Is the Future Socialist?
Even if we could go back to the economic and political arrangements of 1996, it’s not clear that anyone wants to.
Hey fam: Just a warning. You’re going to hate this one. It’s super high-level and the ultimate conclusion is, “People don’t like what JVL likes anymore. So we have to get our heads around that.”
Also, it’s a slow burn. I hope you’ll bear with me.
1. The Great Prog Hope
You should not miss Lauren Egan’s interview with Graham Platner. For reals.
There’s a lot to unpack here. So let me give you the good and the bad. And then we’ll jump up to the big question about the S-word.
The good:
He’s a Marine. And an Army veteran, too. He’s rural. He’s tatted up. He wears a henley. Everything about Platner looks like what you want in a populist Democratic candidate. Like John Fetterman and IronStache Randy Bryce before him.
He’s fixated on health care costs, which is a winning issue for Democrats.
He hates the tech-bro billionaires, which is a pretty good issue for Democrats now and will become a great issue if/when the AI bubble bursts.1
The bad:
People say that he is “plainspoken.” And sometimes he is. But sometimes he sounds like this:
We’ve been sending up well-tested people for decades, and the country is in worse straits than it’s ever been. It’s a mess right now, and it’s a mess that is, in my opinion, built specifically by the political class. And it’s time to do something different. It’s time to run a different kind of playbook. It’s time to engage with a different kind of politics.
That sounds like every politician, ever.
Objectively speaking, his analytical frame is wrong. The country is in “worse straits” than it has ever been. That’s because we have an ongoing authoritarian attempt and the rule of law is breaking down. But that’s not what Platner means. He’s talking about kitchen-table issues. And when it comes to economics, we are nowhere near the worse straits we’ve ever been in.2
The oppo dump on Platner started today. I am skeptical that this will be disqualifying. But you never know. Asymmetry reigns.
What I really want to talk about is the state of “socialism” in America today.
2. What Is Socialism?
There’s no useful way to define socialism in the American context because the Cold War turned “socialism” into one of the dirtiest words in politics. The Soviets were the bad guys and they were “socialists”—it said so, right on the label. For eighty years the easiest way to score points was to call your political opponent a “socialist.”
That dynamic began to break down after 1989, partly because the Russkies folded and partly because Americans reached a rough consensus about “socialism.” The consensus went something like this:
Democrats were fully onboard with capitalism, albeit with an interest in government regulations around the margins. And Republicans were fully onboard with Social Security and Medicare, albeit with concerns about budget-balancing and costs.
Conceptually, both sides were in broad agreement about how American economic life should be ordered.3
Hooray for the Uniparty!
But over the last decade the two parties have diverged from that consensus.
The Democratic divergence is a growing belief that health care should be universally provided by the government. There are all sorts of reasons why this might be a good idea—I don’t want to litigate that today. I simply want to note that “Medicare for All (Who Want It)” would have been pretty out-there in 1996,4 but today it’s a mainstream policy goal.
And it’s a big deal. Implementing a system of universal health care in America would be a major redefinition of the social compact and economic reality. Maybe for the good! I just want to be clear that we are talking about a major shift toward a more socialized view of the economic order.
The Republican shift on the economic order has been even bigger.
Republicans used to want deregulation so that businesses could be as red-in-tooth-and-claw as they wished. Today, Republicans want businesses to be completely beholden to the government.
We should be clear about this: Having government control of the marketplace is not “socialism,” exactly. It’s closer to the Chinese system of command economy.5 And when I say “Republicans want” I am not talking about what MAGA influencers say on X. I’m talking about the policies enacted by the Republican-controlled White House and Congress.
The Republican view is that businesses should negotiate directly with the president to carve out economic zones of operation for themselves.
I realize that this is an expansive claim so I want to show my work: