Zohran Mamdani has eclipsed Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the face of the Democratic Socialists of America, establishing the group as a national force to be reckoned with. Despite this rise, most American voters know little about the organization’s historical roots.
The Democratic Socialists of America trace their origins to the Fabian Socialist movement, which has influenced British politics for over a century. The Fabians employed a strategy of “penetration and permeation” to advance socialist ideals without revolutionary upheaval.
George Bernard Shaw, a prominent Fabian founder and playwright best known for My Fair Lady, wrote in his 1928 book The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism:
“I contended that poverty should be neither pitied as an inevitable misfortune, nor tolerated as a just retribution for misconduct, but resolutely stamped out and prevented from recurring as a disease fatal to human society. I also made it quite clear that Socialism means equality of income or nothing, and that under Socialism you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you liked it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character and industry enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were permitted to live you would have to live well.”
Shaw penned these words after the mass-murdering rampages of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin became widely known. In 1931, Shaw visited Stalin’s Soviet Union and described it as “a land of hope,” contrasting it with capitalist “Western countries of despair.”
Sidney and Beatrice Webb, founders of the Fabian Society, traveled to the Soviet Union in 1932 and returned in 1933 for another visit. Their 1935 book Soviet Communism: A New Civilization glorified Stalin’s regime.
Economist Thomas Sowell noted Shaw’s description of working-class individuals as “detestable” people who “have no right to live,” adding: “I should despair if I did not know that they will all die presently, and that there is no need on earth why they should be replaced by people like themselves.”
Murderous “compassion” and “kindness” is in their bloodline, their DNA.
