Rich Lowry is genuinely distressed that the ghost of Karl Marx might be polling well in Queens. In National Review, he argues in What Marx and Engels Thought About Socialism in the United States that American culture — individualism, anti-statism, sheer bourgeois comfort — has always immunized the country against socialism, and that today’s democratic socialists are swimming against the national grain. He wants you to believe Zohran Mamdani is a foreign infection breaking through the cultural immune system. He’s half right, in a way that doesn’t flatter him. The allergy is real, and it has shaped a century of election outcomes. He’s wrong — and this is the part that matters — about what produced the prosperity the allergy was supposed to explain, and about who is destroying it now.
Let’s start with the famous mobility. Marx, as Lowry quotes him, remarked that “the wage-worker of today is tomorrow an independent peasant, or artisan, working for himself.” The implication: the American worker became a small-holder because he was a small-holder at heart, a bourgeois in a smock. The actual mechanism is a federal program called the Homestead Act.
In 1862, the United States government started giving away 160-acre plots of land — for free — to any adult citizen who would farm it for five years. By the time the program was closed to new claims in 1976, the federal government had disposed of roughly 270 million acres through Homestead and related land-grant statutes. Add the Pacific Railway land grants (about 174 million acres of checkerboard sections handed to the railroads to build the transcontinental lines), the Morrill Land-Grant Acts, and the Dawes Act of 1887, which broke up tribal holdings and transferred another hundred million acres of indigenous land into white hands, and you arrive at something like half a billion acres of productive property redistributed by federal statute over the course of the nineteenth century. Half a billion acres. Roughly a sixth of the land area of the United States, transferred from one set of owners to another by act of Congress, often at gunpoint, almost always to white settlers. The “self-made” man on the prairie in 1870 was the recipient of a federal program, and the program was explicit about who it was for. The 1862 Homestead Act applied to “citizens,” but the 1790 Naturalization Act limited citizenship to “free white persons,” and that limit held into the 1940s. The Dawes Act did the same thing in the other direction, breaking up tribal holdings so the land could be sold to white buyers. Marx looked at this arrangement and saw a “born conservative.” He saw a man with property, no feudal lord above him, and concluded that America was simply exceptional. He didn’t see the largest transfer of productive property in modern history. He didn’t see that the property had a racial filter written into the law. He didn’t see that the “self-made” American was, very often, the state-made American, made so by an act of Congress.
That was the first installment. The second was the New Deal, and this is the part Lowry’s argument can’t survive.
The broadly shared prosperity that defined postwar America — the high-wage, single-earner, defined-benefit, homeowner, college-educated middle class that Lowry’s tradition now holds up as proof of “Americanism” — was not produced by American character. It was produced by a specific, datable, named set of policy choices. Social Security in 1935, with agricultural and domestic workers excluded — a carve-out that covered most Black workers in the South. The Wagner Act in 1935, and the explosion of union density that followed — except the new industrial unions were lily-white in the North and the South alike, and the unions that did admit Black members were routinely denied contracts by segregated building trades. The GI Bill in 1944, which sent eight million veterans to college and gave them cheap mortgages — but Black veterans in many states were turned away at the local VA counter, steered to Black colleges that received a fraction of per-student funding, and locked out of the FHA’s mortgage programs. Federal housing subsidies that built the suburbs — and the FHA’s redlining maps that drew a black line around Black neighborhoods, marking them ineligible for the loans that built white wealth. The top marginal income tax rate of 94% in 1944 and 91% through the 1950s. A financial system tightly regulated enough that bankers went to prison. A labor market so tight that employers competed for workers with health insurance and pensions. These are social-democratic interventions. They are the same interventions, in most cases with the same names, that the European social democrats built after 1945, and that Marx and Engels wanted to see. They are what produced the American middle class — the era Lowry is implicitly mourning when he laments that “Americanism” is being displaced by socialism. The fact that this state, like every state, distributed its largesse through a racial filter does not make it less a state. It makes it more obviously a state — a state that had to be fought, again and again, by Black Americans who knew perfectly well that the postwar boom was a state project because the state kept telling them no.
Lowry leans on Seymour Martin Lipset to argue that “Americanism” — our devotion to individualism and anti-statism — served as a “substitute for socialism.” He says this like it’s a compliment to American character. It’s actually an indictment of American memory. The things that made “Americanism” a viable substitute — the eight-hour day, the weekend, the minimum wage, Social Security, the right to organize — were not gifts from the “purely bourgeois organization” Lowry admires. They were the demands of the socialist and labor movements that the system adopted to prevent a revolution. The New Deal didn’t defeat socialism by proving it wrong; it defeated socialism by eating its lunch. FDR didn’t crush the Soviet dream; he made the American worker too busy enjoying the G.I. Bill to care about it. And the “fizzle” Lowry describes wasn’t just a cultural preference for rugged individualism. It was a century of state violence. We didn’t reject socialism because of a philosophical debate over Das Kapital; we rejected it because the Palmer Raids, the Red Scares, and Taft-Hartley made “socialist” a synonym for “traitor” and broke the back of the only organizations that might have built a labor party here. The “American grain” he talks about was plowed by the FBI.
Which leaves a question Lowry’s piece carefully avoids. If American exceptionalism built the broadly shared era, why is the broadly shared era gone? Why is a thirty-year-old in 2026 worse off than a thirty-year-old in 1976, in real terms — in housing, in wages relative to productivity, in the security of a job that comes with health insurance and a pension? The honest answer is in the columns next to Lowry’s. Every intervention on the list above has been weakened, defunded, or dismantled over the last fifty years, almost always by the same intellectual tradition he writes in. Union density is down to ten percent from a third at the postwar peak. The top marginal rate is 37%. The financial system is back to doing the things that crashed it in 2008. The housing subsidy is gone. The GI Bill is a fraction of what it was. Black-white wealth ratios have actually widened since 1968, because the rollback hit Black workers hardest and first. Lowry is mourning an era his own movement ended. He calls it American character so he doesn’t have to call it policy, because the policy is the part his side dismantled. That is the longest and quietest scam in American political life, and the National Review has been running it since 1955.
Now — the build, because I owe you one and because the alternative is not the gulag.
We have a country full of institutions that prove social democracy is already American. The Bank of North Dakota has been state-owned and operationally profitable in essentially every year of its existence since its founding in 1919, in the reddest state in the union. The Alaska Permanent Fund mails every Alaskan a check from public oil revenue. The 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit cut child poverty by forty-six percent in a single year — 2.9 million children lifted out of poverty — and when the expansion lapsed at the start of 2022, child poverty went right back up. That is the cleanest controlled experiment this country has ever run on what happens when you give families money. Rural electric co-ops wired the countryside when investor-owned utilities said it wasn’t profitable; forty-two million Americans still get their electricity from member-owned co-ops. Credit unions hold about a hundred and forty-five million Americans as members. The most popular programs in the country — Social Security, Medicare, the public library, the volunteer fire department — would be called socialism if anyone proposed them tomorrow. They weren’t proposed tomorrow. They’re already here, and the country loves them.
The “born bourgeois” American was a man on free land, given a union card and a mortgage and a pension by a government that took his side for thirty years — or, if he was Black, by a government that took his side some of the time and his money the rest of the time, until Black Americans forced the issue and got a bigger share than the government was ever going to volunteer. Take any one of those away and you get the next forty, which is what we got. Lowry looks at 2026 and sees the ghosts returning. He cites a candidate named Darializa Avila Chevalier who made “favorable references to communism” on a Twitter account she deleted, and somehow connects this to Zohran Mamdani, a state assemblyman running on rent control and free buses. This is the standard scare tactic: find a teenager with a swelled head, pretend she’s the vanguard, and then tell the reader that the reasonable social democrat is just the thin end of the wedge. Mamdani isn’t plotting a gulag; he’s plotting a freeze on the rent for a guy working two gigs. The “movement” making a bid in 2028 isn’t Bolshevik; it’s just the people who remember that the “Americanism” Lowry loves used to mean a union job and a pension, not a subscription to a healthcare plan that denies your claim because you breathed wrong.
The tragedy of Lowry’s piece is that he thinks “Americanism” is a fixed star, not a fragile bargain. Marx was right that mobility kept the revolution at bay. But that mobility was policy, delivered by statute, and the policy has been rolled back. Comfort isn’t a character trait; it’s a price point. The right question isn’t whether Americans are culturally exceptional. The right question is which set of policies we want to put back, and which set of people we want to put them back for. Marx didn’t have to wait for the European welfare state. He just had to wait for someone to read the receipts on the American one.