That Word Does Not Mean What You Scream It Means

Last summer, when a 33-year-old democratic socialist won New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, the President of the United States announced to the nation that a “100% Communist Lunatic” was on his way to City Hall [1]. Cable’s loudest hosts ran with it for months — communism at the gates, the five boroughs about to be collectivized, breadlines on Broadway. There was just one problem, which every expert consulted managed to state within a single news cycle: the man is not a communist, his platform is not communism, and the claim is simply false [2].

But this isn’t really about one mayor. It’s about a habit. For years now, the conservative talk-circuit — the same one we’ve previously established leaves its exclusive viewers knowing less than people who watch nothing at all — has run a nightly seminar on the coming communist takeover of America, delivered by hosts who could not define communism with the dictionary open and a librarian on retainer. They use communism, socialism, and democratic socialism interchangeably, like a man swinging one wrench at three different bolts, and the fact that they never get corrected on their own air tells you everything about what that air is for.

So let’s do the thing they won’t. Three words, three definitions, receipts attached. This will take five minutes, which is apparently four minutes and fifty seconds longer than anyone in a primetime chair has ever spent on it.

The actual definitions, for the people in the back

Communism is a revolutionary doctrine aiming at a classless society in which private property is abolished and everything is owned in common [3]. In every real-world attempt — the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, North Korea — it has meant a one-party state, no free elections, no free press, no private enterprise, and a command economy where the government decides what gets made and who gets it. The defining features are the abolition of private property and the absence of democracy. Hold onto those two, because they’re the whole test.

Socialism is a broader, older family of ideas whose core is social ownership of the means of production — factories, utilities, and the like owned collectively rather than by private shareholders [4]. It’s a spectrum, not a switch, and history has seen democratic versions and authoritarian ones. Note what socialism is not: it is not “the government does things.” A public library is not the Politburo.

Democratic socialism — the American flavor in question — puts the load-bearing word first. In the Democratic Socialists of America’s own words, the belief is that the economy and society should be run democratically to meet human needs [5]. Everything travels through the ballot box, the very institution communism abolishes on day one. A democratic socialist who loses an election… goes home and tries to win the next one. You’ll notice that’s not how anything worked in East Germany.

And here’s the twist the shouting class truly cannot process: what America’s most famous “democratic socialists” — Sanders, AOC, that lunatic mayor — actually campaign on is milder still. Universal health care, childcare, higher wages, stronger unions, public transit that works. That’s not even textbook democratic socialism; it’s social democracy — a market economy with a serious safety net, the Nordic setup [1][5]. Private property intact. Businesses humming. Elections sacred. When Bernie Sanders held up Denmark as his model, Denmark’s own prime minister flew to Harvard to issue a gentle correction: “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy” [6]. The country the pundits use as their gulag-with-pastries punchline felt obliged to explain, out loud, that it is capitalist.

Want it in numbers the right cannot dismiss? Fine — here are their own. The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, the conservative movement’s official scorecard of capitalism, rates Denmark’s economy “mostly free” with a score around 79 — while the United States sank to 26th place, its lowest ranking ever, at 70.2 [7][8]. By the right’s own math, the “socialist hellscape” is a freer market than we are. Somebody should really tell the television.

The dumbest possible timeline, measurably

Maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe the hosts know the definitions and their viewers don’t. Except we can measure this, and it’s worse: as the shouting got louder, the country got less able to define the word. When Gallup first asked Americans what “socialism” means back in 1949 — with actual Stalin actually menacing actual Europe — 34% could give the textbook answer: government ownership of the means of production. Ask today, after a full decade of red-scare programming, and only 17% can [9][10]. Half. The people yelling about socialism every night for ten years left the audience knowing half as much about socialism as their grandparents did. That is a remarkable achievement in reverse education, and it is precisely the outcome you’d expect from media whose exclusive consumers, studies keep finding, underperform people who consume nothing.

Ninety years of the same wrong scream

None of this is new, which is somehow the most damning part. The scare word is a family heirloom, handed down through four generations of being wrong.

In 1935, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its allies denounced Social Security as an attempt to “Sovietize the country”; nearly every Republican in Congress lined up against it, and the party’s next presidential nominee called it a fraud on the workingman [11][12]. In 1961, a charming actor named Ronald Reagan recorded an LP for the AMA warning that the program soon to be called Medicare was “socialized medicine,” and that unless Americans stopped it, “one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free” [13].

Well. Medicare passed. Social Security endured. And they became the two most beloved government programs in American history — so beloved that the surest way to lose a red district today is to touch either one. The very voters who nod along to the communism panic every evening would march on Washington with pitchforks if you took away their government health care and their government pension. Freedom, it turns out, survived. The only casualty was the credibility of the people who made the prediction — which would sting more if anyone ever checked.

By the scare-word standard, this country has been riddled with “communism” for a century: public schools, public highways, fire departments, police, the U.S. military — collectively funded, government-run, available to all. Nobody has ever watched their house fire get extinguished by a municipal fire department and screamed about the Politburo. The word only comes out when the program in question might help someone the speaker’s sponsors would rather keep billing.

My read: the ignorance is the product

And that’s the part I want to say plainly, opinion clearly labeled. I don’t believe the men at the top of this food chain are all stupid — though watching them define socialism, one keeps an open mind. I believe the confusion is merchandise. If every policy that helps ordinary people can be stamped COMMUNISM before anyone reads it, then no such policy can ever pass, and the folks writing the checks stay unbilled and untaxed forever. The word is doing the work the argument can’t. A viewer who knows the actual definitions is a viewer who might ask why child care is tyranny but a $846 million favor-machine isn’t — so the definitions must never, ever be aired. It’s not an education failure. It’s an education embargo. We keep a Fascism Watch on this site, and a media apparatus that keeps its own audience deliberately misinformed sits right at the heart of it.

And the tell — the beautiful, clarifying tell — came just months after the “100% Communist Lunatic” campaign. The lunatic won. And the President who coined the phrase invited him to the White House, sat beside him, called the meeting civil, and told the cameras “we’re looking for the same things” [14]. The communism evaporated the instant it stopped being useful. It was never a belief. It was a sound effect.

Homework for the republic

So here’s the assignment, and it’s easy. Learn the three definitions — you just did; that was the whole lesson. Then, the next time a red-faced man with a flag pin tells you America is falling to communism because somebody proposed school lunches, ask him — genuinely, politely — to define communism. Watch what happens. There are few pleasures in modern civic life more complete than watching a man who screams a word for a living discover, on camera, that he cannot say what it means.

The republic doesn’t fall to democratic socialists winning elections — winning elections is the opposite of how communism arrives. It falls, if it falls, to a country that let the loudest voices replace its vocabulary with sound effects. Words still mean things. Keep meaning them.

References

[1] “Fact check: Is Zohran Mamdani a communist?” Al Jazeera, June 27, 2025. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/27/fact-check-is-zohran-mamdani-a-communist

[2] “Trump calls New York Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani ‘a communist.’” CNBC, June 27, 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/27/trump-new-york-zohran-mamdani-communist.html

[3] “Communism.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/communism

[4] “Socialism.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/money/socialism

[5] “What is Democratic Socialism?” Democratic Socialists of America. https://www.dsausa.org/about-us/what-is-democratic-socialism/

[6] “Danish PM in US: Denmark is not socialist.” The Local Denmark, November 1, 2015. https://www.thelocal.dk/20151101/danish-pm-in-us-denmark-is-not-socialist

[7] “Heritage 2025 Index of Economic Freedom: U.S. Economy Hit Its Lowest Ranking Ever.” The Heritage Foundation, 2025. https://www.heritage.org/press/heritage-2025-index-economic-freedom-world-economy-mostly-unfree-us-economy-hit-its-lowest

[8] “Index of Economic Freedom: Denmark.” The Heritage Foundation. https://economicfreedom.heritage.org/pages/country-pages/denmark

[9] “The Meaning of ‘Socialism’ to Americans Today.” Gallup, October 2018. https://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/243362/meaning-socialism-americans-today.aspx

[10] “Gallup Vault: Americans’ Views of Socialism, 1949–1965.” Gallup. https://news.gallup.com/vault/240749/gallup-vault-americans-views-socialism-1949-1965.aspx

[11] “Déjà Vu: A Look Back at Some of the Tirades Against Social Security and Medicare.” BillMoyers.com. https://billmoyers.com/content/deja-vu-all-over-a-look-back-at-some-of-the-tirades-against-social-security-and-medicare/

[12] “The Social Security Act of 1935.” U.S. House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives. https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1901-1950/The-Social-Security-Act-of-1935/

[13] “How Operation Coffee Cup undermined US universal healthcare.” RTÉ Brainstorm, October 2020. https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2020/1020/1172670-operation-coffee-cup-socialized-medicine-ronald-reagan-donald-trump-joe-biden-united-states/

[14] “After calling Mamdani a ‘100% Communist lunatic,’ Trump now says ‘we’re looking for the same things.’” Fortune, November 21, 2025. https://fortune.com/2025/11/21/trump-mamdani-meeting-says-civil-new-york-affordable/