Nobody in Michigan voted for the gulag on Tuesday. They voted for a doctor who talks about health insurance—which is why the Wall Street Journal needs the word “socialism” so badly. In “Can Democrats Resist Socialism?”, Kimberley A. Strassel watches Abdul El-Sayed win the Michigan Senate primary and sees Bolsheviks in the doorway: “government-run healthcare,” “wealth confiscation,” “free government everything,” socialists “infiltrating” the Democratic Party. She has one honest sentence in the whole piece, and she does not hear herself say it: voters are “unhappy with high prices, economic uncertainty and gridlock and want change.” That is not the socialist platform. That is the grocery bill.
I will concede the honest half, because there is one. The Democratic Socialists of America platform is genuinely radical. Abolish the Senate. Abolish police and prisons, fully. Put large corporations and essential industries under public ownership. That is a real document, and much of it deserves to lose. I would take it item by item.
And let us get the other thing out of the way in the plainest words available: twentieth-century communism, as actually built, was a catastrophe. Tens of millions died. One-party dictatorship followed every time. The verdict is in. I am not here to relitigate it.
But Medicare is not the gulag. The VA hospital is not the gulag. Social Security is not the gulag. The public library is not the gulag. A country that pays for a sick child’s strep test is not one step from a one-party state. Norway does these things and is not one-party. Denmark does them and is not one-party. Every wealthy country on earth provides healthcare through some form of public system. The one that does not is us.
Notice the sleight of hand. The DSA platform belongs to an organization, not to Abdul El-Sayed. When Strassel wants to frighten you, she reads the most extreme wishlist—abolish the Senate—and when she wants to dismiss what the candidates actually ran on, she waves at “government-run healthcare” and “shared resources.” Those are not the same thing. One is a radical document no government anywhere has put into effect. The other is what every other rich country does on a Tuesday.
She has glued the most radical paragraph in a fringe organization’s wishlist to candidates who ran on rent and doctor bills. That is not a debate. It is a scarecrow.
The word “socialism” is doing the rest. In Strassel’s column, it stretches from a tax on very large fortunes to the DSA platform to Medicare to the Bolsheviks—a small party that seized power by force in 1917, banned the rest, and built the camps. Four different things. One word.
That is magician’s misdirection. One hand says “gulag.” The other hides the actual subject: a public-health doctor running on health insurance in Michigan.
The scare has been wrong every time for ninety years running. Social Security was “socialism” in 1935. “Socialized medicine” was the fire alarm pulled against Medicare in 1965. Medicare is now single-payer healthcare for everyone over sixty-five, and no one wants to abolish it. No senatorial candidate has ever been sent to a re-education camp for defending it. The receipts are still sitting in the country the scare was supposed to destroy.
Strassel says socialism does not sell in America. She is right about the label, which is exactly why every candidate she names is sprinting away from it. El-Sayed says he is not a socialist. The other Michigan winner’s DSA membership “lapsed” a month ago.
When the label is that toxic and the candidates still win, something else is selling. Strassel has already told us what it is: high prices, economic uncertainty and gridlock. The voters are not reading the DSA platform. They are reading the receipt, the rent check, and the arithmetic on the kid’s strep test.
The people who ran on the word lost. The people who ran on the pain won.
That is the sentence that should keep an editorial writer awake.
Strassel says the candidates are winning because voters are in an “antiestablishment, anti-incumbent mood,” and because they are the “only Democratic candidates offering anything new—however terrifying.” She wrote that. The only people with answers are the people she is calling crazy.
What does the establishment offer instead? A checkbook spent against its own candidates and a word with a hiss in it. You know what that sounds like to a voter with a medical bill, a rent increase and a kid in a bad school?
Nothing.
Then there is the “entryism” plot. The Trotskyite tactic. Let me make sure I understand the infiltration. A group of people who dislike the party’s platform joined the party and are now competing in open primaries, in public, before millions of voters, under the published rules.
The secret strategy is elections.
In a democracy, that is not a conspiracy. It is the entire point of the building. The road to one-party rule has a specific on-ramp: you stop letting people vote you out. These people are doing the opposite. They are knocking on doors to earn the right to be voted out in six years.
That is not the gulag’s entrance ramp. It is the exit ramp, going the other direction.
And the tea-party comparison does Strassel in. She calls the tea party grassroots conservatives demanding that Republicans hold true to their stated ideal of limited government. Fine. What do you call a faction that runs in primaries, wins, and pulls a party toward its stated ideals?
When it is right-wing, it is grassroots. When it is left-wing, it is “entryism.” The mechanism has not changed. The destination has. Strassel is not against factions winning primaries; she is against this agenda. She just will not say so plainly, because the agenda in its boring, electable form is popular.
Either entryism is infiltration when the left does it and democracy when the right does—or, more sensibly, it is simply how a party gets changed.
The working version comes up, and suddenly it “wouldn’t work here.” The failed version helps, and it becomes the template. Venezuela stands in for Sweden. The gulag stands in for Medicare. The geography trick is doing the work.
If Strassel believes government-run healthcare is a way station to the camps, she should say that in words and take her chances. Until then, the scare word is doing the work her argument cannot.
Her solution is for Democrats to offer a “full-throated defense of traditional Democratic ideals.” It is worth noting, slowly, that she never says what those ideals are. No program. No policy. Nothing but the status quo her own column concedes is leaving voters unhappy with high prices and economic uncertainty.
The menu she offers is the pain you have now, or the gulag you are warned about if you ask for better.
It is the oldest menu in the world.
Anyway.
The actual menu has more than two items, and we have been ordering from it all our lives. The Bank of North Dakota is a state-owned bank that has turned a profit every year since 1919. Nobody has ever mistaken Bismarck for the Kremlin.
The rural electric cooperatives—about 900 member-owned utilities serving 42 million Americans across 56 percent of the country’s land—wired rural America when investor-owned utilities would not. They are among the most successful examples of public-minded ownership in American history, and conservative counties love their own.
The ownership the Journal means as a threat is already standing in its boring American form everywhere. The question is not whether the market exists. The question is who owns the thing and who decides.
And in 2021, the United States ran the closest thing it has ever produced to a controlled experiment on child poverty. We sent families cash every month. Child poverty under the Supplemental Poverty Measure fell 46 percent, from 9.7 percent to 5.2 percent—the lowest recorded level. About 2.9 million children were lifted out of poverty, roughly 2.1 million by the expanded credit itself.
Then the expansion lapsed, and the poverty came back.
That is not a Scandinavian fairy tale. That is a lab result we ran on ourselves, with the control group being the usual misery.
So here is the actual choice, the one the word is designed to hide. Not the gulag and not the strip-mine. A country that runs like a decent household: nobody the favorite, nobody left out in the cold. A country where a layoff does not end on the street and a doctor does not ask for the card up front.
We already own most of the parts: the credit union in your wallet, the bank in Bismarck, the co-ops that lit the prairie, the VA hospital, Medicare, the public library, and the check that pulled millions of children out of poverty in a year.
The missing ingredient is not socialism. It is nerve.
Voters are not asking to abolish the Senate. They are asking for the fear to be taken out of an ordinary life—the sick child, the rent, the layoff, the tuition bill. The candidates who name those things are winning. The cure is not a backbone. It is an agenda.
The hard part is forty years of convincing people that a thing they already love is a foreign menace. Nobody is coming to save the party, and Strassel is right about that much. But the rescue was never going to be a scolding and a checkbook.
It is the list of things a country can do together: more healthcare, more security, more ownership, more public capacity, offered in plain English by people unafraid of the word.
Nine-point-seven to five-point-two. That is the number a country produces when it tries.
That list is the campaign. Run on it, and watch the word lose.