The transition from a thirty-two-year career as a secondary school educator to a life as an adjunct professor is, for many, a period of quiet reflection. For me, however, the years 2025 and 2026 became an intense, deliberate immersion into the political philosophy of democratic socialism. My decision to engage with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) for an entire academic year—specifically through an intellectual conduit of Religious Socialism [which was beautifully enlightening]—was not born of youthful idealism. I had no intentions of being a mole or an agent provocateur; I wanted to learn more, at the grassroots level, about the movement that is captivating so many of our younger Americans. I felt that the visceral attacks and the red-baiting of some of the conservative punditry was an oversimplification of this emerging development; bashing youthful naivete adds nothing to the dialogue and does not offer solutions beyond sophomoric sounding demonizations. Having spent three decades parsing the often-brutal realities of Modern World History for my students, I am intimately acquainted with the shadows of the twentieth century.

Rather, my engagement was prompted by a desire to reconcile the classic “Social Gospel” zeitgeist with the urgent, atomized anxieties of our digital age. This retrospective serves to document that year, offering both a tribute to the profound moral sincerity I encountered and a sober, historically grounded critique from the perspective of a conservative worldview.

The Moral Core: The Faith in the Human Person

To engage with the democratic socialist movement is to encounter a group of people who are fundamentally, if often implicitly, obsessed with the Imago Dei. My time in the movement revealed a demographic whose core conviction is that our current neoliberal order is not merely inefficient, but morally insolvent.

There is a palpable sense of “radical mercy” within these circles. When my peers argued for universal healthcare or the decommodification of housing, they were not, in my observation, merely arguing for a larger state apparatus. They were arguing that a society is judged by how it treats its most vulnerable members. This echoes the Catholic social teaching I have long held dear—specifically the principles of Subsidiarity and the "Consistent Ethic of Life." I found a refreshing honesty in the movement’s disdain for a “throwaway culture” that treats both the environment and the poor as disposable inputs. The democratic socialist insistence that human dignity is a priori to market value is a moral compass that many conservatives, in their zeal for market efficiency, would do well to rediscover in 2026.

The Historical Lens: Lessons from the Archives

As a historian, I have spent my life studying le long durée—the slow, structural changes of history. This perspective inevitably shapes my engagement with modern political movements. When I look at the proposals of the modern Left, I see a fascinating attempt to iterate upon the past. Yet, I also see the ghosts of historical errors.

History teaches us that the best of intentions—when married to centralized power—often produce the most tragic of unintended consequences. The democratic socialist project often frames itself as a “new” way forward, yet it relies on the machinery of state intervention that has frequently stifled the very organic, local institutions that allow for true flourishing. As an educator, I have taught my students that when we seek to solve problems at the level of the state rather than the person, we inadvertently trade agency for security. My professional background constantly reminds me that the "Great Leap Forward" in political theory usually results in a retreat in individual liberty.

The Conservative Critique: Agency, Order, and Limits

While the moral diagnosis of the democratic socialist is often acute, their prescribed remedies frequently clash with the reality of human nature and the necessity of limited government. From a conservative-libertarian perspective, the primary danger in the socialist project is not a lack of compassion, but an excess of ambition that ignores the hard mechanics of social systems.

The Peril of Centralization and the Calculation Problem

Democratic socialism relies heavily on the state as the primary vehicle for justice. As a student of history, I have observed the arc of the last century with caution. When you empower a centralized authority to redistribute the fruits of labor, you risk hollowing out the "mediating institutions"—family, parish, and community associations—that are the true engines of a flourishing society.

From a consequentialist perspective, this ambition runs aground on the insights of Ludwig von Mises. In his 1920 essay Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, Mises demonstrated that in the absence of a free market for capital goods, there are no market prices to reflect relative scarcity, consumer preferences, and opportunity costs. A democratic mandate can determine what people want, but it cannot provide the quantitative data required to determine how to produce those goods efficiently. When proposals to "decommodify" housing or healthcare are enacted by state fiat, the price mechanism is suppressed or abolished. Without spontaneous pricing signals, the state is flying blind, resulting in chronic shortages, misallocated capital, and waste. The democratic socialist believes that substituting democratic votes for market prices brings economic life under human control; Mises demonstrated that it achieves the opposite, replacing objective coordination with arbitrary bureaucratic guesswork.

The Hubris of Design

There is a persistent idealism regarding human nature in these circles. The assumption that individuals will naturally prioritize the collective over the self is noble, but it ignores the enduring reality of human fallibility and the limits of human reason—a danger famously articulated by Friedrich Hayek.

In works like The Constitution of Liberty and The Fatal Conceit, Hayek warned against "constructivism"—the erroneous belief that complex social orders can be entirely designed and engineered by deliberate reason. Civilization rests upon evolved traditions, rules, and decentralized market structures containing far more information than any single central committee can comprehend (the "dispersed knowledge of time and place"). When the state attempts to manage society from the center, it acts on the pretense of knowledge it does not possess. Centralized interventions inevitably disrupt delicate, spontaneous feedback loops, crowding out organic mutual aid and replacing voluntary cooperation with state coercion.

The Calculus of Freedom and Power

Furthermore, my year of study reinforced the reality that there is no perfect political system. Every attempt to engineer social equality through policy produces externalities: new forms of dependency, the erosion of personal responsibility, and the bureaucratic expansion of the state.

This leads directly to the structural warning of Milton Friedman. In Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman established that economic freedom is an indispensable prerequisite for political freedom. The democratic socialist envisions a separation of economic and political power—the idea that we can nationalize or heavily regulate the economy while expanding democratic control. Friedman argued this is a dangerous illusion. When the state becomes the ultimate employer, landlord, and provider, the distinction between economic and political power collapses. If the government controls the means of production and distribution, dissent becomes practically impossible. Even if such a state begins with democratic intentions, the sheer concentration of economic power creates incentives for rent-seeking, cronyism, and authoritarian creep as citizens incrementally trade economic autonomy for state-guaranteed security.

A Concluding Synthesis

My experiment in discourse has not led me to abandon my conservative instincts, nor has it led me to discard the valuable insights that I gained from my socialist colleagues this past year. Instead, it has deepened my conviction that the most vital political conversations occur in the tension between these two poles.

We must respect the democratic socialist’s fire for justice and their refusal to accept the status quo as inevitable. We must possess their deep empathy for the marginalized. Yet, we must also retain the conservative’s sobriety: our wariness of concentrated power, and our unwavering belief that true social health begins with the family and the local community—not the state. Through the critical lenses of icons like Mises, Hayek, and Friedman, we are reminded that true compassion does not consist in wishing for a better world through state coercion, but in understanding the real-world trade-offs of human action.

As I look back on 2025 and 2026, I am grateful for this "experiment." It has been a reminder that whether we call ourselves socialists or conservatives, our ultimate goal should remain the same: to build a world where every person is treated with the dignity inherent in their creation. The debate is not about whether to help our neighbor, but how to do so without destroying the very structures of freedom that allow us to live in a civilized, prosperous, and truly humane society. The only victims of a culture are the citizenry; constructive dialogue is the path to preserving American greatness.

The author is a retired Advanced Placement Teacher from the Babylon Union Free School District. Holding an earned doctorate in Modern World History, he is currently an adjunct professor at Nassau Community College and Southern New Hampshire University.