Socialism is usually sold to people through things that sound good: free healthcare, free college, free childcare, affordable housing. But when you listen to socialists talk among themselves, you hear something much more alarming.

The 2026 Socialism Conference, held in Chicago last weekend, showed what modern socialists are really fighting for in America today.

“Democrats must be destroyed”

“The Democrats cannot be reasoned with. They must be destroyed,” proclaimed UC Santa Barbara professor Butch Ware, who later discussed weapons training and fighting in the streets.

When Ware says Democrats must be “destroyed,” he’s talking about the political institution of the Democratic Party. Yet he’s not advocating for higher taxes or another government program. He’s talking about political revolution.

Democratic Socialists love to distinguish themselves from communists: Stop calling us communists. Socialism isn’t communism, they say.

Though technically true, they are in fact related. Lenin himself explained socialism was the first stage of transition into a communist society. Socialism is the ostensibly democratic step towards full communal ownership (communism), which promises an end to all forms of exploitation. But society always has winners and losers, and a worldview built on permanent exploitation requires a political program of permanent revolution.

Once you start with that Marxist framework — constantly looking for the exploiter and the exploited, the oppressor and the oppressed — you start seeing that relationship everywhere.

Apparently, even in a weight-loss drug.

“Body fascism”

Self-identified “anarcho-communist” activist Da’Shaun Harrison spoke about fighting “Health Fascism,” claiming that the political deployment of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs is “fascistic.”

He argued that society treats thinness as desirable, fatness as a fixable condition, and that medicine and capitalism help reinforce that standard. But this concept of fascism is so watered down that it loses all meaning.

Fascism is an authoritarian political system where the nation is placed above the individual and government power is used to suppress individual rights. When a pharmaceutical company invents a treatment, offers it to people, and people decide whether they want it — that’s the capitalist wonder of having options.

Nazi Germany demonstrated what actual health fascism looks like. The Nazi government forcibly sterilized people it considered genetically “undesirable.” Under fascist control, no one had a choice.

The anti-capitalist tries so hard to find exploitation that he can’t recognize something incredibly simple. The pharmaceutical company isn’t your friend. Profit doesn’t magically make everything good. But profit also doesn’t magically make everything oppression.

Abolish the police

Georgetown professor Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò discussed responding to skepticism that defunding the police comes with serious risks.

He argued the immediate concerns of anarchy do not make the long-term goal of police abolition wrong. He instead suggested that abolitionists need a better answer for what happens “next week.”

Abolishing the police doesn’t abolish murder, domestic violence, robbery, assault, theft, or gangs. If you eliminate the institution responding to those problems, you don’t eliminate the problems themselves.

Any serious proposal must answer: Who has the authority and ability to stop someone from hurting somebody else?

There is effectively no short-term strategy, or long-term one for that matter. Taiwo seemingly looks for a better PR strategy to sell police abolition in light of the obvious ramifications. But no convenient framing can make those problems go away.

The much easier answer comes outside the Marxist framework: reform, rather than tear down, the institution of policing.

Protect peaceful people from others who are violating their rights instead of using police to control peaceful people. Then hold those officers accountable when they abuse the power they’ve been given.

You don’t have to choose between “police can do whatever they want” and “abolish the police.”

Socialism 2026 takeaways

Underneath each of these viral moments is a similar way of looking at society: power, conflict, exploitation, oppressor versus oppressed — the Marxist framework in various forms. Capitalists become the exploiters and voluntary exchange becomes a system of exploitation.

A pharmaceutical company giving consumers a new medical option becomes part of “body fascism.” Police misconduct becomes an argument for abolishing policing itself. And revolutionary politics remains on the table for some speakers because the existing political and economic system isn’t simply something they want to reform, but something they want destroyed and replaced.

Ideas have consequences when they move from conference rooms and internet debates into institutions and policy. And these aren’t simply debates about how to make life more affordable. They’re debates about core principles of freedom and ultimately who should have power over whom.

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Holly Jean Soto is a liberty and economics communicator dedicated to making complex economic, social, and political ideas accessible to everyday audiences. She graduated from George Mason University with a bachelor’s degree in Economics and is a Young Voices Contributor.

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