The real “sewer socialism” in Wisconsin is not the DSA candidate. It is the tax code that lets corporations and large estates pay less while working families pick up the tab. In “Sewer Socialism, but Worse”, the editors of National Review argue that Francesca Hong’s campaign for governor would bring socialism back to Wisconsin “good and hard” through higher corporate taxes, an estate tax, public banking, state-run farms, and an end to school choice. They also call her a “journalism dropout and failed restaurateur,” because apparently the tax code had already been explained.
Let’s start with what is true. Hong is well to the left of the Wisconsin Democratic mainstream. Her positions on policing and school choice are maximalist. Her inexperience with hostile press shows in the clips. The general-election math is real: a race against a bland Republican incumbent would be difficult, and the GOP’s hope that she wins the primary is rational. Milwaukee’s Black and Jewish voters do prize school choice, and alienating them could cost her the election.
Doubling the corporate tax rate would also impose real costs. Some businesses would think twice about expanding. An estate tax can create genuine planning problems for illiquid family businesses. Those are arguments worth having.
The editorial does not have them.
It has a word.
“Socialism” is the decoy. Once the word lands, nobody has to ask who owns the bank, who gets the surplus, who pays the tax, or why a public institution is more frightening than a private company that strips a town for parts. The word does the work. The editors merely stand nearby and look serious.
The piece drags in the DSA’s alleged “antisemitism” without offering a single example. Not one incident. Not one statement. Not one action. If there were a receipt, they would show it. You do not bury your best evidence in a sneer. Instead, the word is used to turn Milwaukee’s Jewish voters into props in someone else’s campaign. That is not an argument about conduct. It is a shortcut around one.
The editors note that Wisconsin has “twice the average of large, family-owned businesses” and treat the number as a reason to protect those businesses from taxation. But why twice? Is the structure partly rewarded by the current code? Do large estates receive advantages that ordinary households do not? Who gains from the arrangement, and who makes up the difference?
The arrangement simply is.
That is how the catechism of the comfortable works. The existing tax code is weather. Hong’s tax proposal is politics. One is treated as natural; the other as an act of aggression. The economy is a set of choices, not the weather. Somebody wrote the rules.
And somebody already built Wisconsin’s cooperative economy.
Credit unions. Rural electric cooperatives. Dairy cooperatives. Marketing cooperatives. Municipal water and light utilities. Land O’Lakes grew out of the cooperative tradition. Wisconsin farmers have spent generations pooling resources, sharing risk, and bargaining together against concentrated buyers. The Capper-Volstead Act, passed in 1922, gives agricultural cooperatives a limited antitrust exemption for exactly this purpose.
That is not a state farm. It is a farmer-owned institution.
Calling any public role in agriculture “state-run farms” while Wisconsin farmers organize collectively every day is not analysis. It is a costume. “Socialism” is the mask.
Milwaukee’s own “sewer socialism” was the tradition of Victor Berger and Frank Zeidler. It built water systems, streets, and public works. It was competent, boring, and effective. It was plumbing. So boring, apparently, that National Review had to invent a new way to fear it.
The same editorial treats public banking as if it were a Politburo project. North Dakota has run a state-owned bank profitably since 1919. The Bank of North Dakota takes deposits, makes loans, supports farms and businesses, and returns its surplus to the state treasury. It has survived every Republican legislature North Dakota has elected since Woodrow Wilson left the White House. Nobody ever called Bismarck the Kremlin.
Alaska’s Permanent Fund provides another American example of public ownership of capital. The state invests resource wealth and pays a dividend to residents who meet its eligibility rules. Alaska did not dissolve. It voted for Trump and kept the check.
The expanded 2021 Child Tax Credit offers another receipt. 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, with 2.9 million children lifted out of poverty. The expansion lapsed, and child poverty rose again.
Turn the policy on. Poverty falls. Turn it off. Poverty returns.
The spreadsheet has spoken.
The question the editorial will not ask is the only one that matters: who owns the thing, and who pockets the gains?
A public bank returns its surplus to the state. A private-equity fund buys a nursing home with debt, extracts fees, sells the building, makes the nursing home pay rent to its new landlord, cuts costs, and leaves town with the silverware. A cooperative dairy keeps more value with the farmers. A consolidated processor holds the buyer power and sets the price. A municipal utility answers to the community. A shareholder utility can defer maintenance to fund buybacks.
The “socialism” label lets the editors avoid that comparison. It permits them to defend the ownership that drains a town while condemning the ownership that stays in it.
The AI moratorium shows the trick even more cleanly. Blue and red communities along Lake Michigan do not want data centers consuming their freshwater. That is not socialism. It is a community protecting a shared resource from an industrial user that might enjoy the gain while leaving someone else with the cleanup. The editors can recognize the policy’s legitimacy when it is popular enough to carry the word “bipartisan.” Attach the same instinct to a candidate they dislike, and suddenly the plumbing becomes tyranny.
Worker ownership is supposedly radical too. Mondragon, the worker cooperative in Spain’s Basque Country, has operated since 1956, employs roughly 70,000 people across its cooperative network, and pays top executives roughly five or six times what the lowest-paid workers receive. The average large American public-company CEO earns hundreds of times the pay of the average worker.
Six to one. Three hundred to one.
Two markets. Two numbers. Nobody handed either ratio down from the mountain.
Mondragon’s 2013 bankruptcy also supplies the honest caution. Worker ownership does not repeal competition. Its flagship Fagor collapsed under roughly €1.1 billion in debt. But about 1,700 of its roughly 1,800 Spanish worker-members were relocated into other cooperatives. The co-op was not magic. It changed what happened when the magic ran out.
Wisconsin already understands the principle. Its rural electric co-ops wire places investor-owned utilities once found unprofitable. Its credit unions hold member assets. Its farm cooperatives let producers bargain together. The people politely ignore anyone who tells them these institutions are secretly revolutionary and go back to running them.
So what should Wisconsin build?
A public bank as a backstop for farms, small businesses, and local investment when private banks will not bother. A child allowance modeled on the 2021 federal experiment. Worker-ownership incentives for firms whose founders want succession without selling to a private-equity rollup. Sectoral wage boards in home care, food processing, and agriculture, where concentrated buyers set the price of labor low. A public healthcare option so a layoff does not become a coverage gap.
Yes, the legislature would fight the public bank. That is the tell. It would be fighting to keep Wisconsin’s money in private hands, earning returns for shareholders instead of working for the people who deposited it. North Dakota made a different choice in 1919. Alaska made a different choice with its oil. Wisconsin can make one with its own deposits.
No revolution. No Soviet farm. No Politburo meeting at the credit union.
Just a state deciding whether its institutions should extract value from its communities or keep value in them.
The cooperation that is supposed to ruin Wisconsin is already running it. The word for that is not socialism.
The word for it is Wisconsin.