Sixty-Six Percent - What Americans Think Socialism Means

A recent Gallup poll, conducted in August 2025, found that 66 percent of Democrats view socialism favorably — while only 42 percent of those same Democrats viewed capitalism favorably. At protests across American cities, demonstrators have carried Soviet flags, the hammer and sickle on red cloth, as symbols of resistance. Senator Bernie Sanders, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani — the new Mayor of New York City — have built careers on the promise of democratic socialism, drawing crowds of young Americans who see that word not as a warning but as a hope.

I am not going to answer them with statistics or economic theory. I am going to tell them about my grandfather, my father, and myself. Three generations. One system. One verdict.

Part 1: The Night of February 25, 1951

In the village of Bebnisi, in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, fourteen-year-old Shota Gelashvili had fallen asleep over his German language textbook. He had a test the next morning at Bebnisi Secondary School. The book lay open beside him in his bed.

His parents, Vakhtang and Ekaterine, had gone to sleep. Ekaterine was visibly pregnant. Shota's sisters — Izolda, born 1939, and Meri, born 1941 — were asleep. Their grandmother, nearly one hundred years old, had also retired for the night.

At two in the morning, soldiers of the NKVD — the Soviet secret police — stood over them in the darkness. The order was simple: dress quickly, make no sound, come with us. There was no time to gather belongings. As the soldiers searched the room, one of them pulled Shota's German textbook from his bed. They passed it from hand to hand, then gave it to the commanding officer — as if a schoolboy's grammar book confirmed what they already believed.

The family was loaded onto a truck and taken to the railway station in Khashuri. There, a train of fourteen freight cars was waiting — cattle wagons, the kind used to transport livestock. Soldiers beat people as they forced them inside: children, women, elderly men, the pregnant Ekaterine. They used rifle butts. They screamed "faster." There was no toilet, no water, no food.