The “silent majority” isn’t staying silent because they are afraid of the word socialist; they are staying silent because they are working two jobs and the math still does not work. In LIZ PEEK: July Fourth exposed Democrats’ big problem with America’s silent majority, Liz Peek argues that the patriots who love the Constitution are terrified by the “socialist” turn of the Democratic Party, citing a Cato poll that shows Americans are “grateful” and “proud.” She concludes that the rise of “democratic socialism”—personified here by Mayor Zohran Mamdani—is a rejection of American exceptionalism, and insists that the unregulated market is the only thing standing between the republic and ruin. Socialism as it was actually built in the twentieth century killed tens of millions and crushed the workers it claimed to free. That’s settled, and I’m not here to relitigate it. Now we can talk about what Peek’s column is actually asking the silent majority to defend.
I’ll concede the branding problem. The left’s obsession with vocabulary—praxis, hegemony, solidarity—is a terrible way to sell a kitchen-table policy, and I have spent years trying to explain to my relatives that we are not going to nationalize their lawnmower. And if the Mayor is painting every zoning variance as an “authoritarian” plot, he is being sloppy. The left can be long on theory and short on the plumbing; I do not defend the slogans. But Peek’s explanation for why the silent majority is hurting is where the wheels come off. She claims the cost of living is driven by “burdensome regulations” and “pro-union labor policies.” Name the regulation, the union rule, and the tax that put groceries out of reach, because I do not see it at the grocery store.
The family in that poll who is “grateful” but also “stressed” isn’t stressed because the bus fare was zero. They are stressed because their “free market” health insurer denied the claim for the MRI. They are stressed because the “freedom” of their landlord to set the rent collided with the freedom of their paycheck to cover it, and the paycheck lost. They are stressed because the price of insulin is roughly four times what it is in Western Europe, not because the government set the price, but because the market allowed a monopoly to extract it.
Peek calls Mamdani’s list of grievances—“monopolies that dominate every industry,” “oligarchs who buy elections,” a “health insurance industry that exploits the sick”—“false and cliché-ridden.” Let me take them one at a time, because the receipts are embarrassingly easy to produce.
Market concentration. The four largest companies in most American sectors now control more of their market than at any point since the Gilded Age. The Federal Trade Commission has been writing reports about it for a decade. This is not a slogan. It is a structural fact that an op-ed columnist can dismiss only by not engaging with the data.
Health insurance. The United States spends roughly twice per capita what the average rich democracy spends on healthcare, and our life expectancy is lower, our maternal mortality is higher, and our medical bankruptcy rate is not a thing that exists in any peer country. If you want to call the health insurance industry “exploitative,” you can do it with a straight face because the data backs you up. The CEO-to-worker pay ratio in the industry is around three hundred to one. The industry spends enormous sums on the machinery of denial—adjusters, prior authorization systems, appeal processes—and loses more than half of those fights when patients and providers actually appeal. These are not clichés. They are the reason more than half a million American families declare medical bankruptcy every year, and the reason Mamdani got applause on the Fourth of July.
Oligarchs. The Forbes 400 now own more than the bottom sixty percent of Americans combined. Election spending has roughly doubled since Citizens United. Both are documented to the digit. You can call it a cliché if you want. The people paying the bills call it a business model.
Peek’s alternative explanation: high prices in Democratic-run cities are the fault of “burdensome regulations, pro-union labor policies and high taxes.” Fine. Then explain why the most expensive hospital in the country is in a red state, why the most expensive housing markets include red states, and why the CEO of the biggest private equity firm in America—which has bought up more housing in the last five years than any single landlord in history—sits comfortably in a Republican administration. The “regulation” story explains a slice. The extraction story explains the rest.
Then the inflation argument, which is the column’s most ambitious move. Biden’s spending was high; the inflation was real; the timing was bad. Conceded. What Peek leaves out: the inflation was also driven by a once-in-a-generation supply chain shock, a war in Ukraine that doubled energy prices, and—this is the part the catechism of the comfortable prefers to skip—the largest corporate profit margins in forty years. Corporations raised prices faster than their costs rose and called it “inflation.” The Federal Reserve’s own research confirmed it. A column that blames government spending for every price increase has to pretend the profit-margin story doesn’t exist, and Peek’s column pretends exactly that hard.
Then the load-bearing line: “socialism always fails because it denies the driving human force of self-interest and the wisdom and adaptability of free markets.” This is the part where I usually find this genre funny, the way a weather vane is funny. Self-interest is a motive. It is not a governing philosophy. It is the reason the guy who owns the toll bridge charges you to cross it, and it is the reason the guy who owns the hospital charges you to be born, and it is the reason your landlord raised the rent. Markets are wonderful at allocating sandwiches and catastrophic at allocating chemotherapy. The skill—and it is a skill—is telling them apart, which is the entire point Mamdani was making and which Peek has decided not to engage with.
The “socialism” Peek fears is just the word she uses for competence—for the boring, basic idea that the market should serve the household, not the other way around. Tell that to the home health aide who needs a GoFundMe because the market decided her labor wasn’t worth a living wage. Tell that to the family that is “self-interested” enough to want their kid’s asthma inhaler to cost less than their car payment. That is not a system that rewards self-interest; that is a system that punishes the people doing the actual work.
The trick—and it is a trick, and it is the same trick every column in this genre runs—is that the word “socialism” is asked to do all the work. Universal childcare? Socialism. Subsidized groceries? Socialism. Free buses? Socialism. Never mind that every other rich country does all three. Never mind that the “silent majority” Peek is worried about already belongs to a long list of institutions that do exactly this, and that they love all of them. Social Security, the most popular government program in the country: socialism by Peek’s definition. Medicare, the single-payer system that covers every American over 65 with no one trying to abolish it: socialism. The rural electric cooperative that wired the countryside when the private utilities wouldn’t: socialism. The credit union in your wallet, of which you are a member-owner: socialism. The Bank of North Dakota, profitable, state-owned, running since 1919, and never once accused of hosting a Politburo meeting: socialism. The Alaska Permanent Fund, which mails every Alaskan a check from the state’s oil revenue every year, and which is in the reddest state in the union: socialism. The silent majority already does this. They have simply agreed, for reasons that would not survive five minutes of cross-examination, to call it something else.
So here is what I would build on the ground where Peek’s “socialism” scare used to stand. Not gulags. Not Soviet five-year plans. The boring, working, popular things that the Cato-poll silent majority is already using and already defending.
A child allowance, like the expanded Child Tax Credit we ran in 2021, which cut child poverty by 46 percent in a single year and then bounced back up the moment the program lapsed. Not a slogan. A controlled experiment we ran on ourselves, with the receipts.
A public option for healthcare, so the people who like their insurance can keep it and the people who don’t can buy into something non-extractive, and the market can decide.
Sectoral wage boards for the sectors—fast food, home care, child care—where one employer sets the wage for the whole region and workers have nowhere else to go. The arithmetic on why this is necessary is the same arithmetic that has been making Peek’s “silent majority” choose between rent and groceries for a decade.
A sovereign wealth fund on the Alaska model for any state that finds a resource under its land. The reddest state in the union has been mailing its citizens a check from the oil fund every year since 1982, and the pitchforks have not yet arrived.
Postal banking, so the sixty-odd million Americans who are unbanked or underbanked—meaning they have no checking account, or they have one and still have to use payday lenders and check cashers to make ends meet—can cash a check without paying a fee to a check casher.
None of this is the gulag. All of it is already running somewhere in this country, often in the reddest states in the union, and none of it requires a single American to give up the parts of the market that work. It requires giving up the parts that don’t—the parts Mamdani was naming on the Fourth of July, and the parts Peek’s column, in the oldest trick in the genre, has decided to call a cliché.
The silent majority is being asked to choose between defending a system that hasn’t been working for them and admitting the parts that aren’t. The first option is what “socialism” is for. The second is what it looks like to notice that the credit union in your wallet and the bank account that funds your Medicare are already the same thing, and that “socialism” was always a word for the boogeyman under the bed rather than a description of the house.
The “American Dream” in Peek’s poll isn’t a yacht. It is “opportunity.” You cannot have opportunity if you are one emergency from bankruptcy. The build is simple: stop treating survival as a luxury good, and start treating it as the infrastructure it is. The silent majority doesn’t want the government to run their lives; they want the government to stop letting the monopoly run them into the ground.
Anyway. The monopoly on the next corner is waiting.