Housing extraction, not socialism, is the actual radicalism. A recent Fox News opinion piece, Broadcast networks tout Mamdani’s victories, proclaim socialism is ‘resonating’, works itself into a state over broadcast networks calling a list of democratic-socialist policy proposals “resonating” — and then prints the list itself: “stronger tenant protections, more publicly built housing, higher taxes on top earners, expanded childcare, expanded public transportation.” Read that list again, slowly. That list is not an earthquake. That list is a Wednesday in Copenhagen. The piece is upset that the networks didn’t reach for the scary word first. The piece, in other words, did your arguing for you.
The broadcast journalists quoted here do have a problem, but it isn’t what the author thinks. The networks’ flaw isn’t that they’re normalizing socialism. It’s that they’re treating basic infrastructure like a revolution. When a CBS host lists expanded childcare and public transportation and acts like he has discovered a new planet that is “resonating” with voters, he is accidentally agreeing with the right’s premise that these things are exotic. They aren’t exotic. They are the baseline.
To prove the menu is tainted, the piece relies on guest Reihan Salam telling CBS host Gayle King, “These are folks who believe in the abolition of borders. They believe in prison abolition.” It is a deliberate pivot, designed to make you forget that a candidate running on fixing the subway is not actually plotting to dismantle the penitentiary.
Some of these candidates actually are radical. Prison abolition isn’t the same thing as expanded childcare, and a journalist who waves at them as if they were the same thing is doing the reader a disservice. Low-turnout primaries — the piece itself notes turnout was quite low — do not by themselves constitute an “earthquake.” A 12% primary electorate that breaks 60-40 for a candidate is a data point, not a mandate. Concede that.
The word “socialism” is doing all the heavy lifting. Strip it out and the policies are the kind of menu that has governed Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Germany for the better part of a century. Higher taxes on top earners. Publicly built housing. Childcare. Public transportation. The United States is the rich-world outlier that doesn’t have any of this. We are not the country that has tried the alternative and rejected it. We are the country that has never tried it.
The piece wants you to be more afraid of the word than of the math. I am suggesting you look at the math. Productivity in the United States has roughly doubled since the 1970s. The typical paycheck has barely moved. Housing costs have more than doubled, and in many places by far more than that. Childcare now costs about as much as public college in most states, and often more. A hospital bill is the single most reliable path to bankruptcy an American family has. The expanded Child Tax Credit of 2021 — a near-universal monthly cash benefit to families with children — cut child poverty by 46 percent in a single year. It lapsed. Child poverty snapped back. That is a controlled experiment, run on us, and the result is the answer to why the word “socialism” is doing what it is doing.
A worker who hasn’t gotten a real raise in twenty years, who is paying triple the rent their parents paid, who can’t find a daycare slot for under $1,500 a month, and who went into medical debt for a sprained wrist — that worker is not a “radical” for noticing. That worker is paying attention. The broadcast networks calling democratic socialism “resonating” is not the story. The story is the condition that lets the word resonate. The networks are the seismograph, not the earthquake.
Now look at who actually pays when these things don’t exist. Tenant protections aren’t a Marxist plot. They are the necessary brake on an extraction model where a private equity firm buys an apartment building with borrowed money, loads the debt onto the building’s own ledger, and raises the rent by massive margins just to service the loan. The “protection” is just the community saying that a hedge fund’s debt schedule shouldn’t dictate who gets to sleep in a bed. The decay isn’t the cap; it’s the leverage.
Universal childcare isn’t a radical demand, either. Quality care requires a high ratio of skilled adults to children, and state licensing rules mandate those exact ratios. The math simply does not work without subsidy. In an unsubsidized market, the cost is dumped on the worker’s wage and the parent’s budget. Subsidizing it isn’t a revolution. It’s just doing the math.
So what do we build on the ground where this panic stands? We stop pretending the menu only has two items — the gulag and a landlord who can evict you because a distant shareholder demanded a better quarter. We already know how to do this without abandoning the market or the republic. We run a fully socialized healthcare system for veterans through the VA, and nobody calls it a communist plot. We have a state-owned bank, profitable, in North Dakota since 1919. We mail every Alaskan a check every year from a sovereign wealth fund built on oil revenue. We have 42 million people belonging to rural electric cooperatives that wired the countryside when the private utilities wouldn’t. We have more than 140 million Americans belonging to credit unions. We have Social Security and Medicare, the two most popular government programs in the country — also the two programs that would be denounced as socialism if anyone proposed them tomorrow. We have public libraries, which are quietly the most radical institutions in the country, and we take them for granted. We already have the floor; we just keep pretending we don’t.
The “socialism” frame works because it lets the country argue about the word instead of the bill. Higher taxes on top earners is not a debate about Soviet five-year plans. Publicly built housing is not a debate about the gulag. Childcare is not a debate about Stalin. Those are debates about line items in a budget, and other rich countries have been having them competently for a hundred years. The piece would rather you did not notice that. So would a lot of pieces. The math does not care what they would rather you noticed.
So build the next floor. Universal childcare. Publicly built housing on federal land. Higher taxes on top earners, the way every other rich country has had for a hundred years. The menu is sitting on the shelf. The country just has to pick it up.
Anyway.