The Conservative Case for Democratic Socialism: Why Both Political Parties Have It Backward
By Thomas L. Vaultonburg | The Rockford Blog
Every day, I sit at my window in Rockford, Illinois, and watch somewhere between 25 and 100 homeless people pass by. Some are familiar faces. Others are strangers. Some appear to be carrying everything they own. They are walking through a city that has no shortage of charitable organizations, social service agencies, nonprofit administrators, political committees, public initiatives, and people professionally employed to address the very conditions these individuals are experiencing. And yet, there they are. Every single day.
Meanwhile, there is discussion of a cultural-center project carrying a proposed price tag of approximately $60 million. I am not suggesting that culture is unimportant. I am a writer, a publisher, and someone who has spent much of his adult life participating in Rockford's artistic community. I believe in the arts. But I also believe that a civilization ought to establish some hierarchy of human needs, and I find it increasingly difficult to reconcile the ambitions of our civic institutions with the material circumstances of the people walking past my window. The cultural-center figure and its funding arrangements deserve independent verification, but the question it raises is larger than any particular project.
This brings me to a political argument that will probably irritate Republicans and Democrats equally. I am a democratic socialist. But my reasons for being one might surprise people, particularly those who imagine democratic socialism as an elaborate scheme to redistribute the wealth of hardworking Americans to people who would rather sit around doing nothing. In fact, my argument is considerably more cynical, pragmatic, and, in some respects, conservative than that. I believe democratic socialism offers conservatives more of what they claim to want than the Republican Party does. And I believe it threatens some of the institutional arrangements upon which the Democratic Party has built its political power. That is the paradox I want to examine.
The Conservative Case for Meeting Basic Human Needs
Let's begin with a proposition that shouldn't be especially controversial. A society in which people have reliable access to food, clothing, shelter, medical care, education, and fair treatment under the law has a better foundation for public order than one in which large numbers of people are perpetually struggling to survive. This isn't simply a sentimental proposition. There is empirical research supporting the practical benefits of material stability. A 2024 study published in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics found that rapidly placing homeless adults into housing programs reduced subsequent homelessness, criminal activity, and reliance on emergency cash assistance. Other studies have found that housing interventions can reduce emergency medical utilization, although their effects on crime vary by population and program design. In other words, helping people meet their basic needs can be an investment in the stability of the entire community.
Consider what conservatives routinely tell us they want: safer neighborhoods, less crime, fewer people dependent on government assistance, more productive citizens, stronger families, and greater individual responsibility. I want those things, too. The difference is that I believe you have a much better chance of achieving them by eliminating the most destructive obstacles to self-sufficiency than by endlessly punishing people for failing to overcome those obstacles. A person without a stable address, reliable food, transportation, medical treatment, or access to education is not competing on anything resembling equal terms. Demanding that person demonstrate personal responsibility while denying them the elementary conditions necessary to exercise it is not a philosophy of self-reliance. It is a contradiction.
And here is where my position becomes less conventionally charitable. I don't want to guarantee everyone a successful life. I want to guarantee everyone a legitimate opportunity to build one. I don't believe society owes anyone a luxurious existence. I don't believe people should be exempt from the consequences of their decisions. I don't believe every personal failure is attributable to capitalism, discrimination, or some invisible institutional conspiracy. What I believe is that society has an obligation to remove certain fundamental disadvantages before it can reasonably insist that individuals bear responsibility for what happens next. Give people adequate food. Give them a place to live. Give them access to medical treatment and education. Give them a justice system that doesn't administer one standard to the wealthy and another to the poor. Give them a genuine opportunity to participate in economic life. Then expect something of them.
If someone squanders those opportunities, refuses to make any effort, or persistently makes destructive choices, I am considerably less inclined to regard their circumstances as a collective moral failure. There will always be exceptions involving disability, illness, trauma, and other limitations, but the principle remains. I am not proposing the abolition of personal responsibility. I am proposing the conditions necessary to make personal responsibility meaningful. And yes, there is something self-serving about this position. I would like to live in a community with less crime, less desperation, less public disorder, and fewer people suffering visibly on the streets. I would like to stop paying, directly and indirectly, for the consequences of problems that might have been prevented much earlier and more cheaply. I would also like to live with the knowledge that everyone was given a fair chance. That seems like a perfectly reasonable bargain.
Why Conservatives Might Be Fighting Against Their Own Interests
One of the most successful achievements of American conservative politics has been convincing working- and middle-class taxpayers that their principal economic adversaries are poor people receiving public assistance. The implication is that the person receiving food assistance is somehow responsible for the financial pressures experienced by the person working fifty hours a week. But this framing directs attention away from the distribution of wealth, the structure of taxation, and the political influence exercised by those with the greatest economic resources. Wealthy Americans do pay substantial amounts in income taxes. It would be dishonest to suggest otherwise. But the federal income tax is only one part of the tax system. Working Americans also pay payroll taxes, sales taxes, property taxes directly or through rent, and a variety of other costs. Meanwhile, wealth accumulated through investments and unrealized asset appreciation can receive treatment very different from ordinary wages. The relevant question isn't whether wealthy people pay taxes. It is whether the total system distributes its obligations fairly, and whether the people most capable of influencing that system have arranged it to their advantage. I would argue that they have.
A conservative who wants lower long-term public costs should be interested in preventing expensive social problems before they occur. A conservative who wants fewer people on government assistance should support policies that help people become economically independent. A conservative who values law and order should recognize that reducing desperation is one potential means of reducing the conditions associated with some forms of crime. None of this requires abandoning fiscal discipline. Quite the opposite. It requires examining what public spending actually accomplishes. The question should not be whether government spends money helping poor people. The question should be whether that spending produces measurable improvements in people's lives and, ultimately, reduces the need for further intervention. That sounds rather conservative to me.
The Democratic Party's More Uncomfortable Problem
Now we arrive at the part of this argument that may be even less welcome. I believe the institutional Democratic Party has a fundamental conflict of interest when it comes to genuinely transformative social policy. Not every Democrat, obviously. There are sincere reformers, committed public servants, and people doing extraordinarily difficult work inside social service organizations. Many Democrats support universal healthcare, affordable housing, labor protections, and other policies associated with democratic socialism. But the party as an institution has also developed political relationships with a sprawling network of public agencies, nonprofit organizations, consultants, grant administrators, professional advocates, and service providers. These organizations frequently perform necessary work. Some do it exceptionally well. Nevertheless, we ought to ask a question that is almost never raised in polite political conversation: What happens to an institution whose continued funding depends upon the persistence of the problem it was created to solve?
This is not an accusation that everyone working in social services is corrupt. It is an observation about institutional incentives. Organizations, like individuals, develop an interest in their own survival. They acquire employees, offices, administrative procedures, professional hierarchies, funding relationships, and political constituencies. Eventually, preserving the institution can become a goal separate from accomplishing its original mission. The distinction matters enormously. A homeless person needs a home. A homelessness bureaucracy needs funding, personnel, compliance systems, reporting requirements, program evaluations, and administrative infrastructure. Some of those things are indispensable to delivering housing effectively. Others may become expensive layers between the money and the person it is supposed to help. When those layers become permanent, we should be asking whether the system is designed primarily to eliminate homelessness or to administer it indefinitely.
And this is where I see an uncomfortable resemblance to Republican trickle-down economics. Conservatives have long defended economic arrangements in which benefits are directed toward the top, with the promise that prosperity will eventually reach everyone else. I believe some Democratic approaches to social welfare risk creating their own version of this arrangement. Money enters the system at the top. Administrators, consultants, contractors, and institutions receive their allocations. Programs are developed. Meetings are held. Reports are prepared. Salaries are paid. Buildings are maintained. Public relations materials celebrate the work being done. And somewhere at the bottom is the person the entire arrangement was supposedly created to help. How much reaches that person? How quickly? In what form? And does it actually improve their circumstances? These questions should be central to every publicly funded social initiative. Instead, they are too often treated as expressions of hostility toward the people providing services. I would suggest the opposite. If we genuinely care about vulnerable people, we should be especially demanding about the effectiveness of the institutions claiming to represent them. The problem is not the existence of administration. The problem is administration becoming an end in itself.
When the Safety Net Becomes a Trap
A safety net should prevent people from falling into circumstances from which recovery becomes nearly impossible. It should not become a permanent apparatus for managing their poverty. Yet many American assistance programs contain eligibility cliffs, income restrictions, complicated application procedures, and administrative demands that can make improvement unexpectedly difficult. A person who begins earning more money may lose benefits before their new income is sufficient to replace them. Someone seeking assistance may spend enormous amounts of time navigating requirements that would challenge even a reasonably well-resourced individual. In such circumstances, the system can inadvertently punish the very progress it claims to encourage. This is not an argument for eliminating assistance. It is an argument for redesigning assistance around independence, stability, and measurable outcomes.
A democratic socialist approach, as I understand it, should establish a universal foundation beneath which nobody is permitted to fall, while allowing people the freedom and incentive to improve their circumstances. That is fundamentally different from constructing an endless collection of narrowly targeted programs, each with its own administrators, eligibility requirements, political sponsors, and institutional beneficiaries. The purpose of a social program should be to make itself less necessary wherever possible. If the objective is to reduce homelessness, success should mean fewer homeless people. If the objective is to improve access to healthcare, success should mean more people receiving appropriate treatment. If the objective is to improve economic opportunity, success should mean more people achieving sustainable independence. Not more conferences. Not more committees. Not more promotional campaigns celebrating the generosity of the organizations involved. Results.
Sixty Million Dollars and the View From My Window
Which brings us back to Rockford. A cultural-center proposal reportedly carrying a price tag of approximately $60 million raises an important question about civic priorities. Before drawing conclusions about that particular project, its full budget, financing arrangements, and intended public benefits deserve examination. Money dedicated to one purpose is not always legally or practically available for another. But the larger question remains. What does a community owe its residents before it begins celebrating its institutional ambitions? I understand the economic arguments for cultural development. Cultural institutions can create employment, attract visitors, support local businesses, and provide educational opportunities. I have no interest in dismissing those benefits. But I also know what I see outside my window. Twenty-five, fifty, sometimes a hundred homeless people passing through the neighborhood in the course of a day. That is my personal observation, not an official count of distinct individuals experiencing homelessness in Rockford. But it is a daily reminder of a problem that cannot be explained away by another announcement about civic progress.
I wonder what $60 million represents when measured against the practical needs of people living on the streets. How many units of permanent supportive housing could be developed? How many people could receive sustained rental assistance? How much medical treatment, mental healthcare, addiction treatment, vocational training, or direct assistance could be provided? Those are questions worth calculating, not rhetorical claims that every dollar could simply be redirected. And I would ask the same questions of any large expenditure proposed by Republicans, Democrats, nonprofit organizations, or private-public partnerships. What are we buying? Who benefits? How will success be measured? What happens if the promised benefits never materialize? Above all, why do the people with the greatest immediate needs so frequently seem to occupy the lowest position in our hierarchy of civic priorities?
The Difference Between Helping People and Managing Them
There is a fundamental distinction between a society committed to reducing poverty and a society committed to maintaining a permanent infrastructure for administering poverty. The first measures success by the number of people who no longer require assistance. The second risks measuring success by the size of its budget, the number of people enrolled in its programs, and the continued expansion of its institutional responsibilities. Of course, some people will always need sustained assistance. Disability, chronic illness, age, and other circumstances make the notion of universal economic independence unrealistic. A civilized society should acknowledge that without embarrassment. But for those capable of greater independence, our objective should be to make it possible.
That is why I believe democratic socialism, properly understood, poses a greater threat to certain Democratic political arrangements than to the legitimate interests of conservative working people. A genuinely universal system of basic material security could reduce the political importance of selectively administered benefits. It could simplify assistance, eliminate some eligibility barriers, and diminish the power of intermediaries who determine who qualifies for what. It could also make public spending more transparent and allow citizens to judge programs by results rather than intentions. None of this means that Democrats uniformly oppose such reforms or that Republicans uniformly support them. Political parties are coalitions containing competing interests. But it does mean that the people who benefit from existing arrangements, regardless of party, have reasons to resist changes that would diminish their influence. And that is the political conflict I find most interesting. Not socialism versus capitalism in the abstract. Not Republicans versus Democrats as competing moral tribes. But ordinary people versus institutional arrangements that too often place their own survival ahead of the outcomes they were created to produce.
A Fair Chance, Then Personal Responsibility
I do not believe government can create a perfect society. I do not believe poverty can be eliminated simply by writing checks. I do not believe every social problem has an economic explanation, or that everyone who receives assistance will use it wisely. I believe human beings are complicated, frequently irrational, sometimes self-destructive creatures. But I also believe that a wealthy society can establish a reasonable minimum standard of material security without abandoning personal responsibility, individual freedom, or fiscal accountability. And I believe that doing so could serve the interests of people across the political spectrum. The conservative gets a safer, more stable community and a stronger foundation for expecting personal responsibility. The working person gets a more reliable measure of economic security and less exposure to the catastrophic consequences of illness, unemployment, or misfortune. The poor person gets an actual opportunity rather than an endless series of appointments with people whose professional lives revolve around administering poverty. And society gets to stop confusing the amount of money spent on a problem with the amount of progress made toward solving it.
There is nothing especially utopian about this. In fact, my position is rather brutally practical. Give people a fair chance. Remove the most destructive barriers to independence. Protect those who genuinely cannot protect themselves. Then hold people accountable for the decisions they make within those conditions. And hold institutions accountable, too. Because if we are going to insist that poor people demonstrate responsibility for the resources they receive, we ought to insist that the organizations receiving millions of dollars in their names demonstrate at least as much.
Until then, I will continue watching people walk past my window in Rockford, wondering how a community can possess so many institutions devoted to human welfare while leaving so many human beings without the most elementary conditions of a decent life. Maybe the problem isn't that we haven't spent enough money. Maybe the problem is that we have become much better at funding the management of social problems than at solving them.
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