The word ‘communism’ is doing all the heavy lifting in this argument, and the policy is doing none of it. AP reports that a progressive group’s platform proposes abolishing the Senate, replacing the president with a congressional pick, and letting all permanent residents vote — and House Speaker Mike Johnson has called it ‘communism.’ That is the same label applied to every expansion of the welfare state since the New Deal — and I’ll say what I always say first: communism in the 20th century was a catastrophe, full stop. Not the gulag, not the strip-mine — not the only two items on the menu.

And some of these proposals are genuinely radical. Abolishing the Senate and rewriting the Constitution are not the boring, working alternatives I usually point to. They are dramatic, and reasonable people can disagree about whether they are wise. Centrist Democrats are pushing for a formal break after socialist primary wins — and that split tells you how far the ‘communism’ label has already done its work. The DSA platform doesn’t necessarily line up with the candidates who win on its name. That detail gets buried, because the detail doesn’t help the scare.

But calling them ‘communism’ is the same move that has been used to scare people away from the boring, working alternatives that already exist. Social Security was called communism. Medicare was called communism. The public library is called communism. The expanded Child Tax Credit of 2021, which cut child poverty nearly in half in a single year, was called socialism — which is close enough for the same playbook. Trump has been repeating the same label for months. The sentence does its work on contact: you hear the word, you flinch, and the argument is over before it starts.

Notice the reflex: the second you say ‘communism,’ it suddenly ‘wouldn’t work here’ — as if Americans were uniquely, congenitally incapable of what every other rich country does. Walk me through it slowly. Start with why a Norwegian 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.

That is the catechism of the comfortable: the market is nature, the rich earned it, there is no alternative.

The working alternatives are already here. Credit unions with 145 million members. Rural electric cooperatives serving 42 million Americans. A public bank in North Dakota that has been turning a profit for over ninety years. The expanded Child Tax Credit that cut child poverty nearly in half in a single year. I’m not anti-market. I’m anti-extraction, and there’s a Grand Canyon between the two. Nobody ever called Bismarck the Kremlin.

It’s harder here because American political institutions are fragmented — federalism, weak parties, campaign finance, and the ‘communism’ label has been used to scare people away from working alternatives for decades. The policy is the tip; the institutions are the iceberg. But the tip is already here, and the iceberg is built one co-op, one credit union, one child allowance at a time. These proposals may or may not be wise. But they aren’t what stands between Americans and the alternatives that already work.

Remind me what the obstacle is again.

The economy is a set of choices, not the weather. Someone chose this. Someone could choose another. The ‘communism’ label is the only thing in this argument that doesn’t work. Anyway.