The Republicans are not running out of anti-communist vocabulary; they are running out of an economic argument that survives contact with a rent increase.
Alex Leary’s Wall Street Journal report, “Is America Still Afraid of Socialism?” describes Republican candidates trying to make November 3 a referendum on a word: a September Gallup poll found 43% of Americans view socialism favorably, the highest share in its records, and socialism outpolls capitalism among voters ages 18 to 34, 57% to 43%. Meanwhile the party has begun recalibrating on affordability. So the answer, apparently, is to say the word louder. Trump invoked communism 15 times at the September Republican convention. He has personally framed and led the messaging effort, stepping up campaign events through October. AdImpact found more than $70 million in television spending focused on socialism or communism, and communism surfaced in more than 880 episodes of conservative podcasts since Oct. 1. The reach is large. The persuasion is not. The labels have not become harmless. They have become unable to answer the question voters are asking.
The label still has an edge, and pretending otherwise would make this column worthless. A September NBC News poll found 64% of voters 65 and older view socialism negatively, against 33% of those under 30. In South Florida, a House Democratic leader stops by a Cuban bakery and two local bakery chains rush out to disavow socialism — one of them had not even hosted him. That is not noise. That is a signal. Republicans at the Illinois State Fair handed out placards reading “Common Sense Over Communism.” At an Atlanta golf club, candidates staged a “Living Under Communism” event. Trump offers membership in an “Anti-Communist Club.” None of that proves a majority of voters wants communism. It proves the word has been wired into the party’s machinery, and machinery lasts after conviction fades. “You’re not a communist, right?” is a campaign slogan, not a theory of political economy.
Start with the honest half, because there are two of them, and the second one is mine.
The twentieth-century communist states — Russia, China, Cambodia — were catastrophes. The death tolls were staggering. Workers were crushed by the people who claimed to be liberating them. That verdict is settled and I am not here to relitigate it. Denmark is not the gulag. Mondragon has no secret police. The word was hijacked by the people who built the worst version of it, and that is not the same as the word being useful forever.
And some of what is being flattened into a smear is not a smear. Will Lawrence, the 36-year-old Michigan candidate running neck-and-neck with Republican Rep. Tom Barrett, is a former member of the Democratic Socialists of America who has distanced himself from some of his earlier positions: redistributing land and wealth, abolishing the police, the “forced nationalization” of fossil fuel companies. If that is what a man says, say what he says. I will not pretend the receipts are worse than they are. The Democratic side does not get a free pass, and those positions deserve answers. The race’s test is whether voters care more about Lawrence’s old words or his present campaign on pocketbook issues, data centers, the war with Iran, and widening income disparity.
And I use the Nordic model as a receipt, not a talisman. Sweden’s school-voucher system has been associated with increased segregation, while the effort to pin falling PISA scores on school choice remains contested. Aging populations are pressing Nordic budgets. Those pressures matter. They are reasons to build carefully, not reasons to confuse public provision with the twentieth-century catastrophe. They certainly do not make concentrated private power an acceptable owner of the emergency room.
Now the demolition. Donald Trump did not merely tolerate this. White House advisers spent months testing anticommunist rhetoric, and Trump personally framed and led the push; the strategy hardened after the election of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. This is not messaging that wandered into the campaign. It is messaging being built from the top.
Meanwhile the party has decided to make this election about a word instead of about the bill. Republicans want November 3 to be a referendum on Democratic extremism rather than rising prices and the war with Iran, even though widespread economic frustration complicates that plan. Changing the question is not persuasion. It is an admission that the original question is hard. And here is the contradiction the ad buy will not fix. The same party spent years calling Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi socialists while the Trump administration took ownership stakes in private companies and promised a $5,000 check for every adult if Republicans retain Congress — a proposal pegged at more than $1 trillion. It gave Xi Jinping a lavish reception in September, and some of its own members objected. Then the party that is buying pieces of private companies, promising cash to everybody, and entertaining Beijing wants to have a serious talk with you about property rights. A party cannot denounce public power as communism while offering public power as a campaign perk. It can try. The receipts are not subtle. Trump once branded Zohran Mamdani a communist before treating him warmly. That is not a strategy. It is selective labeling.
ABBA had this figured out in 1980: “The Winner Takes It All.” Except they are not playing for the money. They are playing for the word, and the word is polling at 43% favorable.
Now ask who really pays. A higher drug price is not an insult to socialism. It is money moving from a patient to whoever controls the pricing decision. A rent increase is not an insult to capitalism. It is money moving from a tenant to the owner or lender who can raise it. A $5,000 check is not revolutionary by itself. It is a promise, and its cost could exceed $1 trillion. Markets should be allowed to make mistakes. They should not be allowed to call their mistakes somebody else’s bill. The twentieth-century verdict does not answer whether a family can afford treatment, a tenant can keep a lease, or a drug company can set a price without anyone else having a meaningful say.
Anyway. The GOP spent years calling more mainstream Democrats, including Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi, socialists. That overreach made the label cheap. You cannot spend years calling everybody on the other side a socialist and then expect the word to frighten anybody in November.
The retreat is visible, and it is not because Republicans ran out of synonyms. Barrett’s strategist said, “Attacks that would normally be killshots get a shrug by voters.” Barrett stopped emphasizing the word “socialism” last month. Carlos Curbelo, a former Republican congressman, put it plainly: “For most voters, the suggestion that some Democratic candidates are actual communists is harder to believe.” The cue still fires. It no longer proves what it used to prove. And it is not because young voters have stopped asking who bears the cost of a bad economy — they are a key 2026 midterm target for both parties. They are asking it with more precision than the slogans allow. A voter can favor a public option and still want competitive markets. A voter can support taxing billionaires and still distrust concentrated power. “Socialism” cannot carry both questions. It has been asked to. Most US voters already say the economy is worsening. Young voters are not merely a target for both parties; they are the reason the old script is losing the room.
Which leaves the interesting part, and it is not the one on the billboards. Will Lawrence put it better than the professionals: people understand that politics now is “more about top vs. bottom than left vs. right.” He is right, and I will translate it for the professionals, because nobody else will. Top versus bottom is an ownership question. Who owns the house? Who owns the medicine? Who owns the pension account? The label is a distraction from the only fight that has ever had a real constituency on both sides.
The Republican retreat confirms it. JD Vance, who sees a 2028 presidential bid waiting beyond these midterms, told fellow Republicans: “You don’t stop socialism by throwing slogans at people about the free market. As much as I love the free market, you stop socialism by making people’s lives better.” That is the ownership question in the mouth of a Republican. You do not defeat a voter’s demand with a pejorative. You defeat it with a program that makes the demand less urgent.
Meanwhile, the other half of the field has answered an ownership question with a pledge: more than 60 Democratic candidates, including 10 sitting members of Congress, declaring their support for capitalism. A pledge is not a program. A pledge says: this arrangement is the default, and I intend to keep it. That is a perfectly respectable thing for a candidate to want. It is not a rebuttal to a voter asking who owns the thing. The midterms could also bring a new crop of Democratic socialists into Congress, expanding the movement inside the party and forcing Republicans to make harder calculations. Either way, the election will not consist only of a referendum on one adjective. It will be a fight over who gets to make economic life work — and who owns the machinery when it does.
So what do we build? Not a word. An institution. And there are three answers to the ownership question, and all three are already running somewhere.
The first is to change the owner. In the Basque Country, Mondragon has been doing it since 1956: the workers own the firm, the firm competes in a market, and the state does not run it. That last part is the whole point, and it is why the word is such a poor description of it — this is not the gulag, it is a different owner. And it is not magic. Worker ownership does not abolish failure. It changes who bears the risk. When the money runs out, the worker-owners share the losses; there is no distant shareholder to absorb them. Both sides of worker ownership are true. It puts more decision-making in the hands of the people doing the work, and it puts more of the risk in the same hands.
My grandfather sat on the boards of a dairy cooperative and a rural electric cooperative in western Minnesota, and the same machinery is already here. A home-care worker cooperative in the Bronx puts care workers and the people receiving care under one roof of ownership. Rural electric cooperatives still light up rural America. Credit unions put members rather than distant shareholders in charge. Employee-ownership plans have become one of the country’s most bipartisan ownership ideas, with Republican champions going back decades.
The second is to build the floor so the worker can move. Denmark’s version has a name — flexicurity — and it is three things: it is easy to fire you; a laid-off Dane can draw unemployment insurance through a union-administered system; and the state spends money retraining people and placing them in the next job. It protects the worker, not the job. That dissolves the fake American choice between protecting every job forever and telling people to fend for themselves. Denmark and Sweden lean on sectoral bargaining to make the transition stick. Here, bargaining remains mostly firm by firm, which leaves each worker to negotiate alone against an employer who can move capital, divide work, or import a replacement. The machinery around the job does the real work.
And somebody pays for it, so here is the sentence the Nordic romance always skips: Nordic countries collect a larger share of GDP in taxes than the United States and use a broad sales tax that hits the waitstaff as hard as the orthodontist. Nobody’s latte is subsidized by the billionaires. It is a thing an entire society buys for itself, on purpose, with the price tag printed on the front. Every summer I sat at my aunt’s kitchen table in Gothenburg while the adults argued about elder care as if it were a household chore, and what I could not get past as a kid was how boring it all was. That is the point. Boring, useful, and theirs.
The third is the experiment we have already run ourselves. In 2021, we expanded the Child Tax Credit into a monthly, near-universal payment. Census researchers estimated that child poverty under the Supplemental Poverty Measure fell 46% in a single year, from 9.7% to 5.2%, lifting 2.9 million children out of poverty. When the expansion lapsed, child poverty rose again. That sequence does not prove the payment did all the work. It does show that the experiment was not permanent. American children, American dollars. It was called socialism for most of its life. It was a check in the mail.
Now the hard part, because a column that only imports is a brochure. The Nordic machine is not the Nordic policy. It is union density, employers organized to bargain with each other, unemployment insurance run by unions, a tax authority that collects and a bureaucracy that delivers. America has separate state tax systems, parties too weak to deliver what they promise, campaign finance that hands policy to whoever can pay for the ad — which is, conveniently, the party spending $70 million on communism right now — an anti-tax orthodoxy forty years in the making, and a long habit of splitting working-class coalitions along racial lines before they can do any bargaining at all.
Remind me of the obstacle again. It is not Danish character. It is a century of institutions. The policy is the tip. The institutions are the iceberg. And some of it fits under existing American law this year: a child allowance, because we have already run the experiment; state wage boards for home care and fast food; public banking, since North Dakota has operated a state bank since 1919 and nobody ever put Bismarck behind an Iron Curtain; community land trusts to take homes off the speculation market while families keep building equity; Alaska’s Permanent Fund, which pays eligible residents an annual dividend from oil revenue in one of the reddest states in the union. The slow, unglamorous, decades-long piece is union density and bargaining coverage, and there is no shortcut around doing it.
Union membership in America is roughly one in ten workers, with bargaining coverage a little higher. Sectoral bargaining would extend that table: people negotiating the price of their work together, instead of one worker asking a company that can replace her. A public option is not a command to shut down private insurance. It is a way for patients to choose a provider that does not have to answer to shareholders before it answers to patients. None of that requires the state to own every shop. It changes who has a vote, who bargains, and which provider is available. I’m not anti-market. I’m anti-extraction. A worker cooperative still has to make a good product. A public option still has to deliver care. The point is not to abolish the price signal. It is to stop making a patient’s lack of leverage look like a virtue.
So the word goes, and the question stays. Who owns the house? Who sets the price of the medicine? Who is the employer of last resort? Every one of those has an owner on the other side of it, and every one of them already has a working answer on the shelf: a home-care cooperative in the Bronx, a workers’ cooperative in the Basque Country, a bank in Bismarck, an oil dividend in Juneau. Not the gulag. Not the strip-mine. A menu — and it has been a menu the whole time. The only thing that ever made it look like two items was the insistence on using one word for one side and a different word for the other. Build the member-owned firm, the sectoral bargain, the public option, and the child allowance; then make the next election about whether they work. The label has done enough damage. We are here for the next sentence.
Programs don’t lose to adjectives. The floor is still there. Let’s build it.