the fist and rose drawn in Paris in 1969 and spread worldwide through the Socialist International (the full account, and the rest of the left’s symbols, is at /causes/symbols-of-the-left).

How popular is it

Gallup has asked Americans about socialism periodically since 2010, and the number barely moves: 39 percent rated it positively in Gallup’s August 2025 survey, against 54 percent for capitalism, a capitalism figure that was 60 percent as recently as 2021. The partisan split accounts for most of the gap. Self-identified Democrats rated socialism positively at 66 percent in that same survey, ahead of their own 42 percent rating for capitalism, while Republicans rated socialism at 14 percent. That single word carries a century of connotation, which is why democratic socialists spend so much energy on definitions instead of slogans.

The DSA today, and who’s in it

Sanders remains the country’s best-known democratic socialist and has never joined the organization that shares his label. A Niskanen Center analysis of the movement states the fact plainly: “He has never been a DSA member.” He has spent his congressional career as a registered independent, caucusing with Democrats, even as DSA’s National Political Committee voted 11 to 4 to endorse his 2020 campaign on March 21, 2019, after a member poll in which three-quarters of participants said yes.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s membership record runs the opposite way: she joined DSA in 2018, let the membership lapse in 2019, and DSA confirmed in August 2026 that she had rejoined, seven years later, as speculation grew about a 2028 run. Zohran Mamdani’s record has no gap: he joined the New York City chapter in 2017, three years before winning a State Assembly seat and eight years before winning the mayoralty of New York City on November 4, 2025. At his ceremonial inauguration outside City Hall on January 1, 2026, in front of a crowd reported in the tens of thousands, the person administering his oath a second time, for the public ceremony, was Sanders, still not a member of Mamdani’s own organization:

You showed the world the most important lesson that can be learned today , and that is that when working people stand together, when we don’t let them divide us up, there is nothing we cannot accomplish.

DSA passed 120,000 members six months later, on July 4, 2026, and said so in terms that made the historical comparison explicit: the organization called itself the largest socialist organization in United States history, ahead of what it described as the Socialist Party’s 1912 peak of roughly 113,000 dues-paying members under Debs. A movement Debs’s own party could not sustain past one bad decade passed its old high-water mark in a country that, per Gallup, still tells pollsters it prefers capitalism by fifteen points.