Karl Rove wrote a campaign memo disguised as a column for the Wall Street Journal this week. In his piece, “Nix on Nixon: How to Defeat the DSA in the Midterms”, Rove hands GOP House candidates a canned speech that demands every Democrat either endorse the Democratic Socialists of America’s platform or denounce it — with silence treated as confirmation. Then he runs through the DSA’s loudest planks — publicly built housing, treating food and medicine as “common goods,” a 32-hour workweek, abolishing ICE — and presents each one as the unofficial Democratic creed. The point of the exercise is not engagement. It is to manufacture guilt by association and skip the policy fight entirely. Voters in Florida and everywhere else are angry for a different reason, and Rove’s column won’t touch it.
Start with the rigged question. The DSA is a real organization with a real platform, but its members are a tiny slice of the Democratic caucus — a handful of House members, at most one or two senators, a few hundred local officials nationwide. Treating “disavow or be branded” as the only honest answer is a debater’s move, not journalism. If a Republican senator were asked to disavow every position of the John Birch Society, the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and the National Rifle Association in a single televised answer — with silence treated as endorsement — the demand would be laughed off the stage. The same demand, aimed at Democrats and DSA, is treated as serious commentary.
Here is the concession, because I’d rather be honest than clever. The DSA platform does call for abolishing the Senate, abolishing the Electoral College, abolishing ICE, letting non-citizens vote in national elections, defunding the military, phasing out fossil fuels fast, and — the line Rove gets to sound grave on — fully abolishing the police and prison system. That is a real platform. It is more radical than the Democratic mainstream by a wide margin, and it is fair to ask Democratic candidates how much of it they share. He has a real point on the policing plank especially. “Abolish” is bad politics and bad policy at a moment when crime concerns are real in some cities, and Democrats should not run on it. I’ll give him that.
But Rove does not stop at asking. He uses each plank as a cudgel, and the cudgel is dishonest in the same way every time.
The Cold War housing frame is the worst of them. “Some will remember those big, ugly apartment blocks in the Soviet Union. That’s DSA leaders’ vision,” Rove writes, as if publicly built housing were a single thing invented in Moscow in 1955. Vienna runs a public-housing system in which the majority of residents live in city-owned or non-profit housing with regulated rents and buildings that last a century. Singapore’s Housing Development Board owns roughly 80 percent of the country’s housing stock, and nearly the whole country lives in it because it runs that well. New York built limited-equity co-ops and Mitchell-Lama housing for decades before the program was starved by budget cuts. Public housing is a building type, not a political confession. Slapping the worst Soviet image on every publicly-owned unit is not argument. It is a Cold War cut-out propped up to do the work of thought.
The “common goods” stretch is the same move in different costume. Rove lists food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation and asks whether the DSA wants the government to take over Publix, Lennar, Ryder, CSX, the cruise lines, and Disney. The list is supposed to shock. But “food as a common good” in policy language does not mean V.I. Lenin runs the grocery store. It means treating access to food the way we treat access to clean water — publicly funded, publicly regulated, guaranteed as a baseline. School lunches are a common good. SNAP is a common good. Public-health inspectors in the dairy aisle are a common good. Rove knows this. The reader is supposed to forget it for the duration of the paragraph.
The 32-hour workweek gets one rhetorical question — “What small business could cope with that?” — and no arithmetic. France moved to a 35-hour statutory week in 2000 and the country did not collapse. Iceland and New Zealand have run four-day-workweek pilots without productivity collapse and, in some cases, with documented gains. The honest question is whether shorter hours can be paired with productivity, wages, and small-business relief. The eight-hour day itself was a radical demand in 1886, won by labor agitation against an earlier version of exactly the free-enterprise consensus Rove defends. Now it is a baseline. Rove is defending the status quo against any further compression and calling that moderation.
Even on the policing plank, where I conceded him the point, Rove skips half the conversation. The “abolish” slogan is wrong, but the complaint it stands in for is real: many Americans, especially in Black and brown neighborhoods, have experienced policing as occupation rather than protection. Rove treats the slogan as the whole story and ignores the complaint, because the complaint implicates the actual market forces he will not name.
What are those forces? Follow the cost down. The free-enterprise system Rove is defending built the condition that has voters angry in the first place. A starter home in Tampa now costs roughly $450,000. The Federal Reserve held interest rates low for a decade and then jacked them up. Private equity bought starter homes by the tens of thousands. National builders built luxury condos because that is where the margin is. Zoning kept supply tight. None of that is socialism. All of it is the market working as designed, with specific named beneficiaries and specific named victims.
This is the move Rove’s column will not make. He’d rather you argue about whether Mickey Mouse should be nationalized than about why your rent doubled in five years.
The pattern repeats across every plank he mocks. Rove mocks “health care as a common good” — but he will not defend the system that produced $400 insulin, $5,000 deductibles, and grocery bills that eat 15 percent of a working-class paycheck. Rove mocks the “Department of War” line as unserious — but defense spending is now over $800 billion a year and he does not argue that is the right number. Rove puts scare quotes around “legalize migration” and calls it “open borders” — a strawman that lets him skip the actual debate about enforcement priorities, asylum backlogs, and visa caps. The pattern is uniform. Pick the most extreme-sounding sentence in a long platform document. Refuse to distinguish it from the Democratic Party. Demand disavowal. It is a debater’s trick, not a policy argument, and it works only if you do not notice what the column is not saying.
What isn’t Rove saying is the fight voters in Florida — and everywhere else with a housing crisis — actually need to have. Florida’s homeowners insurance market is in crisis. Rents in Miami and Tampa have outrun wages for a decade. The state rejected federal rental-relief programs and refused to expand subsidized-housing production. By most housing-policy tallies, Florida is now hundreds of thousands of units short of what working families need. That is not a problem a forced disavowal solves. It is a problem housing solves.
So build the housing. Zoning reform that puts fifty thousand new starter homes on the market in Tampa, Orlando, and Jacksonville by 2028. A public option on health insurance that caps deductibles at $1,500 a year. Child care priced as a public utility. Defense spending audited row by row and cut where it does not deliver. An immigration system that processes asylum claims in 90 days and enforces visa caps honestly. None of that is socialist. None of it is radical. It is the boring, competent governance neither party has been delivering, and voters — DSA members or not — will reward whoever starts.
Rove’s script will scare some suburban voters. It will keep DSA-linked Democrats on defense. It will not solve the Republican problem that the GOP has nothing to say to a 28-year-old paying $2,200 a month for a one-bedroom in Orlando while Lennar reports record profits. That voter does not need DSA to be angry. They need a Republican who can explain why their rent is so high. Or a Democrat who will build the housing. Either is fine. Rove’s column does neither.