A one-bedroom apartment in New York costs more than a starting salary, and John Fund thinks the problem is Marxism. Writing in National Review, Fund catalogues the DSA’s recent mayoral victories, its updated platform calling for the abolition of the Senate and the transfer of corporate ownership to the public, and a “security apparatus” that, in its own words, would “build community defense structures outside of and in resistance to law enforcement.” He concludes that socialism is now “in danger of becoming the secular religion of many voters.” He has sounded a fire alarm. I’d recommend a mirror.

I’ll concede the true half, because it is real and it matters. The DSA platform contains genuinely radical planks: zero-out police budgets, abolish the presidency, subordinate the Supreme Court to Congress. The “Red Rabbits Security Commission” language about community defense is the kind of thing that starts as campus rhetoric and ends as something nobody wants in their own neighborhood. Fund is not hallucinating the document. He is reading the cover and skipping the question of why anyone is opening the book.

The thing he never names is the rent check. It is the childcare invoice. It is the hospital bill. A generation of young voters has spent its adult life inside American cities where infant care consumes one full paycheck before taxes, where a single unexpected medical charge can empty a bank account, and where a landlord backed by a hedge fund can raise the rent 30 percent because the building was bought with borrowed money. They are not reading Marx. They are reading their own bank statements. And the DSA officials who actually hold office do not govern from the platform. Zohran Mamdani won New York’s mayoral race on the cost of living — childcare that bankrupts parents, rent that eats half the paycheck, transit that costs more while delivering less. He didn’t run on abolishing the Senate. He ran on the thing that keeps New York parents up at night.

There is a category error running through this entire genre of commentary, and Fund’s column is a clean specimen of it. He treats electoral outcomes as ideological victories when they are, in fact, affordability rebellions. The DSA’s net favorability among Democrats is +17 — compared with just +4 for congressional Democrats, as he himself cites from CNN’s Harry Enten. That is not a socialist fever. It is a report card on Democratic governance, and the grade is an F. When a label that includes the word “socialist” outpolls the party that was supposed to fix your healthcare, the problem is not the label. The problem is the healthcare.

And then Fund, to his credit, comes within one paragraph of naming the actual mechanism — and walks away. “The DSA has taken advantage of opportunities handed to it by the failure of liberals to govern America’s cities effectively or efficiently,” he writes. “Republicans have also dismally failed to promote their own solutions to urban problems.” This is the whole column, stated and then dropped in a single sentence. He identified the gaping hole in the roof, and then wrote nine hundred words about the brand of bucket the tenant is carrying. A voter facing a rent increase of 40 percent over three years will eventually vote for whoever promises to stop the bleeding, and they will not pause to check whether the person doing the promising has a platform plank about the Senate they find distasteful.

Childcare provides the cleanest illustration of why the market was never going to solve this. A quality center needs a high ratio of well-paid, skilled adults to small children. The arithmetic refuses to produce a result that is simultaneously affordable for parents, decently paid for workers, and profitable for owners. Pick two. Every other rich country picked the parents and the workers and paid the difference with public money. The American market picked the spreadsheet, and then the people who write op-eds about socialism are surprised when the spreadsheet’s victims vote for someone who promises to solve the problem the spreadsheet was never going to solve. Housing runs the same arithmetic on a larger scale. A private developer who borrows to build must charge enough to cover the debt service, and in a hot city that number is higher than a young worker can pay. If Fund had traced the mechanism instead of the platform, he would have seen that what these voters want is not exotic. It is the removal of the terror.

So what do we build instead? The answer is not to simply watch the DSA inherit every unaffordable city and then write columns about how alarming its manifesto is. The answer is to take impossible-triangle problems seriously, with public money, at scale. Universal childcare — funded, staffed, treated as infrastructure the way we treat the interstate — removes the arithmetic trap that guarantees market failure in the care sector. Social housing, built and maintained by public agencies or community land trusts, takes a permanent bite out of the rent curve that the private market cannot flatten on its own. This is not the abolition of markets. It is welding the trap doors shut so that a layoff or an illness does not end in eviction. It is what Denmark does, and what we used to do before we forgot.

Fund invokes Michael Harrington — the DSA’s founding chairman — as evidence that the organization has strayed from its origins. But Harrington’s life’s work was exactly what these elected officials are doing: pushing the boundary of the achievable from inside the system, by democratic means. “The left wing of the possible,” he called it. He described himself as an American who happened to be a socialist, not a revolutionary. If Fund wants to argue that Harrington would disapprove of today’s DSA, he should name the specific policy — the childcare subsidy, the rent stabilization, the wage board — that Harrington would have called too radical. He can’t, because Harrington spent his career arguing for those exact things.

Fund’s column proves the point it is trying hardest to refute. He showed that both parties failed to govern. He then watched voters select the only candidate who promised to try. He diagnosed a broken pipe, and then wrote a column about the wallpaper. The thing on the march isn’t socialism. It’s the bill for decades of neglect, arriving at the ballot box line by line — rent check, tuition statement, medical invoice. The arithmetic refused. The voters noticed.