John Mac Ghlionn Has Thoughts About Your Economic Anxiety and He's Happy to Explain Why You're Wrong
The Hill's Op-Ed Page: Where Anyone With a Keyboard Can Tell You Exactly How Capitalism Works
John Mac Ghlionn has carved out a comfortable niche as the kind of opinion writer who generates exactly the kind of engagement metrics that modern media outlets find irresistible. His latest piece for The Hill on the apparent rise of democratic socialism in America follows a pattern that has become depressingly familiar in opinion journalism. He raises legitimate concerns, gestures toward genuine phenomena, and then wraps them in rhetorical scaffolding designed more to trigger predictable responses than to illuminate anything.
The fundamental problem with this article is that it conflates several distinct phenomena without doing the analytical work to distinguish them. Mac Ghlionn correctly identifies that younger Americans are experiencing genuine economic distress. Unaffordable housing, crushing student debt, stagnant wages, and precarious employment are not imaginary problems manufactured by radical professors. These are material conditions that affect millions of people in very concrete ways. When someone cannot afford to rent an apartment in the city where they work, or finds that their paycheck disappears into student loan payments before they can build any savings, the abstractions of market efficiency ring hollow. This is simply observable reality, not socialist propaganda.
Where the article goes off the rails is in its treatment of Zohran Mamdani and the broader implications Mac Ghlionn draws from Mamdani’s political trajectory. The piece presents Mamdani’s 2025 Democratic primary victory as if it represents some kind of seismic shift in American politics, but this framing obscures more than it reveals. New York City has a long and well-documented history of electing candidates who would be considered center-left or progressive in national contexts while remaining deeply embedded in the Democratic Party establishment. Ed Koch, David Dinkins, and Bill de Blasio all won mayoral elections in New York without triggering a socialist transformation of American politics. The notion that Mamdani’s victory represents something categorically different requires supporting evidence that the article does not provide.
Mac Ghlionn gestures toward DSA membership numbers and mentions “imitative efforts in Las Vegas” as if this constitutes evidence of a broader trend, but he provides no data, no sourcing, and no methodology for evaluating these claims. This is precisely the kind of assertion that passes for argumentation in contemporary opinion journalism but would be immediately called out in any honest analytical piece. When someone makes a claim about organizational membership trends, the responsible approach is to cite actual membership figures, historical comparisons, and specific examples. Simply asserting that DSA membership has been “boosted” without documentation is not analysis, it is advocacy masquerading as observation.
The article’s treatment of capitalism is similarly underdeveloped. Mac Ghlionn correctly identifies that “Trump-era capitalism promised disruption and delivered cronyism,” and that “drain the swamp became a punchline, then a lie, then background noise.” These observations are widely shared across the political spectrum and have substantial empirical support. But the article does not explain how these failures of crony capitalism relate to democratic socialism as a political philosophy. The logical gap here is significant. One can acknowledge that particular instances of capitalism have been corrupt, captured by special interests, or failed to deliver promised outcomes without concluding that socialism represents a superior alternative. Mac Ghlionn seems to assume that his readers will make this connection automatically, but the intellectual work required to establish that link is never actually performed.
There is also something intellectually dishonest about the way the article treats the historical record. Mac Ghlionn acknowledges that “early communal experiments in Jamestown and Plymouth collapsed under the weight of shared ownership and diluted responsibility,” but then dismisses this as a “cautionary tale” that has lost relevance because “democratic socialism, at least in its American form, is not proposing the abolition of markets or ownership.” This is a convenient rhetorical move that allows the article to invoke historical lessons while simultaneously dismissing their relevance. If the historical examples are genuinely cautionary, they deserve serious engagement rather than hand-waving dismissal. If they are no longer applicable, the article should explain why the conditions that led to those failures have somehow been overcome.
The most subversive element of this article, and perhaps the one that Mac Ghlionn did not intend, is its implicit admission that capitalism as currently practiced is failing vast numbers of people. The contrast the article draws between “capitalism’s defenders warn that socialism leads to breadlines, while millions already queue at food banks” is effective precisely because it highlights the gap between rhetorical claims and material reality. This observation does not require one to embrace socialism to find it compelling. One can believe that market mechanisms, properly regulated and counterbalanced by strong social programs, represent the best available system while simultaneously acknowledging that the current implementation of such mechanisms is badly broken.
What the article ultimately lacks is any serious engagement with the question of what would actually work. Mac Ghlionn concludes that “if capitalism wants to keep the franchise, it needs fewer speeches and better outcomes,” which is true as far as it goes. But this observation is so general as to be almost meaningless. What specific policies would constitute “better outcomes”? How should those outcomes be measured? What trade-offs are acceptable in pursuit of those outcomes? These are the questions that serious policy analysis addresses, and they are precisely the questions that this article avoids.
The appropriate response to Mac Ghlionn’s argument is neither wholesale rejection nor uncritical acceptance. The article correctly identifies real problems with the current economic arrangement and correctly notes that these problems are generating political responses. But the analytical framework it provides for understanding those responses is thin and underdeveloped. The rise of figures like Mamdani, whatever one thinks of their specific policy proposals, deserves serious engagement rather than rhetorical alarm or dismissive framing. Whether democratic socialism represents a genuine alternative or simply a new branding for familiar progressive policies is an open question that requires evidence and argument to resolve. This article provides neither.
I know I cited it but here is a link to the original if you have the patience for this kind of uneducated digital graffiti: https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/5692120-democratic-socialism-rise-america/.
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Works Cited
Mac Ghlionn, J. (2026, January 16). America is sleepwalking into socialism. *The Hill*. https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/5692120-democratic-socialism-rise-america/
Mamdani, Z. (2025). *Zohran Mamdani*. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zohran_Mamdani