One-Third of Democrats Call Themselves Socialists. Good.

A third of Democrats now call themselves socialists. The word is doing its old job — scaring half the country about a thing that isn’t socialism, while quietly describing a thing that already exists, works, and roughly forty percent of Americans already belong to without knowing it.

Let me say the first part fast so we can move on. Communism as it was actually built in the twentieth century — Russia, China, Cambodia — was a catastrophe. Tens of millions dead. Workers crushed under the regimes that claimed to liberate them. That isn’t a verdict I relitigate. The people now calling themselves socialists in Democratic primaries are not that. The label “socialism” doing the scary work in conservative rhetoric — and this week, in a House resolution condemning the DSA by name — is pointing at a ghost.

So what is it pointing at?

It’s pointing at universal healthcare — which we already have for everyone over sixty-five, through a program called Medicare that no one wants to abolish. It’s pointing at a child allowance — which we briefly had in 2021, when the expanded Child Tax Credit cut child poverty nearly in half by the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, from 9.7% to 5.2% — and which reverted to its old, worse state the moment the expansion lapsed. It’s pointing at childcare, which every other rich country subsidizes because the arithmetic refuses to close without public subsidy, as any parent who has looked at a daycare invoice can tell you. It’s pointing at labor rights — a union being a thousand people negotiating one price together, which is a market mechanism with a bad reputation from the Cold War, not a manifesto.

You probably already belong to a cooperative. If you have a credit-union card in your wallet, you do — and credit unions now serve about a hundred and forty-five million Americans. If you have ever bought anything at Ace Hardware, you’re patronizing one. Land O’Lakes is one. Ocean Spray is one. REI is one. Rural electric cooperatives, member-owned utilities that wired the American countryside when the investor-owned companies decided it wasn’t profitable, serve about forty-two million people across fifty-six percent of the country’s landmass. None of those people have ever attended a Politburo meeting, which is the tell.

Now here’s the part the socialism scare never mentions: the countries that built the actual alternative are not the gulag. They’re high-tax, open-market, private-property democracies with strong welfare states. Denmark has universal healthcare and a year of paid parental leave. Sweden has school vouchers and a 25% sales tax that everyone — everyone — pays. Norway turned its oil into a two-trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund that owns about one and a half percent of all publicly listed companies on earth. These are not command economies. They are capitalism with the trap doors welded shut.

The American politicians now getting the most attention — Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed insisting he’d rather be “a capitalist who has actually read about capitalism,” New York’s Zohran Mamdani winning on affordable housing, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rejoining the DSA — are not proposing any of that. They are proposing pieces of it. Universal childcare. A public option. Rent stabilization. Labor protections. The boring, specific, unsexy policies that every other rich country has some version of, and that work. Their reluctance to embrace the label is itself a clue: the misframing has worked so well that even the candidates running on these policies spend half their time disclaiming the word for them.

Here’s what I want to leave you with, because it matters more than the label debate: the thing on the table is not whether America becomes Sweden. Sweden took the better part of a century to build the institutional foundation — high union density, sectoral bargaining, organized employers willing to sit across the table from organized labor. We have a fraction of that machinery. Policy is the visible tip; institutions are the iceberg. But the answer to the institutional gap is not to wait — it is to use the ones already here. The Child Tax Credit expansion was American. Medicare was American. The GI Bill was American. Rural electric co-ops were American. The Bank of North Dakota — state-owned, profitable every year since 1919, in the reddest state in the union — is American. The Alaska Permanent Fund, which sends every Alaskan a dividend from publicly owned oil revenue, is American. These are not Nordic imports. They are the country’s own precedents for doing what the socialism scare says cannot be done.

We have been doing versions of this for a century. The argument is not about whether to start. It’s about whether to admit we already do, and whether to do more.

Anyway.