Blue-collar Michigan is being bled by a broken system, and the word “socialism” has nothing to do with it. David Marcus, in his column for Fox News, argues that Michigan’s blue-collar voters are too practical for Abdul El-Sayed’s brand of democratic socialism, that the label is a “bug” in a state that has seen improvement under Trump, and that Democrats carrying the socialist banner are about to crash into reality across the country. His case rests on a handful of bar-stool conversations and a demographic headcount at a Detroit rally. What it doesn’t rest on is anything about what’s actually costing these workers money.
I’ll grant his strongest point, because it’s real: blue-collar Michigan is skeptical. These are people who’ve watched factories leave and promises pile up, and “free, free, free everything” raises fair questions about who pays and whether the thing actually works. Glen, the federal worker Marcus quotes at the Anchor Bar, isn’t a fool. He’s asking the right question: can you deliver?
But notice what Marcus does with Glen’s skepticism. He turns it into a blanket rejection of the programs themselves — and then walks away without ever asking whether Glen might actually want what those programs provide. He never asks about Glen’s health insurance. He never asks about his childcare costs. He never asks whether his wages have kept up with the price of groceries. Glen is a prop in a column about labels. His actual life is not in the piece.
And here’s the telling detail Marcus can’t seem to see: his own plumber source didn’t say government programs are the problem. He said El-Sayed needs to not be “way left.” That’s a complaint about packaging, not policy. Tim, the Ann Arbor voter, didn’t say he wants less government — he said he wants transparency and he’s tired of normal people having no say. That’s a demand for accountability, not austerity. Even the federal worker’s complaint is about whether the math works. None of these people are rejecting what they’re being offered. They’re asking whether it’s real.
Marcus doesn’t hear the difference, because he’s not listening for it. The column is about the label, not the lives.
Here’s what he never mentions. Michigan’s blue-collar workers are already paying — heavily, every month — for the arrangement Marcus treats as the reasonable default. Healthcare that costs an average family over $25,000 a year and ties you to a job you might hate. Childcare that runs $12,000 to $15,000 per child — more than rent in most of the state. Wages that, for the typical worker, have barely budged in real terms since the mid-1970s, even as productivity roughly doubled. The gap went somewhere. It didn’t go to Glen.
Since the 1990s, Michigan has watched wave after wave of private equity buy its hospitals and nursing homes, load them with debt, strip the assets, and leave town. It watched right-to-work laws get passed, then repealed, then fought over — a decade-long campaign to break the only institutions that ever gave working people leverage at the negotiating table. Union membership, once roughly a third of the American workforce, has collapsed to about ten percent — under six percent in the private sector. The wages have told the same story in reverse ever since.
That is the status quo. It is not neutral. It is a set of choices — somebody made them, and somebody benefits from them — and the people who benefit are not the ones standing in line at a Detroit rally or eating wings at the Anchor Bar.
Marcus wants you to believe the choice is between sensible blue-collar pragmatism and loony-bin socialism. He’s framed the whole column around that binary, and it’s a lie. Not a complicated lie. A simple, structural one. He’s telling you there are only two items on the menu: the way things are, and an absurd caricature of what El-Sayed is proposing. He skips right past the question of what’s already costing Glen his paycheck.
So let me ask the question Marcus won’t.
Does Glen want health insurance that doesn’t evaporate if he loses his job or his employer decides the plan is too expensive? Polling says yes — overwhelmingly, across party lines, in Michigan and everywhere else. Does a young family in Detroit want childcare that doesn’t cost more than their rent? Yes. Does a laid-off autoworker in Flint want the certainty that losing his job won’t end on the street? Yes. These aren’t radical positions. These are the things every other wealthy country on earth already provides. The Danes treat them the way we treat the interstate highway system — boring, useful, and theirs.
And here’s the part Marcus really doesn’t want you to notice: we’ve already proven these things work in America, in the reddest states imaginable. North Dakota has run a state-owned bank — profitably, without interruption — since 1919. Nobody ever put Bismarck behind an Iron Curtain. Roughly 900 rural electric cooperatives serve 42 million Americans across more than half the country’s landmass. About 145 million Americans belong to a credit union. These are member-owned institutions. They are cooperatives. Nobody calls them communist because nobody thought to be scared of the label.
And the single most powerful proof point is the one that hit hardest and disappeared fastest. In 2021, the expanded Child Tax Credit sent monthly, near-universal cash payments to American families. The result, according to the U.S. Census Bureau: child poverty fell forty-six percent in a single year — from 9.7 percent to 5.2 percent — lifting nearly three million children above the line. The expansion lapsed at the start of 2022. Child poverty shot back up. We ran the experiment on ourselves. It worked perfectly. Then we turned it off.
That is the “harsh reality” Marcus should be writing about. Not whether a Senate candidate can survive a label. Whether the working families of Michigan can survive the policy he’s defending by default — which is, to be precise, no policy at all. Just the old incantation: the market will provide, world without end, amen. It hasn’t provided. Glen knows it. Tim knows it. Marcus knows it too. He just isn’t writing about it.
The real question for Michigan isn’t whether the word “socialism” polls well. It’s whether working people can get healthcare that doesn’t depend on an employer’s mood, childcare that doesn’t cost more than a house payment, and wages that move when productivity moves. Mondragon, in the Basque Country, has been answering that question for seventy years with eighty cooperatives and seventy thousand worker-owners — paying its top executive roughly five times what the lowest-paid worker makes, instead of the three hundred times American boardrooms settled on. That’s not a fairy tale. It’s an eleven-billion-euro company that has competed in global markets since Eisenhower was president.
Nobody’s asking Marcus to move to Mondragon. But the least a column about blue-collar Michigan could do is talk about blue-collar Michigan’s actual problems — the healthcare, the childcare, the wages, the eroded bargaining power — instead of building an entire piece around a word and then congratulating himself for not using it. Glen at the Anchor Bar deserves better than a column that uses him as decoration. He deserves a country where losing his job doesn’t mean losing everything, and where “free stuff” is just what his taxes already bought him, if anyone bothered to deliver it.
The economy is a set of choices, not the weather. The people doing the work in this state can keep paying for a system built to extract from them, or someone can build a floor underneath them instead. That is the choice. The question was never socialism or barbarism. The question is whether working families are going to keep footing the bill for an arrangement designed to take from them, or whether someone is going to build the floor underneath them instead. The Danes did it. The Basque cooperative workers did it. Eleven million Americans who belong to a credit union did it without even noticing. The only people who think the menu has two items are the ones profiting from the ones we’re stuck with.