Ten House Democrats just signed a pledge for “fiscal discipline and capitalism over socialism,” and I would like to know, very specifically, which capitalism. A Wall Street Journal dispatch from Aaron Zitner, Ken Thomas, and Sabrina Rodriguez on Tuesday’s New York primaries lays out the panic: three Mamdani-backed congressional candidates swept contested races, two of them DSA members, running tax-the-rich platforms and calls to “abolish ICE.” The centrist response, per the piece, is to plant a flag for “capitalism.” Name it. Walk me through it. The mortgage-interest deduction? The carried-interest loophole? The private-equity playbook that loaded your local hospital with debt, sold the building, and now charges you for parking?
I am not here to relitigate the twentieth century. The verdict on communism as it was actually built is in: a catastrophe, tens of millions dead, a system that crushed the very workers it claimed to free. I am not relitigating it. What I am here for is the smaller, more interesting question the WSJ piece quietly assumes away: that “capitalism” and “socialism” name two opposing things, and that the centrist Democrats can tell you which one they mean.
They can’t. The word is doing the work.
The Third Way data, as the piece reports, is real. Those three New York districts are, on average, 36 points more Democratic than the country. The GOP-held seats House Democrats need to flip favor Republicans by about 8. The electability question is not a fiction. I concede the true half: a party that cannot win the seats it needs to govern cannot govern, and a candidate who cannot survive a general election has not actually won. And, while we’re conceding: moderation has not produced a landslide. It produced last cycle’s defeat. The Republican base is already mobilized by economic anxiety and cultural grievance, and the strategy of running scared to a middle that no longer exists has stopped paying its own way.
But — and this is where the panic starts doing more work than the analysis — the “capitalism” the pledge defends is not the capitalism small-business owners think they’re defending. It is not the corner store, the family farm, the credit union. It is the rentier. The extractor. The financialized fund that buys a company with borrowed money, loads the debt onto the company, pockets the fees, and leaves the workers holding the bag. That is the capitalism the pledge defends, and the pledge will not name it, because if it did, the small-business owners the word is meant to reassure would notice that they have not been on that side of the deal in forty years.
Here is the tell. The candidates the WSJ piece is panicking about are not running on a gulag platform. “Tax the rich” is not the abolition of private property. It is the system that every other rich country runs, the one that comes with universal healthcare and a year of paid parental leave and a five-to-one pay ratio. The Danes call it Tuesday. The piece is calling it socialism. The gap between those two sentences is the entire argument.
So: what gets built? The same thing the pledge is implicitly afraid of, the working alternative, the one that has been built in red states and blue states and everywhere in between for a century.
You have a credit-union card in your wallet. You are a member-owner of a cooperative. You are not, and never have been, in danger of being summoned to a Politburo meeting. The rural electric co-op that wired the American countryside is a member-owned utility, and Franklin Roosevelt was not, somehow, drummed out of polite company for it. The Bank of North Dakota has been profitable every year since 1919, and Bismarck has not once been mistaken for Moscow. Alaska has been mailing every man, woman, and child an oil-dividend check for more than forty years out of a sovereign wealth fund, and the reddest state in the union has voted for it twice.
The “socialism” the centrists are promising to outflank is not a Venezuelan command economy. It is the existing American social-democratic infrastructure that they have been calling something else for so long they have forgotten it is there: Social Security, Medicare, the VA, the public library, the volunteer fire department, the rural electric co-op, the credit union, the public school, the public university, the GI Bill. The argument over “capitalism versus socialism” is, in the mouth of any American voter, the argument over how much of the existing American system to keep.
The pledge will not name the capitalism. The candidates will not be running on the gulag. The voters in those three New York districts, in the seats Democrats need to flip, in every district where the question is being asked, will keep being told that the choice is between two abstractions neither side will name. They deserve the named thing. They deserve the credit union in their wallet, the co-op down the road, the public bank that does not exist yet in their state but could. They deserve to be told that the alternative to “tax the rich” is not communism but the country they already live in, the one that works, the one with the floor under it. That is not a slogan; that is the eight-point seat. That is the ballot the centrist pledge is too afraid to walk door-to-door on.
The earlier MSI dispatch on the New York primary sweep lays out who won and where; what I want to leave you with is what “capitalism” and “socialism” are being asked to do in this argument, which is to stand in for things neither side will name.
Anyway.