The real American theft isn’t socialism. It’s the corporate extraction that empties your pension, sells the building out from under your nursing home, and writes the eviction notice on your apartment. Arthur Herman, in his latest column for Fox News, wants you to believe the choice we face is between the Founding Fathers and the Gulag. Mamdani is not Stalin, and the country is being asked to confuse him with Stalin anyway. Herman’s column argues that the recent wave of Democratic Socialists of America primary wins — the “Commie Corridor,” the “warmth of collectivism,” the whole catalogue of warnings — is the leading edge of an American communist takeover, and it cites a hundred million dead from twentieth-century communist regimes to make the ask. It is built to scare the country out of building the institutions every other rich democracy has already built.
Let’s get the disclaimer out of the way first, because I’m tired of people waiting for me to dodge it. Communism, as it was actually built in the twentieth century, was a catastrophe. The Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge — the regimes that called themselves Marxist and seized the means of production in the name of the working class — killed tens of millions of their own people by abolishing the very civil society that would have let the workers fight back. The verdict is in, and I’m not here to soften it or relitigate it. I have no patience for the campus tankie who thinks the gulag was a misunderstanding.
But Herman’s column depends on treating that catastrophe as the only alternative to unfettered shareholder capitalism. It performs a category swap: Mamdani’s “warmth of collectivism,” a slogan that could come from a Mondragon co-op president or a Norwegian oil fund manager, is run as a synonym for Stalin’s grain requisitions and Mao’s Great Leap Forward, and the entire 250th-anniversary warning is built on that substitution. Strip it out and the column collapses. The body count does the work of forbidding the country a policy that has nothing to do with the body count. That’s the rhetorical trick, and it is the oldest one in American politics.
Mamdani’s actual platform, in the event anyone is interested, is the kind of program that exists in some form in every other rich democracy on earth. Public buses. Rent stabilization for the rent-stabilized. A city-owned grocery pilot. Free school meals. A public option that lets people buy into a nonprofit health plan. None of those are Soviet. None of them are Venezuelan. The countries that have them are the countries whose citizens can take a year of paid parental leave, can send a kid to college without selling a kidney, can lose a job without losing their house, and can — this is the part that apparently needs spelling out — vote the whole thing out in a free election if they don’t like it. Denmark has been doing most of this since the 1930s. Norway owns a sovereign wealth fund larger than the GDP of Mexico. Sweden has run universal healthcare for seventy years and has voted in governments that wanted to scale it back and governments that wanted to scale it up, and it has done this without a single Politburo meeting. Conflating those countries with the Soviet Union is the kind of move that requires either never having been to any of them, or having been and deciding to lie about it.
The Abraham Lincoln quote Herman pulls — “You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it” — is a perfect description of a private-equity firm buying a nursing home with borrowed money, extracting the fees, selling the real estate out from under it, and leaving the town with the bill. It’s a perfect description of a landlord collecting half your income for a moldy apartment simply because the city built a subway station nearby. It’s a perfect description of a buyback that sends a firm’s profits to inflated executive shares instead of to the wages of the people who built the product. The cost of that bread is already being eaten. Herman just refuses to ask who is eating it.
Here is the part his column is not going to tell you, because telling you would dissolve the binary the column needs. The United States already runs a large chunk of the institutions the rest of the rich world calls social democracy. Social Security is a universal pension. Medicare is single-payer healthcare for every American over sixty-five. The Veterans Health Administration is fully socialized medicine — government hospitals, salaried government doctors, the whole apparatus — and it is wildly popular with the people who use it. The public library is the most quietly radical institution in the country, and the column’s author surely has a card. The Bank of North Dakota has been a state-owned, consistently profitable bank since 1919, and it sits in the reddest state in the union. Alaska mails every resident an oil-dividend check every fall, and Alaska is not a communist jurisdiction. The “collectives” actually running in America right now aren’t sending anyone to the camps. They’re running the rural electric cooperatives that wired 42 million Americans when investor-owned utilities wouldn’t. They’re running the credit unions that hold the checking accounts of 145 million Americans. They’re running the worker-owned cooperatives in the Basque Country and the Bronx that pay a living wage and don’t vanish in a puff of dividend recaps. None of these are Soviet. They are American, and they have been here the entire time, and Herman’s argument is structurally incapable of accounting for them, because accounting for them would mean admitting that the scare word does not describe the country it is trying to scare.
Herman’s Founders are very particular about which of the country’s existing public institutions count as American, and which ones become Soviet the moment someone proposes building more of them. The line is drawn at the existing floor; the column is for keeping the floor exactly where it is and calling anything beyond it a gulag. That is the actual project underneath the Founders routine: a country in which the public library stays but no public childcare is added; in which Medicare stays for the sixty-five-and-over but a public option is forbidden; in which Social Security sends its check but a child allowance for the under-six is, by definition, communism.
We already know what this kind of expansion would look like, because we ran a controlled experiment on it. The expanded Child Tax Credit of 2021 — a near-universal monthly cash benefit to families with children — cut child poverty in the United States by almost half in a single year, by the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure. It did not trigger the inflation spiral its opponents predicted. It did not produce the labor-supply collapse that gets invoked whenever a benefit is proposed. It just stopped children from being poor, and we let it lapse. The policy lapsed in 2022. Child poverty went back up. The change was measured, reversible, and American. Herman’s column does not mention it, because mentioning it would be the proof of concept for the very thing the column is calling communism.
I’m told by older historians like Mr. Herman that I’m too young and naive to understand why these functioning alternatives can’t possibly work here. Walk me through it slowly. Start with why we can subsidize the military-industrial complex the column celebrates, and then explain why we can’t subsidize a childcare system that is mathematically impossible to run as a pure, unsubsidized private market. Do it without the phrase “American exceptionalism,” since the exceptional part, in this telling, is the bankruptcy.
So what do we build instead? The version of the country that already exists in pieces, and that Herman’s binary is built to keep us from assembling. Public banking, the way North Dakota has been doing it since 1919: the state owns the bank, the bank lends to farmers and small businesses at cost instead of at the rate a private bank can charge, and the profit comes back to the state treasury instead of to outside shareholders. Sectoral bargaining — wages and conditions set across whole industries at once — the way Germany and Denmark do it, so a single non-union firm in Tennessee cannot undercut the wage floor a unionized firm in Detroit is paying. The expanded Child Tax Credit, made permanent, so we stop the experiment we already ran on ourselves and decided to forget. Paid family leave, the way every other rich country has it, and the way the federal government already gives it to its own employees. A public option, so the people who can afford to leave the for-profit insurance system can, and the people who cannot, eventually, can. Worker cooperatives — there are roughly a thousand of them in the United States already — on the Mondragon model: the workers elect the board, the surplus is split among the workers instead of being returned to outside shareholders, and the gains stay in the town. A community land trust, so the house is a place a family lives and not an asset class somebody trades on a screen: the trust owns the dirt, the family owns the house they build on it, and when the family sells, the resale price is restricted to keep the home affordable for the next buyer, which means the house never enters the speculative market. None of this is the Soviet Union. All of it is the country we already are, with the floor extended where it should have been extended decades ago. The menu has more than two items. It’s not the Gulag, and it’s not the strip-mine. The real question isn’t whether we should be a command economy or a free market. It’s who owns the thing, and who pockets the gains.
It is harder to build here than in Denmark, because we have spent fifty years dismantling the union density and the state capacity and the social trust that make the Nordic model work, and that is the conversation Herman’s column will not have, because the conversation it is having is more profitable. The body count it cites is real. The lie it tells with that body count is that the country and the century in front of us have to be the country and the century behind it. They do not. The Danes, the Norwegians, the Mondragon worker-owners, the 145 million Americans who belong to a credit union, the families whose poverty fell by half in 2021 and rose again when the policy lapsed — they are all already living in the alternative. The alternative is not the Soviet Union. The alternative is what your country looks like when you stop being afraid of it. Anyway.