The thing killing American workers isn’t the word “socialism.” It’s the rigged economy that James Freeman of the Wall Street Journal wants you to defend in its name. In his Another Chance for Democrats to Reject Socialism column, the assistant editor uses Karishma Manzur’s graceless concession speech after New Hampshire’s Democratic Senate primary to demand that the party reaffirm “economic liberty” and reject what he calls a socialist “takeover.”
Let me be plain about something before we go further. Authoritarian socialism in the twentieth century killed tens of millions and crushed the workers it claimed to free. That’s the verdict, and I’m not here to relitigate it. Manzur lost the primary. That’s also not in dispute. Her concession speech was graceless — telling the winner to move further in the direction that just got her crushed by 33 points is a fair criticism, and it applies to sore losers of any ideology.
But neither fact means what Freeman needs it to mean. Manzur losing a primary is not the same as voters rejecting the welfare state. New Hampshire voters already have Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, the public library, the rural electric co-op that wired their grandparents’ farms. They’ve got it. They like it. They will fight to keep it. Calling any expansion of that floor “socialist” is what needs defending, not the other way around.
And the 33-point margin is the wrong number for Freeman’s story. If there were a coordinated takeover of party machinery, the voters would be the last to know. They didn’t miss it. They voted the other way, by two to one, in the most direct ballot a primary electorate gets. Freeman does not engage with that evidence. He moves on to demanding that Chris Pappas publicly humiliate the loser.
Freeman wants to make a federal case out of a Club for Growth scorecard showing Pappas votes more often against free markets than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez does. That is interesting data. It is also exactly what you’d expect from a Democrat who has won a purple district four times. Pappas represents a place where “centrist” means voting with labor on wages and with small business on regulation, and occasionally ticking “present” on something AOC also ticks “present” on. The scorecard tells you Pappas is responsive to his constituents. It does not tell you he is leading a revolution.
Here’s the thing the “economic liberty” framework skips past: in America, that phrase almost always means freedom for owners of capital and precarity for everyone else. The mortgage-interest deduction subsidizes homeowners. The employer health-insurance exclusion subsidizes people whose employers provide coverage. The carried-interest loophole subsidizes investment managers. The corporate income tax was 52 percent in 1968 and is 21 percent now; the effective rate on many wealthy households is lower than on their employees. None of those are “economic liberty” for workers. They are transfers to people who already own stuff, paid for by the rest of us. “Economic liberty,” as currently configured, is a business model that only pencils out because somebody else eats the cost.
And who eats it? The worker without bargaining power who can’t push for a raise because the local employer has little real competition — one major buyer of labor in town, which means wages get set by what suits the employer, not the worker. The family that can’t afford childcare because the cost rivals in-state college tuition in most states, while the workers providing it earn barely more than fast-food wages — so centers either charge what the family can’t pay or pay the workers what doesn’t keep them. They close. The workers quit. Kids lose the slot. The homeowner whose hospital bill bankrupted them. The 22-year-old whose student loan payment is larger than their rent. The retired couple in a nursing home owned by a private equity firm that loaded it with debt, sold the building, and left town with the silverware. These are the choices being made right now, in the name of “economic liberty.” These are the costs that show up on somebody else’s balance sheet.
I’m not anti-market. I’m anti-extraction, and there is a Grand Canyon between the two. The market is superb at allocating sandwiches and sneakers and ten thousand ordinary goods. It is catastrophically bad at allocating chemotherapy or childcare or housing. The problem isn’t the absence of “economic liberty.” The problem is the absence of bargaining institutions that would let ordinary workers capture the gains they produce.
Freeman wants the Democrats to run from a word. The working alternative — the thing every other rich democracy has built, the thing America already has the bones of — is neither socialist nor a retreat from government. It is universal healthcare. It is paid family leave. It is a child allowance. The Columbia Center on Poverty and Social Policy estimated that the 2021 Child Tax Credit cut child poverty by roughly 46 percent in a single year — that’s American, recent, measured, and reversible, because we let it lapse. Medicare has had 65-year-olds in it for sixty years without producing collectivization. Rural electric co-ops deliver power to 42 million Americans without anyone noticing they’re member-owned utilities. The Bank of North Dakota has been profitable every year since 1919, and nobody has ever called Bismarck a Kremlin.
New Hampshire’s motto is “Live Free or Die.” Fine. But freedom for whom? Freedom for the landlord to evict the family that can’t pay rent after a hospital stay? Freedom for the private equity fund to buy the hospital, load it with debt, and bill you for the parking? Freedom for the monopolist to charge whatever the local market will bear? That isn’t freedom. That’s extraction. And it isn’t socialism’s opposite — it’s the thing the universal welfare state was built to civilize.
The Democrats shouldn’t be running from “socialism.” They should be running toward the institutions that work. Pappas’s job is to represent the people who chose him by two to one — cheaper groceries, lower drug prices, functioning schools, hospitals that don’t close on a Tuesday. Not to perform loyalty tests for the Wall Street Journal’s comfort. The way you turn a two-to-one primary win into a two-to-one general election is to keep delivering for the people in it. That’s how you win the next one after that. Freeman’s column won’t change a single New Hampshire voter’s mind. Anyway — the work is in the district.