These last few summer months have shown how Socialism is growing, and it seems the Democratic Party is embracing its emerging popularity with open arms. Just a couple months ago, the 28-year-old Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez scored a stunning victory against Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary for New York’s 14th congressional district. Soon after, DNC chair Tom Perez called her “the future of [the] party.” Socialism may help the Democrats succeed in future elections, considering that polls indicate about half of millennials support it. However, if this economic system were implemented in the U.S., the results could be disastrous.

Despite Socialism’s obvious failure in South American countries such as Brazil and Venezuela, proponents of socialism like Bernie Sanders often respond to these cautionary examples by pointing out that Nordic countries like Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway have implemented socialism with great success. Indeed, these countries provide universal healthcare and free public college, among a myriad of government programs, and also have relatively low levels of income inequality.

So socialism is working there, right? Not really. If that were the case, then why are Nordic Americans (that is, citizens of Nordic countries who immigrated to the U.S.) faring considerably better than their counterparts back at home? According to the National Review,

Danish Americans today have fully 55 percent higher living standard than Danes… Swedish Americans have a 53 percent higher living standard than Swedes. The gap is even greater, 59 percent, between Finnish Americans and Finns.

The article also cites Swedish economists Jesper Roine and Daniel Waldenström, who found that “most of the decrease [in income inequality in Sweden] takes place before the expansion of the welfare state.” A recent paper by Anthony Barnes Atkinson and Jakob Egholt Søgaard arrived at a similar conclusion for the other Nordic countries. Evidently, Nordic socialism is not nearly as fabulous as American socialists like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez purport it to be.

Additionally, Nordic socialism is hardly similar to the strain of socialism supported by Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders. As mentioned earlier, Nordic countries do have high income taxes, and they do maintain a large social safety net. However, their business and regulatory policies differ starkly from those proposed by Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders. The latter want to restore the federal corporate tax rate to somewhere near 35%, and they call for stronger regulations on “greedy” corporations and a $15 minimum wage. In contrast, the OECD reports that the corporate tax rates in the Nordic countries don’t reach above 27%. These countries also impose relatively few regulations on businesses and foster some of the world’s most business-friendly economies, and none of them has minimum wage law. American socialists like Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders fail to realize that Nordic socialism — which still underperforms against American capitalism — has only survived because it still retains many capitalist elements. Perhaps, for the sake of America’s future, the Democratic Party should reconsider its engagement to socialism and recognize that capitalism is a superior system.