The Important Missing Word That Discredits the Centrists’ New Letter

So Democratic Congressman Tom Suozzi of Long Island has come out swinging against the socialists. “We are capitalist, not socialist,” reads a letter that The New York Times reports he and 14 other legislators signed and began circulating last week. This went out Thursday, two days after three self-described democratic socialists backed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani won Democratic congressional primaries in the city.The letter, which is on the short and vague side, states two broad principles to which the signatories adhere. The first is “growth, competition, and broad prosperity.” “Growth” and “prosperity” are time-honored centrist buzzwords, as they’re hoisted into use to send the message that these Democrats value economic dynamism more than “fairness,” which is a word that moderates fear signals endorsement of excessive statism, although interestingly, the concept is tucked into the first sentence (“We believe in a growing, fair, and competitive economy…”). The second is “safety, security, and human dignity,” under which the letter lists four components: fiscal discipline, a government that works, free speech, and patriotism.There’s nothing wrong with these things as far as they go. But these platitudes don’t go far enough. In particular, there’s one big missing word. I’ll circle back to that, but first, let’s talk about why these democratic socialists are winning in some places. The first reason is that people are really pissed off at a system they see as totally rigged. Suozzi is roughly my age. He and I grew up in a United States in the 1960s and ’70s that Lord knows had many problems, but that was at least trying to build a robust middle class and was taxing excessive wealth appropriately.The Gini coefficient is a number that measures economic inequality. Like golf, lower scores are better, and the lowest Gini scores, invariably logged by the Scandinavian countries, are in the mid-20s. The highest is always South Africa, in the low-60s.When Suozzi and I were toddlers, the U.S. number was fairly high—around 37. Then came the Great Society—the civil rights, fair housing, and other anti-discrimination laws that first brought large numbers of Black families into the middle class, and other anti-poverty programs. The right has sold middle America on the idea that the Great Society—which I’d hope most Democrats today are proud of, but much of which was, as the word is used today, “socialism”—was a failure. But by the 1980s, right before Ronald Reagan took office, the U.S. Gini number reached its lowest point in modern history, 34.7.Then came Reagan and supply-side economics and the war on the War on Poverty. By the time Bill Clinton took office, the number was north of 40. Today it’s 42 and climbing. We’re worse than Russia and Iraq and about on par with Argentina and Mexico.People aren’t stupid. They may not know what the Gini coefficient is or who Gini was (an Italian economist), but they know what’s been happening to the country and their money in their bones. And they know how they’re being ripped off by corporate actors, as these hidden junk fees become more and more just a fact of life, especially for working-class people paying rent to private-equity landlords or trying to take their kids to a ball game. So, it’s small wonder that more people are voting for the candidates who are saying most emphatically that they’re going to try to do something about all that—specifically, fighting back against the people who’ve been cheating the middle- and lower-classes for years. The second reason socialists are winning elections is that the Democratic base has moved well to the left of where it was even just 10 years ago. Early this year, The New Republic commissioned a poll of 2,400 rank-and-file Democrats. We asked respondents to identify themselves ideologically, giving them five choices: conservative, moderate, moderate-to-liberal, liberal, and progressive. There were little descriptions of each, so it should have been clear to all that “progressive” was the left-most choice.I thought “progressive” was going to finish third. It finished first (within the margin of error): Progressive got 32 percent, liberal 31, and moderate-to-liberal 21. Moderate was way back at 12 percent. Back in the Obama days, moderates were around 35 percent of the party. Indeed, liberal overtook moderate as the top Democratic category only around 2012, according to Pew. So that’s a huge change. Now it’s true that other polls, which unlike TNR’s didn’t offer five categories, show a higher moderate share, but the overall move leftward by Democratic base voters is undeniable. They haven’t done so because they want the government to take over the means of production.