We’re Not One Election Away From Ruin

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, July 29, 2026

 

“History is made by intense, compact minorities,” George Will is fond of observing.

 

As with a great many things, Will is both correct and wise (not all correct statements are wise, but I think all wise statements must be correct. Please let me know if you can think of a counterargument to that).

 

The Christians were a tiny cult, and they conquered the Roman Empire and moved the river of history in a new direction. The Bolsheviks were a fringe that captured Russia. Ditto the Maoists and Khmer Rouge. Even democratic societies are shaped—or, in our case, founded!—by small groups of ideologically committed activists and intellectuals. Abolitionism was started by a tiny sect of 12 British zealots (nine Quakers and three Anglicans) who through the force of their moral clarity eventually triumphed. The conservative legal movement, born in the wake of Roe v. Wade, was easily dismissed for years as little more than crackpottery; it now has six adherents (of various levels of intensity) on the Supreme Court. The Fabian Society, the Seneca Falls 100, the Mont Pelerin Society, Supply Siders: The list is almost endless.

 

The problem with this observation, which I think about a great deal, is that it doesn’t provide much guidance on how seriously to take each intense, compact minority you encounter. Because for every sect, cabal, faction, club, cell, and party that succeeds, there are dozens, maybe thousands, that flail, fail, and drown in the currents of history. The ancient world was full of false messiahs who only a few scholars can even name. History counts far more failed revolutionary movements than successful ones.

 

The champions of Esperanto were compact and ideologically committed. The only people today who can speak Esperanto are constantly surprised by how few people want to talk to them at all—even in English. No one spends a lot of time worrying about the Fourierists of Brook Farm. The Oneida Community was created to end monogamy. They failed but they do live on as a thriving cutlery business.

 

A fraction of them get an asterisk in the history books as being prematurely right. Jan Hus was a premature Protestant. Had his movement succeeded, we might be talking about Hus the way we do Martin Luther. Many socialists see the Diggers as the first socialists, so they have a certain immortality as precursors of the “successes” that followed.

 

But, again, for every such moral victory there are countless more Shakers, Hale-Boppers, Southscottian Panacea Societies, Fruitlanders, Fifth Monarchists, and Muggletonians (the last one died in 1979. We shall not see his like again).

 

I bring this up because I’ve gotten an interesting reaction to my LA Times column on the alleged threat of a socialist takeover of America. A good number of people tell me that I am being too dismissive. The  Democratic Socialists of America is taking over the Democratic Party, and the radical movement would do enormous damage or even destroy America if it got into power.

 

Now, I agree entirely that it would do enormous damage if it got into power. I’m even willing to concede that the chances of it destroying America are greater than zero if it managed to seize the reins of both the Democratic Party and subsequently the country.

 

(I’ll even add to the threat matrix. I don’t want to say the DSA is explicitly antisemitic—not because I don’t think the case can be made, albeit contestably. An easier claim to defend is that it has a high degree of tolerance for antisemitism and that is dangerous enough. Small, committed minorities of Jew-haters have made their share of history, too.)

 

But that doesn’t mean I think the DSA will be successful in turning the country socialist. I explained some of my thinking in the column. Socialism tends to become more popular—in polls—when people are dissatisfied with the economic status quo and their personal plight. But that has more to do with the fact that they think capitalism is the label for the status quo. And since the opposite of capitalism in their minds is socialism, by the transitive property, they say they want socialism because that’s the antonym for the status quo/capitalism. This is a longstanding trend in public opinion.

 

But I’ll broaden out. Americans don’t like socialism because distaste for socialism is a component part of American exceptionalism. Sure, being human beings, Americans like subsidies and free stuff far more than they should. But they also hate long lines, bureaucracy, shortages, inefficiency, freeloaders, economic stagnation, and being bossed around. Socialism may suck at delivering knee surgeries in a timely manner, but it’s great at delivering that stuff.

 

Indeed, the term—not the idea or the phenomenon—“American exceptionalism” was coined by Joseph Stalin when Jay Lovestone told him that the American capitalist running dogs just didn’t want to eat the Marxist dogfood. Stalin refused to believe the American proletariat was unconvertible to the cause  and called American exceptionalism a “heresy.” And Stalinists—and all manner of communists and socialists—continue to agree with him.

 

I think I’ve earned my anti-communist and anti-socialist credentials. I am happy, to the point of crackpot exuberance, to denounce socialism and communism and defend capitalism (though not the status quo) all day long. I think the DSA is shot through with bad ideas and infested with bad people. I’ve written quite a lot about that already.

 

What seems to annoy some people is not my opinion about the DSA’s craptacular ideas, but my analysis about their likelihood of success. I don’t want to get deep into the punditry, but I am hardly alone in thinking it’s fairly obvious that the DSA agenda is not merely stupid on the merits, but politically idiotic. Many of the same people who nod along at—correct!—claims that Kamala Harris lost in 2024 because she was too left-wing want to believe that a faction even further to her left is on the cusp of total victory.

 

The reason why establishment Democrats are finally starting to fight back against the radicalism in their ranks has less to do with their adamantine opposition to abolishing the police or ending border enforcement—after all, many of them embraced or quasi embraced such ideas just a few years ago when they thought, wrongly, that such ideas were popular (ironically, the liberal media screwed the Democrats by helping them think that). No, they’re fighting back because they understand this stuff repels far more voters than it attracts in general elections. (By the way, the idea that socialists and communists are opposed to the police or border enforcement is one of the strangest ahistorical pieces of claptrap imaginable. The Berlin Wall was not some socialist installation art piece at the unpoliced open border between the Germanies.)

 

Are they fighting back effectively? Alas, no.

 

I get it coming and going. Because other people give me grief for writing as much as I do about the DSA. Some want me to concentrate my ire at President Donald Trump and Republican perfidy. Others insist that the DSA is a fringe group with a small following only in very blue districts and regions. The two groups overlap in the complaints I get about lending aid and comfort to Trump by either letting myself be distracted (from my Trump criticism) by the DSA or by bolstering his hysterical Red Menace rhetoric.

 

What unites all of these complaints—of “you overestimate the DSA’s significance” and “you underestimate it”—is the confusion of electoral analysis with substantive analysis.

 

Ironically, this is precisely the same dynamic I’ve been struggling with for 10 years now when it comes to the new right, my preferred catchall for the various nationalists, postliberals, common good constitutionalists, neo-reactionaries, and the like. These are also small, ideologically committed minorities, and I’ve struggled with how seriously I should take them. I’ve decided to take them very seriously, not because I think their arguments are good and their ideas are sound, but because Trump succeeded in becoming president and has seeded them throughout the government and the right-wing media and institutional ecosystem. Trump himself is not one of them. He has no fixed ideological commitments. But the new right figured out that in exchange for lip service (to his posterior) they can get power unearned by serious arguments.

 

I think many of the ideas associated with this crowd are also stupid and dangerous. I also think they’re politically unwise in a post-Trump environment. If J.D. Vance gets the nomination in 2028 (a much bigger “if” than some of my friends believe) and runs as an out-and-out postliberal, I think he’d lose in a landslide against any remotely normal Democrat. But he might win against a committed DSA-style Democrat. The converse is also true. If a Mamdani doppelganger gets the nomination and runs against a relatively normal Republican, I think the Democrat would lose.

 

I’ve spent so much time and energy arguing against the illiberal ideas capturing the hearts and minds of young right-wingers—including a similar DSA-esque tolerance for antisemitism—for several reasons. For starters, as noted above, they are actually wielding real political power and influence, thanks to Trump. Also, as a lifelong defender of traditional conservatism, I think that’s not just my obligation, but my beat. More importantly, I think this country desperately needs a healthy conservatism that seeks to conserve the classically liberal propositions at the heart of the founding and the American creed. My argument has never been that if the corporatists, nationalists, and theocrats get power, they will destroy America overnight. They’d do damage. They’d weaken the country. But they would not actually “succeed” because their ideas are bad, often un-American in a literal and descriptive sense, and won’t work. And therefore their ideas would prove to be unpopular.

 

I’d rather not go through all the drama of being proven right, though. Which brings me back to my main motivation. As I’ve said countless times, this stuff can break conservatism as a viable philosophical movement. Redefining conservatism as state capitalism or corporatism in the service of some kind of white or Christian identity politics would be a disaster over the long term.

 

Likewise redefining the “liberalism” of the Democratic Party into DSA-style socialism, left-wing identity politics, and a kind of secular, environmentally inflected theocracy would be a disaster over the long term as well. We need two healthy, serious parties. The longer we go without them, the more damage they will do.

 

That damage will have electoral consequences that can be remedied in whole or in part with another election. Or the one after that. Or the one … you get the point.

 

The question of how to deal with bad ideas is very easy. Reject them. Argue against them. Prove them wrong, as best you can. But the question of how seriously one should take small, committed minorities pushing bad ideas is a prudential question.

 

My problem is with people who think if those minorities win one election, that minority will win perpetually. The idea that we’re one election away from destruction is a destructive idea, because it gives parties and voters permission to make allowances for lesser evils until all we have are choices between competing evils. In such an environment, opponents of what they deem to be the greater evil get very angry at criticism of the lesser evil because they think it’s tacit support for the greater one. Such thinking just perpetuates the cycle, inflicts more damage, and delays the day when Americans figure out how to get us out of the mess. The people making allowances for the DSA do so because they think anything that “stops Trump” is worth it. The people making allowances for Trump do so because they think anything that “stops socialism” or “stops communism” is worth it. This is how electoral calculations predicated on the false assumption that we’re one election from Armageddon corrupt intellectual calculations. America has not been destroyed by Trump, and it won’t be destroyed if the DSA gets a larger foothold in the Democratic Party.

 

These small, committed minorities should be opposed because they’re wrong and bad for the country. But winning one election isn’t all it takes for them to destroy America. Think about it this way. Obviously, FDR had a lot of political success with the New Deal (I think his policy successes were far more mixed than the conventional wisdom holds). But in 1944 he wanted America to adopt a second Bill of Rights that could be part of the DSA platform today—guaranteed jobs, healthcare, housing, etc.— and Americans said, “No thanks.” If Americans didn’t want quasi-socialism then, I don’t see why we should believe they’ll want it in 2026 or 2028. But even if they do want it, that doesn’t mean they’ll want to keep it once it proves not to work.

 

Once enough people—both voters and politicians—accept there are no permanent victories and no permanent defeats, that we have the agency to remedy mistakes, the sooner we’ll get to a constructive political order again.

 

I’m long-term bullish on America because I think our constitutional structure combined with our vast, diverse, continental nation will allow the innate reasonableness and decency of the American people and our exceptional culture to win out. I’d just rather see it happen in my lifetime.