Stop Worrying About the Word. The Working-Class Agenda Is the Point.

The word “socialism” is the wrong fight. The agenda is the right one. This week a 29-year-old first-time candidate named Melat Kiros ousted Representative Diana DeGette — a congresswoman who had held the Denver seat since 1997, the year Kiros was born — and two Democratic Socialists of America-backed candidates did the same in New York. None of them won by leaning into the label. They won running on working-class economic populism, refusing corporate PAC money, and campaigning on the things most Americans tell pollsters they want. The word, fine, is expensive. The agenda polls with the bipartisan majorities its parts earn individually.

The centrist worry is real, and I’ll grant it before I dismantle it. Matt Bennett of the centrist think tank Third Way is correct that the label makes it harder for Democrats to distinguish themselves from a “socialism” caricature the other side has been running since 1917. He is correct that Republicans will paint any Democrat as a socialist in close races — the President reached for “communists” this week to describe candidates who campaigned on cheaper childcare, which tells you exactly how high the word-war is going to go. He is correct that the historical record on the word is, to put it gently, catastrophic — communist regimes built in its name in the twentieth century killed tens of millions of people and crushed the workers they claimed to liberate, and I am not interested in relitigating that verdict. So: yes, the word is a real political problem. The question is whether it’s the right political problem to spend the next four months solving.

It isn’t. The proof is in what the candidates actually ran on. NPR’s Elena Moore reported on the primary wins, and the story underneath the headline is that “socialism” was the word the cable anchors reached for, but “working-class” was the word the candidates ran on. In New York, Claire Valdez — one of two DSA-backed congressional winners — told Moore the quiet part out loud: there’s “broad consensus around the need to recenter working-class Americans in our politics and really fight to make sure that the Democratic Party is leading on these issues.” That is not a socialist manifesto. That is a sentence a country-club Republican could sign, and most of them would lose half their donors in the process. In Denver, Kiros won the same way Moore describes the others: anti-establishment, in the literal sense — refusing the money that comes with establishment allegiance, which means refusing the specific donor pressure that comes with the corporate PAC and the pro-Israel lobby. Economic populism, which is Moore’s careful phrase for the cluster of policies working-class voters in both parties say they want. Cheaper childcare. Cheaper healthcare. A tax code that doesn’t loot the bottom to feed the top. An economy that fixes the boiler instead of pumping the stock price. The voters voted on the agenda. The agenda is the point.

Which is, by the way, why DeGette lost. Not because Denver turned communist overnight. Not because a 29-year incumbent was outflanked on the left by a 29-year-old. She lost because at some point in those 29 years, “progressive” stopped meaning “the people who actually sent me here” and started meaning “the donors who keep me here.” Her constituents didn’t defect to socialism. They defected from a congresswoman who had stopped fighting for the working-class people she claimed to represent, and they defected to someone who promised to.

We have already run the experiment, for anyone keeping score. In 2021, the expanded Child Tax Credit — a near-universal monthly cash benefit for families with children — cut child poverty by 46 percent in a single year, lifting 2.9 million children out of it by the Census Bureau’s own Supplemental Poverty Measure. Then we let the expansion lapse at the end of that year, and child poverty snapped right back up. The same policy, on and off, with the same kids, in the same country, in successive years. We already know what the working-class agenda does when you actually try it. It works. The 2021 number is the receipt.

We have other receipts, if anyone wants them. North Dakota has run a state-owned bank profitably since 1919, and nobody has ever called Bismarck the Kremlin. Alaska has mailed every man, woman, and child in the state an annual check from public oil revenue since 1982, and the state is, to put it mildly, not a workers’ paradise. Rural electric cooperatives — member-owned, one member one vote, the boring little idea that wired the country when the investor-owned utilities said it wasn’t profitable — serve 42 million Americans across 56 percent of the landmass of the United States, including some of the reddest counties in the country. Credit unions, owned by their depositors, count around 145 million members. The agenda isn’t theoretical. The agenda is sitting in your wallet.

So the question for the Democratic Party isn’t whether to win the argument over the word. The argument over the word is lost before it begins — Republicans get to define the dictionary in close elections, and pretending otherwise is a waste of time. The question is whether to spend the next four months defending against the word, or whether to spend them running on the agenda. The agenda is what just won in Denver and New York. The agenda is what we already proved works in 2021. The agenda is what every other rich country in the world has already built, with various levels of messiness, and what we keep refusing to build because we keep losing the argument over a word the rest of the world uses to mean something much less frightening.

The “socialism” scare is the catechism of the comfortable. It is the comfortable’s way of not having to defend the actual current arrangement — the one in which a sick kid can still bankrupt a family, in which a layoff can still cost you your house, in which a private-equity firm can still buy your hospital and leave town with the silverware. The catechism works because the people who deploy it never have to specify what they’re for. They’re just against the word. They’re just warning you about the word. They’re just very, very concerned about the word, while the strip-mine behind them gets a little bigger every year.

The Child Tax Credit is the working example. We built it. It cut child poverty nearly in half. We let it lapse. That is the answer to every question about whether the working-class agenda is real, whether it works, and what the obstacle to passing it actually is. The word is not the obstacle. The donor pressure that kept the lapse in place is. Federalism, weak union density, a Democratic Party institutionally allergic to passing the same thing twice — those are the harder-here obstacles, and the candidates who win in November will be the ones who name them. The comfortable would rather you kept worrying about the word. The word can wait. The agenda cannot.