Your grocery bill isn’t rising because of a Democratic Socialists of America flier. It’s rising because four companies — Walmart, Kroger, Costco, and Albertsons — capture roughly two-thirds of every grocery dollar spent in this country, and they set the price the farmer receives, the price the consumer pays, and the wage the meatpacker takes home. That isn’t a free market. That’s a rigged one.
In “A DSA America? Not Okay”, James Lileks warns that the DSA’s platform — nationalizing successful industries, taxing wealth, expanding public ownership — will empty the shelves and bring the shortages that socialist revolutions always deliver. He wraps it in jokes about quicklime pits and soup tweets, but the claim is serious: every leftward step ends in state-mandated gruel. His method is sneering standing in for thinking: eight hundred words of mockery deployed to dismiss every idea on the left without naming a single one.
I’ll grant Lileks this. Some DSA members post absolute nonsense online — the soup tweet is a young person mistaking a throwaway line for serious analysis. Candidates and their supporters flirt with language borrowed from regimes that actually did produce gulags, and wave away the historical record of every state that tried to seize the commanding heights. That kind of talk frightens normal voters for good reason.
But communism as it was actually built in the twentieth century killed tens of millions of people and crushed the workers it claimed to liberate. I’m not relitigating that verdict. And the DSA’s actual platform is not the cartoon Lileks is drawing. Medicare for All is not nationalizing Campbell’s. A federal housing guarantee is not abolishing private property. Sectoral bargaining — where workers in an entire industry negotiate together — is how Germany runs its auto plants, and German cars are not gruel. Public ownership of utilities is what we already do with the Tennessee Valley Authority, and nobody calls Tennessee a gulag. Lileks never names an actual policy. He reads tweets, picks the dumbest version of his opponent’s view, defeats it, declares victory. It’s a tell. The tell says: I don’t actually want to argue the policy. I want to argue the caricature.
Now for the shelves Lileks is so confident capitalism will keep full. The American grocery sector is a four-company oligopoly. When four firms control that much of the supply, every price in the chain is theirs to set. The farmworkers and meatpackers who handle the food are paid so poorly that many of them qualify for the same public-assistance programs their employers’ lobbyists fight to keep underfunded. You are subsidizing the labor costs of a company that reports billions in profit so its workers can eat the food they packed. Shelf after shelf of soup you can afford, made by people who cannot. That’s the choice-rich system Lileks is defending.
And here is the part Lileks skips — the part that should embarrass him. There is a working alternative on the table right now — not Soviet, not Cuban, not a thought experiment — that the major democracies of northern Europe have been running for decades. We call it social democracy. It isn’t “the DSA.” It’s high-tax, open-market capitalism with a serious welfare floor: universal healthcare, paid parental leave, sector-wide bargaining, real unemployment insurance. The countries running it sit at the top of global competitiveness rankings. They didn’t nationalize their grocery stores. They didn’t collectivize Campbell’s. Denmark makes it easier to fire workers than Texas does. Denmark’s safety net is so generous it makes entrepreneurship more likely, not less, because failure doesn’t end on the street. Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global, capitalized from North Sea oil discovered in 1969, is now worth roughly two trillion dollars and holds about 1.5 percent of every publicly listed company on Earth. Texas has been producing oil since 1901 and built a century of booms, busts, and a bumper sticker. Different choices. Real consequences. Remind me what the obstacle is again.
And here is the part neither Lileks nor the DSA wants to talk about: why are young people drifting toward the DSA in the first place? Median rent in major metro areas is roughly a third of median income. Medical debt is the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in this country. Real wages have been flat for forty years while productivity has nearly doubled. The kids Lileks is sneering at did the math on what their lives cost and concluded that the current arrangement isn’t working for them. That conclusion is correct. The solution they’re reaching for is sometimes confused, and a few of them say dumb things on the internet. But the diagnosis is real, and Lileks doesn’t have a counter-diagnosis. He has sneers. Walk me through how a sneer pays the rent.
And here is the part that should make him think harder. We already do most of this. We just refuse to call it by its name. Social Security is universal social insurance and the most popular program in the country. Medicare is single-payer healthcare for everyone over 65, and nobody wants to abolish it. The VA is fully socialized medicine — government hospitals, salaried government doctors — for veterans. The Bank of North Dakota has been state-owned and profitable since 1919, in the reddest state in the union. Alaska mails every resident a check every year from oil revenue. About 42 million Americans get their electricity from rural cooperatives they own as members. About 140 million of us belong to credit unions. In 2021 we briefly expanded the Child Tax Credit into a near-universal child allowance, and child poverty fell 46 percent in a single year — then shot back up the moment the policy lapsed. We ran the controlled experiment on ourselves. We already know the answer.
The honest part — the part neither the DSA nor Lileks wants to admit — is that the Nordic model rests on institutional machinery we mostly lack. They have union coverage around 80 to 90 percent of the workforce; we have about eleven percent. They have organized employers willing to bargain sector by sector; we have half a century of employer resistance to that. They have a century of institution-building behind the welfare state. You cannot airlift the policy without the foundation. The DSA didn’t build those institutions, and electing more DSA members to office won’t build them either — the work is local, slow, and unglamorous. Lileks would rather sneer at soup tweets than address any of this, because addressing it would require him to defend the actual arrangement we have — and that arrangement, by his own side’s lights, is increasingly indefensible.
So what do you build, if you want to do something other than snipe at kids on the internet? You make the expanded Child Tax Credit permanent, because we proved it works. You pass the PRO Act and start the slow work of letting workers bargain sector by sector. You fund community land trusts — a nonprofit buys a piece of land, holds it forever, and leases the houses on it to families at locked-in below-market rates, so the land’s appreciation stays with the residents instead of getting extracted by the next flip — and housing stops being an asset class traded by people who will never sleep in it. You put a public option on every insurance market and let the extractors compete with it. You build stronger antitrust enforcement so the four-company stranglehold on the grocery aisle actually cracks. You build cooperative models so the people who shop and work in a store keep the money in town instead of shipping it to a hedge fund. You finance it with the broad taxes the Nordic countries actually pay — yes, including a 25 percent sales tax that everyone pays, including the working class — and you tell people honestly what’s happening. None of that is gulag. None of that is soup communism. None of it requires a politburo, a struggle session, or a quicklime pit. The economy is a set of choices, not the weather. We can let four conglomerates extract rent while the workers who feed us qualify for food stamps, or we can weld the trap doors shut. Either way, the menu has more than two items on it, and a flier at a train station gets to decide none of them.
That’s the actual project. James Lileks would rather not talk about it. Probably because it works.
Anyway.