I’ll grant her the scaffolding. The median first-time homebuyer is 40. Childcare costs more than rent in most states. Two in five Americans carry medical debt. Wages have been roughly flat for forty years while productivity kept climbing. The anger is earned, and a generation looking at an economy that promises them nothing and a political establishment that offers them nothing is going to look for structural change. That part is not in dispute.
Then Cooke does a very old trick. She names the symptom — young people want structural change — and blames a bogeyman instead of the cause. She cites Gallup polling showing 57 percent of Americans view socialism negatively, treating this as proof the DSA is a stealth threat. But the same polling universe shows young voters disapprove of the label while approving of the underlying policies when offered without the “s” word. The 57 percent isn’t a warning about socialism; it’s the exact reason the DSA hides state control behind the word “affordability.” Cooke’s own data confirms the diagnosis.
She lists what “socialism” supposedly means in this context: “public ownership, expanded welfare, defunding ICE, antisemitism, wealth redistribution and greater government control over housing.” Read that list slowly. Public ownership of what? Expanded welfare for whom? Government control of which housing? The author doesn’t say, because the answer would be inconvenient: the things her readers already use.
The labels let the column run 800 words about a political insurgency without ever having to ask why the insurgency exists, which would require asking why a duplex costs $1,800 a month in the city where the median worker makes $24 an hour, which would require asking who captured the difference, which would require asking the question the column is built to avoid.
Let me be plain about the part I always make plain: the twentieth century was a catastrophe for the actual communist project, and the gulag is not a negotiating chip. Russia, China, Cambodia, the works. The social democrats — the ones who kept the elections, the free press, the independent courts — produced the only model in human history that welded the trap doors shut without producing the camps. Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland. High taxes, universal healthcare, sectoral bargaining, the lot. Not the gulag. Plumbing. (And yes, building the institutional scaffolding — strong unions, organized employers, sectoral bargaining — is a generation of work, not a single election. We’ll get to that. The column won’t.)
But “socialism” is not the only word in the language, and the things the DSA is actually proposing — when you read their platform instead of the column about their platform — turn out to be pieces of plumbing America already runs. Medicare is a public option for everyone over 65, and the column’s author almost certainly loves it. The Bank of North Dakota has been profitable every year since 1919, and nobody has ever called Bismarck the Kremlin. The credit union in your wallet is a co-op. You’ve been a member-owner of one this whole time, and you have somehow never once been to a Politburo meeting.
The 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit was a near-controlled experiment. The Census Bureau, using the Supplemental Poverty Measure, found child poverty fell 46 percent in a single year — from 9.7 percent to 5.2 percent — lifting roughly 2.9 million children out of poverty. The moment Congress let it lapse, the poverty came back. We ran the test, the test worked, and then we stopped running it. That’s not a socialist conspiracy. That’s an American failure of nerve.
So what actually priced a generation out? Walk through it with me. Housing: the median home price has roughly doubled since 2012 after inflation, while wages haven’t. And it’s not just mom-and-pop landlords. Investors now buy roughly a quarter of homes in many metro areas. Take Invitation Homes, a subsidiary of Blackstone. It buys single-family houses in bulk in metro Phoenix or Atlanta, pays in cash, and rents them out. The family that gets priced out of buying becomes a permanent renter, paying a mortgage-sized check to an institutional landlord whose only job is to deliver a yield to Wall Street. The problem isn’t socialism. The problem is that housing became an asset class for people who will never sleep in it.
Childcare: the average family pays more for childcare than for rent in most states. That’s not socialism. That’s a market that can’t square the circle — you cannot make care cheap for parents, decent for workers, and profitable for owners all at once. Pick two. Every other rich country subsidized it. We watched it fail and called the fix socialism.
Healthcare: the country spends roughly twice what other rich countries spend per person, with worse outcomes on most measures, because a profit-taking middleman sits between a sick person and a doctor. Calling the public option “socialism” is the way you talk about a market failure without having to name the market that failed.
Cooke treats a five percent tax on billionaires as sinister extremism. Denmark’s top marginal rate is north of 55 percent. Sweden’s is over 50. Both have higher median incomes, lower poverty, and more competitive economies than the United States on most global rankings. The “extreme” policy is the one that works.
So what gets built on the empty lot the column is gesturing at? A child allowance that doesn’t lapse. A public option that lets people choose a non-extractive provider and lets the market decide if the extractors can compete. Sectoral wage boards in fast food, home care, agriculture — the low-pay industries where a handful of big employers set the wage and the worker has nowhere else to go. Public banking, where the state captures the float instead of Wells Fargo. Co-ops and worker-owned companies — there are more than 800 worker-owned firms in America right now, and the Basque Country’s Mondragon has employed 70,000 people in nearly 80 cooperatives for nearly 70 years, paying its top executive about five times what it pays its lowest-paid worker. ESOPs, with roughly 15 million American participants and Republican champions, that almost no one on the right or the left is talking about, possibly because they don’t fit anyone’s tribe. A private-sector union density above six percent, achieved by letting workers bargain sector by sector the way the rest of the rich world does.
Some of this is the menu. None of it is the gulag. And all of it answers the actual question the column is built to avoid, which is why a generation watching the rent climb faster than the paycheck keeps voting for the only people who will say the thing out loud.
The economy is a set of choices, not the weather. Somebody chose the arrangement that priced a generation out. Somebody could choose differently. The only people insisting it’s impossible are the ones who never had to live inside it.
Anyway.