The 43% of Americans who now view socialism positively are not suffering from amnesia. They are doing the math on a boiler that died in January, on rent that has outpaced wages for a generation, on a labor market where productivity gains flow upward instead of into paychecks. Jonathan Turley, in his Fox News column, calls them “dupes.” He warns that the Democratic Socialists of America are the modern descendants of the Jacobins and says that if you wait long enough, socialism comes back into style with generations who have no memory of past failures. His warning is a costume. The clothes are Marx and the French Revolution. The body underneath is the old story: blame the workers for noticing that the deal they were sold stopped working.
Turley wants us to imagine a voter who has heard about rent, about medical bills, about a furnace that dies in a cold city — the five-thousand-dollar bill, the credit card at twenty-something percent, the “buy now, pay later” loan at thirty — and decided that Adam Smith’s invisible hand sounds good in theory but is a bad landlord in practice. That voter is not a dupe. That voter has done the math.
The math is not hard. Median rent has outpaced median wages for an entire generation. A worker making twenty dollars an hour cannot afford a one-bedroom apartment in the city where they work. Roughly four in ten Americans cannot cover a four-hundred-dollar emergency; a single emergency-room visit can be a bankruptcy filing; education debt sits above a trillion dollars. The promise that housing, food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation should be common goods and utilities is, at root, a promise that the furnace gets fixed before the family freezes and the appendectomy does not become a lien on a young person’s wages for twenty years. That is not Marxism. That is a thermostat. The Jacobins did not invent the deductible.
The historical move — drawing a line from Zohran Mamdani to the French Revolution — is the same trick deployed whenever a redistributive proposal gains traction. Mamdani’s actual platform is municipal: rent stabilization, free buses, city-owned grocery stores. None of that is guillotining the aristocracy. The comparison bypasses the policy debate and reaches straight for blood and terror. It works because most readers do not know what a Jacobin actually proposed; they just remember the imagery.
To be fair to Turley, he is right about some things. The 250th anniversary of The Wealth of Nations is real, and the track record of centrally planned economies includes genuine failures. The USSR did collapse. Mao’s Great Leap Forward did kill tens of millions by famine. Venezuela did suffer catastrophic hyperinflation. Turley is also right that some of the DSA’s more baroque internal schemes — the unicameral fever dreams, the elected-justice proposals — are unserious ideas from people who have never met a budget. None of that is contested by serious democratic socialists, who distinguish their proposals — public options inside market economies, robust labor protections, antitrust enforcement — from command economies. The democratic socialist tradition runs through Nordic social democracies, not through the Politburo.
Conceding that, however, does not get Turley to his conclusion. The failure of past socialist experiments does not answer the question of why capitalism is producing a generation that holds more college debt, less housing security, and shorter life expectancy than their parents did. The same polling context he does not quote shows support for socialism rising sharply among voters under forty, who cite housing affordability, medical debt, and student loans as their top concerns. These voters are not forgetting Soviet grain harvests. They are responding to a system where their parents could afford a house on one income and they cannot. The socialists are not the cause of the rent-to-wage gap. The gap is the cause of the socialists.
Turley’s most inflammatory passage cites a poll finding that roughly 60 percent of Democrats responded positively to “the idea of a military coup to remove President Donald Trump.” That figure deserves scrutiny. But it also serves as a distraction. The question conflates opposition to Trump’s specific conduct with opposition to democracy itself. Polarization is the underlying phenomenon — not socialism.
Turley ends by quoting Marx’s line that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. He intends the farce to be the DSA. The farce is actually his column. Here is what he will not say: the policies that produced the affordability crisis are the ones his side spent decades championing. Deregulation produced the 2008 collapse. Trade agreements shipped manufacturing jobs overseas while the wages of those who stayed stagnated. Tax cuts for the wealthy widened the gap between productivity and compensation. Housing supply was throttled by local zoning rules the right has historically defended. The young voters drifting toward socialism are not dupes; they are the bill-payers for an experiment that did not deliver.
So build the alternative. Build housing: legalize mid-rise apartment construction across most residential lots in most American cities, pair it with social housing and a public-option mortgage, and watch rents fall. Build healthcare: extend Medicare to cover everyone and let the existing system compete on price. Build childcare and elder care that do not price out two working parents, funded the way Social Security funds retirement. Build unions: pass the PRO Act and let workers organize without employer intimidation. Build infrastructure that works — bridges, trains, water mains, the grid. Build a tax code that asks the people who benefited most from the last forty years to help pay for the next forty.
None of this is Jacobin fantasy. It is the Nordic social democracies that have consistently outranked the United States on most standard quality-of-life measures. History does not repeat, and noticing that the system is failing the people in it does not require amnesia. If Turley wants a generation to stop listening to Marx, he should tell them why they should trust the market. He is not doing that. He is telling them they are dupes for noticing the rent. The answer to bad socialism is not Jacobin-shaming. It is a capitalism that delivers.