The thing hollowing out America’s towns isn’t the school board. It’s the grocery bill. That’s the punch line Rosemary Becchi missed in her recent Fox News Opinion column, “America’s quiet socialist takeover is spreading from town halls to classrooms”, a tour of Democratic Socialists of America candidates who’ve won local races for city council and school board, capped by her alarm over New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan to open five city-run grocery stores selling a defined basket of essentials at 30% below typical retail. Becchi wants you scared of socialism at the local level. I’d like you to notice what’s actually squeezing the immigrant grocer she claims to be defending.
Local government does shape everyday life. Scrutinizing any movement’s fiscal arithmetic is fair. Small immigrant-owned grocers do operate on thin margins — all true, conceded, on the record.
Now the diagnosis.
The vocabulary does the work so the argument never has to. Notice the framing Becchi reaches for whenever a DSA-backed candidate wins an election. They become a “socialist in office.” Any municipal policy that competes with private enterprise becomes “government-centered economic policy.” Any school-board candidate who mentions climate, housing, or LGBTQ+ protections becomes a threat to “intellectual diversity.” “Quiet takeover” is the tell. There’s nothing quiet about elections. People ran. They knocked doors. Some won, some lost. That’s not a takeover. That’s a Tuesday.
Now the grocery pilot she’s most exercised about: five stores, $70 million in city money, run by private operators under city requirements, selling a basket of essentials at mandated prices. By any honest measure, it is a pilot program. A pilot is small on purpose, so you can see whether it works before you scale it. The first store isn’t open yet. The litigation is in its earliest stage. And the stores will be operated by private firms under city requirements, not by municipal employees. That’s what pilots are for — you learn something if it works, and if it doesn’t, the stores close and the city writes off the experiment. The piece treats it as if Mamdani had nationalized the grocery industry.
Meanwhile, four firms now control roughly sixty percent of US grocery sales. Kroger spent years trying to absorb Albertsons. Walmart and Costco use their buying power to dictate supplier terms. Wholesale meatpacking is dominated by four firms. Produce distribution is consolidated. Storefront rents in immigrant neighborhoods are set by landlords who have nothing to do with the grocer’s labor. A family bodega competes with a deep-pocketed chain that can sustain losses to drive it out and write a check to the same landlords. Dollar-store expansion has hollowed out small grocers in neighborhoods like the South Bronx over the last fifteen years. Independent operators — the immigrant and minority-owned stores Becchi claims to be defending — already run on margins so thin that one bad quarter can close them. That has been true since long before Mamdani took office.
The piece treats the squeeze as the immune system. It isn’t. It’s the disease.
Becchi’s argument also smuggles in a sleight of hand. She frames any policy that lowers prices for one group as automatically imposing costs on another, then concludes that working-class protection requires protecting small business from the working class. If you want to defend the immigrant grocer on Lexington Avenue, the enemy is not the city’s pilot project on 125th Street.
A real concern is fair. The owners of small grocery stores operating on two-percent margins should not be put out of business by a city subsidy they cannot match. That is worth taking seriously in the rollout — perhaps through staged openings, geographic limits, or a procurement preference that funnels contracts back to local suppliers. Becchi is right that these questions deserve serious fiscal and competitive analysis. But this concern is a design question for a pilot, not a verdict on whether the working class deserves a public option at the check-out counter.
The school-board half of the argument is even weaker. Becchi cites DSA-backed candidates in Los Angeles, San Diego, Baltimore, and Minneapolis as evidence of ideological capture. Her proof is that some of these candidates’ agendas extend beyond “conventional school policy” to climate, immigration, LGBTQ+ protections, housing, and labor. That is a list of issues facing real students in real schools — issues where board decisions about facility use, hiring practices, anti-discrimination policy, and curriculum content genuinely affect outcomes. Pretending these are not legitimate school-board concerns is itself an ideological move. It treats a board that engages with climate as captured, and a board that bans books on race as the neutral default. One of those is the natural state of school governance; the other is the recent innovation.
The “low-turnout elections” line is the giveaway. School-board elections have always had low turnout. So have municipal elections generally. If low turnout delegitimizes progressive local governance, it also delegitimizes every school board that has cut music programs, raised property taxes, or contracted with charter operators without a referendum. Local democracy is local democracy. The cure for low turnout is more participation, not disqualifying the winners.
And skip past the obvious question Becchi never quite gets to: how are the kids actually doing on reading and math, and where’s the money to fix it? Property-tax-funded school districts in hollowed-out tax bases don’t have a curriculum problem. They have a funding problem. The board she doesn’t want to talk about.
What should actually be built is a working-class political economy at every level of government where Republicans have abandoned kitchen-table issues. The boring answer, and the one already working here: Alaska already mails every resident an annual dividend from public oil revenue — a sovereign-wealth fund in a red state, putting cash directly into households. North Dakota has run a state-owned bank profitably since 1919. Rural electric cooperatives serve 42 million Americans across 56% of the U.S. landmass. Credit unions serve more than 140 million members as not-for-profit cooperatives. None of these are Soviet. None of them “took over” anything. They’re quiet institutions most of us already belong to without noticing.
Put cash directly into households and the rest of the architecture sorts itself out. That’s the mechanism the expanded Child Tax Credit demonstrated in 2021, when child poverty fell roughly 46% in a single year under the supplemental poverty measure and bounced back when the credit expired. Mamdani’s grocery pilot is a much smaller intervention than any of those. The cooperative alternative — member-owned stores, anchor institutions like libraries and credit unions serving the same neighborhoods — is the version that lasts longer, though building it at scale takes the patient institution-building America hasn’t prioritized in a generation. Either way, the answer starts by admitting there’s a problem the piece never quite names.
Becchi wants you worried about school-board socialists. The immigrant grocer in the Bronx is worried about rent and wholesale prices, which are problems with documented mechanisms and known fixes. Fix the markets — antitrust the wholesale chains, finance small grocers, reform the rents — or pilot the cooperative alternative. Local elections aren’t the threat. Failed local markets are. The dispute Becchi wants to start is between socialism and family business. The real fight is between concentrated private power and the public institutions that constrain it. On that fight, the side running a five-store pilot has the stronger ground.