This is opposition research dressed as a constitutional lecture. In a Fox News op-ed titled JONATHAN TURLEY: Talarico brings a touch of Trotsky to the Texas Senate race, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley takes a six-year-old climate-forum clip from Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico and rebuilds it as a Trotskyist manifesto. Turley’s thesis: Talarico’s 2025 “proud capitalist” line is a mask for the revolutionary he was in 2020. The mask claim is the smear. The premise behind it is wrong.
Read Talarico’s sentence. Not the headline Turley cut it down to — the actual one. “I think only ending the ways that all three of those oppressive systems work together are we gonna be able to begin the process of dismantling them.” Three things get dismantled together: climate change, white supremacy, and capitalism, grouped as “oppressive systems.” That is the cadence of a state rep speaking to a friendly audience at an Austin Sierra Club climate conference in 2020. It is not a program.
Communism, as it was actually built in the twentieth century, was a real catastrophe — I won’t relitigate it. But pasting “Trotsky” onto every Democrat who says “dismantle” is not argument. It’s a thought-stopper dressed up as a book plug.
One word — “dismantle” — is doing all the work in Turley’s column, and “dismantle” can mean many things. It can mean the gulag. It can mean seizing the means of production. It can also mean — and this is the part Turley never engages with — phasing out fossil fuel subsidies, building public options for childcare and healthcare, expanding cooperatives, treating housing as shelter rather than as an asset class. The actual menu of what American reformers are arguing for, in 2026, in words they would defend on the record.
Trotsky had a program. It ran through a one-party state, the expropriation of the peasantry, forced collectivization, the Red Army at the gates of Warsaw, and the gulag archipelago. “Dismantle capitalism” in 2020 Austin academic-speak meant something like regulate carbon, expand voting rights, raise wages. Turley has taught constitutional law for decades. He knows the operative phrase in Talarico’s sentence is “the ways that all three of those oppressive systems work together.” The target is the intersection. It is not the cash register.
Six years is a long time. Talarico was a state representative in 2020. He is now a US Senate nominee. People change. The climate movement itself spent 2020 arguing about “system change” and 2025 arguing about permitting reform and LNG export terminals. Locking a candidate to his first political language is a trick. Turley is using it.
The constitutional pageant is where the column falls apart. Turley reaches for Adam Smith, the Founders, and the 250th anniversary of Wealth of Nations. Smith was Scottish. He was not a Founder. The Founders were a coalition that argued with each other about economics from day one: Hamilton wanted a national bank and protective tariffs, Jefferson wanted yeoman farms, Madison wanted a Bill of Rights. None of them agreed with Smith completely; several agreed with him not at all. There is no Founder consensus on free-market capitalism as founding doctrine. There is a permanent American argument about it.
The free-market column in the Founders’ thought is real. So is the enumerated power to regulate commerce. So is the post-1937 constitutional order that accepts labor law, antitrust, the SEC, the FDIC, the EPA. American capitalism has been “dismantled” and rebuilt about once a generation since 1776, often by Republicans. Calling a Texas state rep Trotsky because he used a verb at a climate forum is not constitutional law. It is mood music.
Turley’s column works because it never names a mechanism. What does dismantling capitalism actually do to a Texan? He does not say. Does Talarico want to seize the refineries in Houston? Abolish the mortgage market? Nationalize the cattle feedlots? Turley leaves every question blank, because filling it in would break the panic. The reader supplies gulags, bread lines, AOC — anything to convert a five-word verb into a civilizational threat. The conversion is the entire column.
Then comes the parade. Mamdani, Ocasio-Cortez, Newsom, Harris, the DSA, a Harvard and Yale op-ed on constitutionalism, the Supreme Court. Every name is doing the same work — converting a campus verb into a civilizational threat. If the threat were real, one mechanism would do. The parade is what you reach for when the mechanism is missing. And sneering at college-educated voters as “armchair revolutionaries” with “robotic rote delivery of a Young Pioneer camp” — that’s a sneer aimed downward, at the voters themselves. Which is the move that should make a serious conservative uncomfortable.
The thing Turley doesn’t mention, because naming it would blow up the column: America already runs social-democratic institutions that no one in his coalition calls socialism. Social Security. Medicare — single-payer healthcare for every American over sixty-five, the program Turley’s own side denounces as socialism every time someone proposes expanding it. Rural electric cooperatives — about 900 of them, serving forty-two million Americans, member-owned utilities that wired the countryside when the investor-owned companies wouldn’t. Credit unions — more than 140 million members, member-owned banks you’ve probably used this week. The Bank of North Dakota, state-owned, profitable every year since 1919. Alaska’s Permanent Fund, mailing every Alaskan an oil dividend from a sovereign wealth fund. Half the country’s grandparents get their healthcare through a single-payer program that, if proposed tomorrow, would be denounced as socialism on this same page.
The countries Turley never names are the boring social democracies of Northern Europe. Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland. High-tax, open-market capitalism with universal healthcare, paid family leave, sectoral bargaining, and sovereign wealth funds. Civilizations survived. Industries thrived. The Danish welfare state is the most boring thing on earth. People there treat it like the interstate.
Or Mondragon, the worker-owned federation in Spain’s Basque Country, which has been running since 1956 and is still not a gulag.
Or our own 2021 Child Tax Credit. American, recent, measured. By the Columbia Center on Poverty and Social Policy’s count, child poverty in the United States fell forty-six percent in a single year — from 9.7 percent to 5.2 percent — when the expanded monthly credit was in effect, lifting roughly 2.9 million children out of poverty. When the policy lapsed at the start of 2022, child poverty snapped back. That’s what one specific policy lever did. Not “dismantling capitalism.” Just giving families cash.
To his credit, Turley is right about one thing. Candidates’ past words do matter, and “proud capitalist” is a claim voters are allowed to test. Talarico did say the word. The video is real. The pivot to “proud capitalist” is awkward, and a smart candidate doesn’t say “dismantle” if he doesn’t want to be quoted on it. Talarico should answer for what he said in 2020. A state legislator who voted and spoke one way six years ago and now claims another way owes voters an explanation. That is the fair question.
But the fair question is not Turley’s question. His question is whether Talarico is a Trotskyist in disguise. The answer is no, and the proof is that he has to drag in Mamdani, Newsom, and a Yale professor to make it feel like maybe. Take the parade away and you are left with a state rep who used campus rhetoric at a campus event and is now running for the United States Senate. That is not a revolution. That is Texas.
Notice what’s missing from Turley’s column: any actual policy. The whole piece is a sneer about a word. That’s the tell. A serious critique of socialism would name the policies, name the countries, and walk through what works and what doesn’t. Turley can’t go there, because the working alternatives would dissolve his frame on contact.
So let me name what gets built instead. Expand the Child Tax Credit — it worked, and it’s sitting on the shelf. Pass a public option for healthcare. Legalize sectoral wage boards the way several states already do. Build a sovereign wealth fund the way Alaska already does. Tax land value the way almost every economist on earth agrees makes sense. None of that is a gulag. All of it is on the shelf. The country Turley keeps telling us to defend could actually defend itself better with most of it.
What Texas deserves is a Senate race judged on the actual seat — the Republican incumbent’s votes on energy, the border, tariffs, judges, weighed against Talarico’s record and his 2025 platform. Voters deserve a choice between those two records, with the 2020 clip weighed honestly against both. The way Turley has done it — dredge, dress, panic, publish — is how a race gets rigged. The only thing the word “dismantle” dismantles is the conversation about which pieces to pick up.