The thing that keeps failing is not socialism. It is the promise of heaven on earth. Daniel J. Flynn, writing in “Is Socialism Really Coming?” at National Review, tells the story of today’s left as 1912 all over again: J. A. Wayland promised socialism would arrive like an unstoppable prairie fire, his movement won six percent of the vote, and Wayland went upstairs and shot himself. Flynn’s moral is that socialism promises paradise, delivers disappointment, and eventually drives its believers either to the right or into despair.
He is right about the part that deserves the funeral. The 1912 religion really did promise everything: socialist schools producing millions of Shakespeares, no unemployment, no war, and “almost no crime, for the cause of crime is injustice.” That is not a platform. That is the Second Coming wearing a union card. The convention theater — the finger-waving, the “comrade,” the “birthing people” — only makes the faith easier to mock.
And the harder version of that faith, the one actually built in Russia, China, and Cambodia, killed tens of millions. It crushed the workers it claimed to liberate. I am not going to defend it, and I am not going to pretend the twentieth century did not happen. Millenarianism fails. It failed like clockwork, and the clock was the whole problem.
Wayland is a genuinely sad story. It is also beside the point.
The piece then makes its leap. It lumps Wayland’s Kansas commune, Marx’s revolutionary program, a DSA primary victory, Social Security, a credit union, and a rural electric cooperative into one undifferentiated thing called “socialism.” It points at the most dramatic failure in the category — a man’s suicide — and asks you to conclude that the whole category shares that fate.
That is like arguing that all restaurants are dangerous because one burned down.
No serious candidate on a ballot in 2026 is promising millions of Shakespeares, the abolition of war, or a world with almost no crime. The left’s actual agenda is a child allowance, healthcare that does not end in bankruptcy, housing that is not a speculation vehicle, and the right to organize a union. It promises exactly nothing about paradise. It promises that a kid does not go hungry and a layoff does not cost a family its house.
Compare the two. Wayland promised heaven and delivered a desperate man with a bedsheet. Today’s program promises a monthly check. One is a religion. The other is plumbing.
The op-ed spends a full sentence on “birthing people” and not one on the price of a hospital room. The costume is easy to mock precisely because the program underneath it is harder to argue with.
Here is what Flynn’s story skips. While Wayland was composing his suicide note, other people on the American left were building things that lasted: credit unions, rural electric cooperatives, mutual-aid societies, the New Deal, and the welfare institutions that followed. None required a manifesto. None needed a prairie fire. None collapsed when a founder’s faith ran out.
The six percent was not a revolution coming. It was a request. The country answered with a floor, not a takeover.
Within a generation of Eugene Debs’s six percent, the country had Social Security, the forty-hour week, and the Wagner Act. That was not the promised heaven. It was more useful. The boring wing built.
The scare word is doing more work than the argument. The “socialism” allegedly coming is, item by item, already here in the reddest states in the union. Medicare is single-payer healthcare for everyone over sixty-five, and nobody wants to abolish it. North Dakota has run a state-owned bank profitably since 1919, and nobody in Bismarck has ever mistaken it for the Kremlin. Rural America has owned its electric cooperatives for roughly ninety years — member-owned utilities that wired the countryside after investor-owned companies passed on it. A hundred and forty-five million Americans belong to credit unions.
Every one of these would be denounced as socialism if proposed tomorrow.
It was not proposed tomorrow. It is here, and people love it.
Now stop chanting and run the machine. In 2021, the expanded Child Tax Credit delivered a monthly cash allowance without caseworkers judging parents. By the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, child poverty fell 46 percent in a single year, from 9.7 percent to 5.2 percent. The expansion lifted 2.9 million children out of poverty. Then it lapsed, and poverty came back.
Policy on. Poverty drops by half.
Policy off. Poverty returns.
That is not a prairie fire. That is a valve. We ran a controlled experiment on ourselves, and it worked. The people warning that socialism was coming responded by calling the valve a revolution and turning it off.
The fear is not the state seizing the factories.
It is a kid eating.
Flynn reaches for the early National Review masthead as proof that leftism is a waystation on the road to conservatism. Fine. The historical defectors were real. James Burnham had advised Trotsky before moving right. Frank Meyer had worked inside the communist world before moving right. Another had aspired to be a Great Socialist Publicist. Another had won an audience with Lenin at sixteen.
But read the evidence the other way. What those men abandoned was the revolutionary promise: the prairie fire, the imminent paradise, the vanguard that knew better, the final goal. They left the thing that burns. They kept the plumbing.
The plumbing is what works.
The Nordic social democracies did not wait for a revolution. They built institutions. Denmark designed a system where it is relatively easy for the boss to fire you and much harder for the layoff to ruin your life. The Danes pair flexible hiring and firing with income security and serious retraining. The point is not to protect every job forever. It is to protect the worker when the job ends.
Denmark’s tax-to-GDP ratio is roughly 45 percent. The Danes are not queuing up to emigrate.
Norway struck oil and put the money in a sovereign wealth fund worth more than two trillion dollars, now owning a slice of roughly every public company on earth. Sweden built a wage system that rewarded efficient firms and retrained workers from failing ones. The goal was simple: let firms fail without letting workers fall.
Those countries chose a method, not a miracle. One achievable institution at a time, made to last. They were too busy building plumbing to watch for the prairie fire.
That is the choice Flynn’s category error hides. The left has two gears. One promises a perfect world and eventually discovers that human beings remain human. The other builds a child allowance, a bargaining structure, a public bank, a cooperative, a safety net. One gear produces convention theater. The other produces institutions people use.
Eduard Bernstein’s famous rule still holds: the movement is everything, the final goal nothing. Build the next achievable thing. The credit union. The child allowance. Sectoral wage boards so an entire industry rises instead of one store at a time. Real retraining, the Danish kind, so a plant closing is a transition and not a catastrophe. A public option here and there, so people can choose an institution that is not trying to extract from them.
None of this requires abolishing private property. It requires rebuilding institutions we let decay: union density, organized employers, and a state that can actually deliver. You cannot airlift the Nordic model into America. Federalism, weak parties, racial division, anti-tax ideology, and distrust of government make the work harder here. The policy is the visible tip. The institutions are the iceberg.
It takes a generation.
That is not a reason to do nothing. It is a reason to stop promising heaven and start building the floor.
Flynn borrows Marx’s line about history repeating itself first as tragedy and then as farce. He is right about that, anyway. This is the farce of a scarecrow standing in a field that was already planted.
The socialism he is warning you about is not coming. It got here long ago, and it is boring. It is your grandmother’s Medicare, your credit union, the cooperative that lights the barn, the bank in North Dakota, and the monthly check that cut child poverty nearly in half until Congress switched it off.
If that is the revolution, the revolution is boring.
The boring thing works.
Anyway. The floor is the point, not the fire.