The thing arriving in American politics isn’t socialism — it’s a security gap so wide that an entire generation fell through it. Peggy Noonan’s “Socialism Is Here—and It’s Serious” in the Wall Street Journal points to a poll finding that 34 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning adults identify as democratic socialists and to Abdul El-Sayed’s Michigan primary win. She argues that young voters, having forgotten the Cold War and absorbed left-wing frameworks, are embracing an ideology that would abolish prisons, open borders, and remake America into “something more common.” Her portrait is of a “colder, less human, occasionally sociopathic” generation. The economics never gets a word in.
Give her the honest half, because there is one. Plenty of people who call themselves socialists, including the Democratic Socialists of America co-chair she quotes, embrace genuinely radical long-term positions: abolishing the Senate, putting large industries under public ownership, and other proposals that deserve a real argument. A radical movement should answer hard questions about what it would actually build.
And communism, as actually built in the twentieth century, was a catastrophe of camps, famines, purges, and one-party rule. The Soviet Union was not a misunderstood Scandinavian preschool. The historical record is settled. I am not here to relitigate it.
Now watch what Noonan does with her own evidence.
She lists the causes patiently: the 25-year-old watched the 2008 crash, saw bailouts flow to the people who caused the damage, watched nobody on Wall Street pay a price, sees artificial intelligence rising, wonders whether the economy has a place for him, and cannot afford a house. She writes all of that down. Then she skips the obvious conclusion — that these are rational people responding to a system that visibly broke and punished nobody who broke it — and calls them sociopaths who never strike her with their warmth.
When the evidence is too damning, reach for the character diagnosis.
That is the oldest trick in the catechism of the comfortable. Turn a mechanical failure into a moral defect. Blame the thermometer for the fever. The young person who watched his parents lose the house, now faces a rent payment eating 40 percent of his paycheck, and wonders whether one illness or layoff could finish the family is not suffering from an excess of abstraction. He is reading the contract.
The contract is broken.
Ask what the 34 percent actually want. Not the co-chair’s ten-year list. The people themselves. They want a layoff that does not cost them the house. A sick kid who does not drain the savings account. A doctor’s visit that is not a sales transaction. A degree that does not shackle them to a lender for thirty years. A year of parental leave treated as ordinary infrastructure rather than a luxury for the rich.
That is not a gulag. It is the welfare state — the exact mixed economy Noonan praises in her own column as “maybe as good as it gets.” She praises the thing, then mocks the people who want more of it. Both cannot be true.
The word “socialism” does all the scary work. The Soviet Union, the Khmer Rouge, the DSA co-chair, the Danish welfare state, and the credit union in your wallet are placed in one bucket. Noonan calls them all abstract, ideological, and imposed from the top down.
The bucket has a hole in it.
We have run a profitable state-owned bank in North Dakota since 1919, and nobody ever called Bismarck the Kremlin. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund holds more than $2 trillion and owns a slice of the world’s public companies. Alaska mails residents a dividend from its oil fund. The rural electric cooperatives serve 42 million Americans across 56 percent of the country’s land. Credit unions have roughly 145 million members, and you have somehow never once been to a Politburo meeting.
Social Security is the country’s most popular government program. Medicare is single-payer healthcare for everyone over 65, and nobody seriously wants to abolish it. These are not foreign invasions. They are American institutions. They are plumbing. They have been sitting here the whole time.
The Danish system was not imposed by a chilly committee from the clouds. It was bargained between organized labor and organized capital, with the state as referee, through agreements beginning in 1933. The Nordic model grew from a century of unions, employer associations, cooperative finance, public administration, and broad taxation. It is capitalism with the trap doors welded shut.
That took a century of institution-building. This is why it is harder here. Harder is not impossible.
The people who built these systems did not abolish markets or private property. They put a floor under both. In Denmark, employers can fire workers relatively easily. The worker receives income support and retraining, so losing a job is a setback rather than a descent through the floorboards. In Norway, public ownership of capital became a two-trillion-dollar fund instead of a command economy. In Germany, workers sit on corporate boards and the country did not slide into the sea.
The alternative already exists. The excuse is what?
We proved the floor works here, too. In 2021, the expanded Child Tax Credit became a near-universal monthly cash payment. According to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, child poverty fell 46 percent in one year, from 9.7 percent to 5.2 percent. About 2.9 million children were lifted out of poverty, roughly 2.1 million because of the expansion. Then the policy lapsed and child poverty shot back up.
That was not a Scandinavian fairy tale. It was a controlled experiment we ran on ourselves. When we build the floor, people stand on it. When we pull it away, they fall.
Noonan’s own list of grievances points to the same conclusion. Private equity buys nursing homes, loads them with debt, strips the real estate, and leaves a husk behind. The healthcare market asks sick people to comparison-shop while they are on a gurney, then sends them the bill. The childcare market cannot be affordable for parents, decent for workers, and profitable for owners at the same time. The arithmetic refuses. Pick two.
Productivity has roughly doubled since the 1970s. The typical paycheck has barely moved. A two-bedroom apartment in most American cities can eat 30 or 40 percent of a renter’s paycheck; in the 1960s, comparable space took about a quarter. The problem is not that young people have been hypnotized by a foreign doctrine. The problem is that they can count.
Noonan says free-market capitalism “flows upward from the human person,” while socialism must be imposed from the top down. I would agree, except that she has described the American economy rather than a contrast. The 2008 bailouts were imposed from the top down. Tax cuts that enriched the top while wages flattened were imposed from the top down. Deregulation that let private equity bleed nursing homes was imposed from the top down.
The “organic” economy has been organizing people’s lives for a century. It simply prefers not to admit that somebody made the choices.
So what do you build instead?
A child allowance. We tested it, it cut child poverty nearly in half, and we should bring it back. Active labor-market policy. The Danes fire you easily but do not let the firing ruin you, which is a better answer to artificial-intelligence anxiety than a lecture about grit. Cooperatives and employee ownership. Mondragon employs roughly 70,000 people across about 80 cooperatives, competes in global markets, and averages a pay ratio near five to one. A public option in healthcare, so people can choose a non-extractive provider. Public banks modeled on North Dakota’s century-old institution. Sectoral bargaining so workers do not have to organize every workplace one miserable election at a time.
These are not fantasies. They are institutions with receipts.
The young are not a horde of icy, very-online radicals. They are a generation that watched one side break every promise and then received a lecture about its own character. You call their conclusion a character flaw because you do not want to face that the bargain itself was the problem.
Noonan ends by quoting Malraux: “Capitalism does not carry us in its heart.” That is true. The Nordics did not try to make capitalism carry them in its heart. They made sure a layoff did not end on the street.
The 25-year-old who watched the crash, the bailouts, the rent, the debt, and the disappearing future is not asking for the gulag. He is asking for a monthly check to a parent, a doctor’s visit that is not a sales transaction, and a layoff that cannot end a family.
He is asking for the trap doors the Danes welded shut.