The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board declared this week that a 4,000-vote primary loss in Wisconsin has finally dispatched the radical socialism it sees metastasizing through the Democratic Party. That’s a bigger claim than 4,000 ballots can carry. The board’s Wacky Francesca Hong Almost Won in Wisconsin catalogs Francesca Hong’s platform — public banking, universal pre-K, a 17% top state tax — and treats the result as foreclosed. Foreclosed by what — 4,000 ballots in a race where public polls had her ahead by 22 points the day before?
That’s the editorial board’s actual job here. By treating Hong’s narrow loss as a verdict on an entire political program, the board helps make that program untouchable. The next Democratic candidate who proposes a state-owned bank, or a serious top-end tax increase, or a serious answer to food access, will be told: Wisconsin just proved voters reject those ideas. Wisconsin didn’t. Wisconsin picked one candidate over another by 4,000 ballots, with surveys pointing the other way twenty-four hours earlier. That is a primary, not a mandate.
The mechanisms aren’t the novel part. Each one already runs somewhere the editorial board usually defends, and one of them runs on the guy who actually beat her.
Public banking: North Dakota has run a state-owned bank, profitably, since 1919. It made $192.7 million in 2023, and the legislature has transferred a portion of its profits back to the state’s general fund in every session since 1945. The bank has served nine Republican governors and seven Democratic governors without anybody in Bismarck calling each other Bolsheviks. The Journal never publishes the receipt.
Universal early childhood education: Denmark treats it the way we treat the interstate highway system. Sweden does too. So does the man who actually beat Hong, David Crowley, who is campaigning on universal pre-K under a different slogan. The board calls universal pre-K a “party priority,” which is a strange way to describe the operating system of every rich country the board keeps telling us to take seriously. You cannot get Crowley out of the page by reading the page.
Strong unions — and yes, Hong is union-backed, and the editorial sneers at “union favoritism,” which has the curious effect of dismissing the bargaining structure that built the American middle class in the 1950s, rebuilt Germany after the war, and never let Sweden collapse. Denmark has the OECD’s strongest sectoral bargaining coverage and one of the OECD’s higher rates of small-business formation. Those two facts sit comfortably in the same country. The board would like you to think they don’t.
A 17% top state tax is high. The framework is real. The U.S. federal top marginal rate under Eisenhower, a Republican, was 91% from 1953 to 1961, and the country used the money to build the interstates and win the space race. The Journal invokes Nordic countries whenever a Democrat proposes anything sensible, and never publishes the receipt. The receipt: Denmark funds the model with a 25% VAT that applies at the grocery store, with no reduced rate. That’s the deal in the country whose model the editorial board keeps denouncing. My cousins in Gothenburg pay higher taxes than the worst-case American and treat universal childcare the way I treat my property tax: boring, predictable, and visibly buying things.
I’ll concede the obvious. Hong’s social-media record was a problem. AOC and Bernie declined to endorse, which is a real signal from inside the coalition. Hong’s tweets about the Pilgrims and her “abolish the police” line are how political candidates lose close races. None of that is the question on the table. A voter who disliked Hong’s tweets is not a voter who opposes public banking. The editorial board wants those voters to be the same voter. They aren’t.
The 22-point polling miss is also too big to let an editorial board assign it confidently to ideology. We don’t know whether the voters who told pollsters they’d vote Hong and didn’t were put off by her record, by the absence of an AOC endorsement, by the weather, or by nothing in particular. Primary polls misread low-propensity voters by double digits all the time. What we know is that Hong got nearly 40% of the vote in a primary the entire Wisconsin press had called for her. That’s not a verdict; it’s a turnout problem.
The 20th-century state-socialist regimes, built under that label, killed tens of millions and crushed the workers they claimed to free. I’m not here to relitigate that, and I’m not here to rehabilitate the word. I’m here to talk about a much narrower thing: the working institutions that survived the argument and run inside democracies the editorial board usually approves of.
Municipal grocery stores are the hardest of the package to defend. American municipal retail is genuinely unusual, and food deserts aren’t solved by wishing. But the status quo isn’t the alternative — the free market produced the deserts in the first place. Calling proposals to address them “radical socialism” is a lazy frame for the question of why a market that didn’t build grocery stores in five hundred zip codes is still the default-correct answer.
So what gets built instead. Three things, each already running somewhere.
A public bank, on the North Dakota model. It doesn’t require nationalizing finance. State deposits partner with private banks; the bank finances infrastructure private banks won’t touch at reasonable rates. Rural electric co-ops already do the same thing for power — member-owned utilities serving forty-two million Americans across fifty-six percent of the country’s land mass. Nobody calls a rural electric cooperative a politburo.
A higher top marginal state rate paired with visible services. The Scandinavian model, scaled to American state capacity — which is less generous than I’d like and more generous than the Journal admits. We already do partial versions: Social Security, Medicare, the GI Bill, the public library, public schools. The 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit lifted 2.9 million children out of poverty and cut child poverty nearly in half; the moment it expired, the children went back. We already do a lot of this. We just refuse to call it what it is.
Food access. The cooperative answer — member-owned food co-ops supplying fresh food where Walmart closed — exists in thousands of towns. The harder question is why we won’t build the obvious infrastructure — community land trusts for grocery sites, cooperative wholesale networks, a public option for fresh-food retail in the worst-served zip codes — that would actually close the gap. Telling voters those proposals are socialist is the easier, lazier answer, and the Journal reaches for it on cue.
The argument isn’t whether to call it socialism. It’s whether to admit the receipt is real. The label is the only thing the editorial board has actually left to argue with.