The word “socialist” is doing the work that evidence should be doing. The Wall Street Journal’s live Q&A points to a divisive Michigan Senate primary, recent victories by candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America in New York and Colorado, and upcoming contests in Wisconsin and Minnesota. It asks what the contests mean for the Democratic Party and the 2026 midterms. It does not establish what those candidates are proposing. That distinction matters.
The Journal’s phrase is “a progressive and socialist groundswell.” Fine. What policies are included in that phrase? The item does not say. It identifies an electoral pattern and invites readers to ask reporters about it. It does not provide candidate platforms, policy documents, or polling showing that Michigan voters have signed onto a particular economic program. So let’s not make the article carry more than it can carry.
The useful question is not whether a label sounds alarming. It is what the candidates actually want government, workers, and private firms to do.
The DSA’s own published platform calls for greater worker power, expanded public provision, and economic control beyond ordinary shareholder ownership. Those are substantive positions. They can be debated. They should be debated. But they should not be smuggled into the reader’s head by a phrase that treats “socialist” as a complete policy description.
I’m not anti-market. I’m anti-extraction, and there is a Grand Canyon between the two. A proposal for universal childcare, stronger labor law, or public ownership of a particular service is not automatically a proposal to abolish private property or replace every market with central command. The twentieth-century record settles one point plainly: one-party communist regimes were catastrophes. They killed tens of millions, crushed independent unions and free presses, and turned state ownership into rule by an unaccountable bureaucracy. That is not a model. It is a warning label.
It is also not an argument for treating every expansion of public provision as the same thing.
If the Michigan primary becomes a national test, the test should be concrete. What is the childcare policy? Who pays? Who provides the care? What happens to workers’ wages? What would be public, what would remain private, and what would be governed cooperatively? Does “housing as a right” mean a voucher, a public housing program, a community land trust, a zoning change, or all four? Does “labor power” mean sectoral bargaining, stronger remedies for wage theft, worker representation on corporate boards, or worker ownership?
Those are different proposals. They have different costs, different institutional requirements, and different failure modes. Calling all of them “socialism” is not analysis. It is a filing cabinet with only one folder.
The source item does not document the candidates’ actual platforms, so it cannot settle those questions. Nor should I pretend that an election calendar proves a national ideological realignment. A candidate’s victory may show that a particular message, organization, biography, coalition, or opponent worked in that race. It does not prove that voters endorsed every plank associated with the candidate’s allies. New York and Colorado may suggest that some left-aligned candidates can win outside the places conservatives imagine when they hear “socialist.” They do not, by themselves, establish a nationwide groundswell.
But the label still hides a real argument about ownership and security. Who controls the institutions that determine whether a family can afford childcare, whether a worker can leave a bad job, and whether a town’s hospital stays open? Private owners and employers are one answer. Organized workers, public agencies, member-owned firms, and mixed institutions are other answers. The question is not markets or no markets. It is who owns the thing, who governs it, and who absorbs the risk when it fails.
Look at the actual comparative record, with the fine print left attached.
Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global is not a magical Scandinavian checking account. It was built from petroleum revenue, invests largely abroad, and is governed by a fiscal rule that limits how much of its expected real return the government may spend. Norges Bank Investment Management reports the fund’s holdings and performance; its value moves with global markets and has recently stood around two trillion dollars. Norway’s achievement is not merely finding oil. It is building an institution that invests much of the windfall rather than spending it immediately, preserving public ownership of a large pool of capital.
North Dakota’s Bank of North Dakota is a smaller, more American example. The bank’s annual reports document its state ownership, lending partnerships, and financial results. Its record is not a license to claim that every public bank will be profitable. It is evidence that “publicly owned bank” is not synonymous with “economic collapse.” North Dakota chose a public financial institution in 1919. Nobody had to put Bismarck behind an Iron Curtain.
Sweden’s welfare state also requires careful translation. Sweden provides generous parental leave through its social-insurance system, including up to 480 days of leave per child under the country’s rules. Its higher-education system is not simply “free tuition” for everyone: students from the European Union, European Economic Area, and Switzerland generally pay no tuition at public universities, while many students from outside that area do. The Swedish government’s study information makes the distinction. That is what honest comparison looks like. The pipes work differently depending on who is using them.
Mondragon is another useful example, provided nobody turns it into a fairy tale. The Basque federation was founded in 1956 and now links dozens of cooperatives and tens of thousands of workers; its own corporate information documents its scale and structure. Its cooperatives use one-member, one-vote governance, internal capital accounts, and shared institutions such as Laboral Kutxa. Published accounts commonly place internal executive-to-worker pay ratios in a range of roughly 3-to-1 to 9-to-1, with figures around 5-to-1 often cited. That is not a universal Mondragon law, and it is not the same as saying every worker across every foreign subsidiary is a member-owner.
Mondragon’s flagship appliance cooperative, Fagor, went bankrupt in 2013. The federation helped relocate most of its Spanish worker-members, but it did not repeal competition or make failure painless. The lesson is stronger because it is less romantic: worker ownership can scale, and it changes how failure is handled. It is not magic.
These examples do not prove that an American candidate’s program would work. They prove something smaller and more important: the menu contains more than two items. The choice is not automatically between command economy and shareholder rule. There are public banks, sovereign wealth funds, unions, community land trusts, mutual insurers, public options, and worker-owned firms competing inside or alongside markets.
The harder question is why these institutions do not transfer easily. America has federalism, weaker unions, fragmented employers, lower collective-bargaining coverage, and deep distrust of public provision. Nordic labor markets rest on machinery built over generations: sectoral bargaining, organized employers, active retraining, broad taxation, and state capacity. You cannot airlift Denmark’s childcare system into the United States and leave the institutional foundation in Copenhagen.
That is not the same as impossible. It means the work begins with pieces that fit the country we have. Expand the Child Tax Credit, which the Census Bureau found helped cut child poverty sharply in 2021. Support state and municipal public banking. Build sectoral wage boards where state law permits them. Finance childcare cooperatives and community land trusts. Give workers a route to buy firms before private equity strips them for parts.
The Journal’s Q&A keeps its eyes on the election calendar. Fair enough. But if “socialist groundswell” becomes the headline, readers should ask what the label is hiding. Name the policy. Name the payer. Name the institution that would administer it. Name the country or American state where a comparable mechanism exists. Then explain what would make it harder here.
That would be reporting. The label takes eight words.
Build anyway. Universal childcare is a budget line, not a mood. Public banking is a documented institution, not a Kremlin costume. Worker ownership is a private-market arrangement in which the people doing the work receive votes and a share of the gains. Some pipes leak. That is why we inspect them.
The Democratic Party’s identity question is real. The answer should not be to run from policies because an old word makes them sound foreign. It should be to describe the policies clearly, fund them honestly, and let voters decide whether the institutions are worth building.