The American Dream is not under threat from a union or a child allowance. It is under threat from an economy that has spent forty years transferring the gains of rising productivity away from the people who produce them. Rep. Tony Wied argues the opposite in Socialism’s Rise Inside the Democratic Party Now Threatens the American Dream on Fox News: that the real danger is democratic socialists winning primaries in New York, pushing for stronger unions and collective bargaining, and that these policies will “fundamentally and permanently change the American free enterprise system.” The alarm has been sounded. The question is whether the thing being sounded about is actually dangerous.
Let me concede the obvious point first. Some positions held by the Democratic Socialists of America are genuinely radical — abolishing the Senate, restructuring the Supreme Court. If those were what the op-ed were about, the alarm would be warranted. But that is not what the piece spends its paragraphs on. It spends them on union dues, collective bargaining, restrictions on independent contracting, and right-to-work laws. Those are the policies that get the column’s body; the radicalism is the garnish.
A union is a thousand people negotiating the price of their labor together instead of one at a time. A right-to-work law says the union must represent you even if you don’t pay a dime toward the cost of that representation — which means every non-member gets a free ride bought with members’ money. And an ESOP — employee stock ownership plan — is a cooperative by another name. There are roughly 6,500 of them in America right now, with fifteen million participants and Republican champions. If worker ownership is socialism, it arrived a long time ago and nobody noticed because they were too busy cashing their checks.
Germany puts workers on the corporate board. German industry did not, in fact, slide into the sea. Denmark lets employers fire people easily, which is the part American progressives always skip, and then makes sure losing your job doesn’t cost you your house, which is the part American conservatives always skip. Both economies are vigorously capitalist, with more private enterprise and more small-business formation in some measures than the United States. The difference is who owns the gains and whether a layoff ends on the street.
Here is the part the op-ed does not want you to notice. The American Dream — the version people actually remember, the postwar middle class, the single-income house, the kids who did better than their parents — was built during the period of peak union power. A third of American workers carried a union card in the 1950s. The top marginal tax rate was ninety-one percent. Stock buybacks were illegal. Nobody calls Eisenhower a socialist, but by the standards the op-ed is applying, he governed one. The bargain was: business got a flexible, educated workforce and the freedom to hire and fire; workers got the certainty that one layoff or one sick kid would not end in ruin. That bargain worked. What happened next was a forty-year project to dismantle it, piece by piece.
Since then, productivity has roughly doubled. The typical paycheck has barely moved. That gap did not evaporate. It went somewhere — to shareholders, to executive compensation, to the buyback machine that now absorbs over a trillion dollars a year in corporate cash that used to go to wages and investment. That is the transfer the op-ed is guarding, and it calls the guard “freedom.”
I’m not anti-market. I’m anti-extraction, and there is a canyon between the two. Markets are superb at allocating sandwiches and sneakers and ten thousand other ordinary goods. No central planner could run a restaurant district the way a price signal does. That is not what we are talking about. We are talking about whether your employer should be the sole provider of your health insurance. Whether a private-equity firm should be able to buy a nursing home, load it with debt, sell the building, and leave town with the silverware. Whether losing your job means losing your kid’s doctor. The question was never “markets or no markets.” It is “who owns the thing, and who pockets the gains?”
Every time someone proposes bringing any of that cushion here — a child allowance, sectoral bargaining, a public option, flexicurity — the alarm gets sounded and the word socialism does all the work, so you never get around to asking whether the boring thing it is attached to already exists, in the reddest states in the union. It does. North Dakota has run a profitable state-owned bank since 1919. Every Alaskan gets a dividend from oil revenue. Medicare is single-payer health insurance for everyone over sixty-five, and nobody wants to abolish it. If those are socialism, they have been Republican socialism for decades, which tells you the word describes nothing in particular. Calling collective bargaining “the road to serfdom” while cashing a Social Security check is not a principled stand. It is just name-calling.
The problem is not that the government is too big. The problem is that it is built for the people who already have things. It was not a socialist who wrote the rule letting corporations spend eight hundred billion dollars on stock buybacks the year after a tax cut. It was not a democratic socialist who designed the system where your health insurance disappears the day you get laid off. The current arrangement is a set of choices, not the weather — and the people who benefit from those choices have a very strong interest in making sure you never notice they were choices at all.
I am told I am too young to understand why the things that work in every other rich country cannot work here. Walk me through it slowly. Start with why a Danish child and an American child, born the same year, face such different odds of being bankrupted by a hospital — and do it without the phrase “American exceptionalism,” since the exceptional part, in this telling, is the bankruptcy.
Let me be plain. Communism in the twentieth century was a catastrophe. It killed tens of millions and crushed the workers it claimed to free. I am not here to relitigate it. What I am here for is the question that comes after the verdict: between the gulag and a stock market that treats your town as something to be stripped for parts, are those honestly the only two items on the menu? Because the credit union three blocks from your house, the rural electric co-op that wired your county, and Mondragon — the eleven-billion-euro worker-owned company in the Basque Country that has paid its top executive about six times its lowest-paid worker for nearly seventy years — would all be surprised to hear it.
So here is what we build instead. We build sectoral bargaining that lifts wages across whole industries without nationalizing a single firm. We build cooperatives and ESOPs that let workers own the place where they work — fifteen million Americans already do. We decouple health insurance from employment so losing your job doesn’t mean losing your kid’s doctor. We fund childcare the way every other rich country does, not as charity but as infrastructure. We build a floor under the economy so that people can afford to take a risk — quit a bad job, start a business, go back to school — because failure doesn’t end on the street. That is what a Dane does when she quits and starts a company. She can afford to be brave because the fall is cushioned.
The op-ed calls that a threat to the American Dream. I call it the American Dream’s only remaining shot. The economy is a set of human choices, not the weather, and somebody built the one we have now. Somebody could build it differently.