When the Algorithm Sets the Price

Posted: September 9, 2026 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional, Excess and Algorithms
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

What happens when the price of something stops being a decision and becomes an optimization?

There was a time when pricing was relatively simple.

A store decided what to charge. A landlord decided what to charge for an apartment. A hotel adjusted its rates. A customer looked at the number and decided whether to buy.

The decision might have involved spreadsheets, forecasts, competitors, and plenty of guesswork. Today, software can make that decision continuously.

It can watch demand, inventory, competitor prices, location, timing, browsing behavior, and thousands of other signals. It can adjust the price, watch what happens, and adjust it again.

The question is no longer simply: What should this cost?

It can become: What is the highest price the market—or this particular person—will accept?

That sounds like a technological question. It isn’t. It is an economic one.

Because an algorithm does not decide what to optimize. A person does.

And when the objective is maximizing revenue, the machine can become extraordinarily good at pursuing it.

The Market Learns to Move

Dynamic pricing is not new.

Airlines have used it for decades. Hotels do it. Rideshare companies do it. Retailers have long adjusted prices based on demand, inventory, season, and competition.

There is nothing inherently sinister about responding to changing market conditions. The important change is what software makes possible. A human pricing team might review yesterday’s sales and adjust prices today.

An algorithm can monitor thousands of variables in real time. It can test prices continuously. It can detect patterns no human employee could reasonably track. It can respond before anyone even notices the market has changed.

That is useful when the goal is efficiency. Businesses can manage inventory, respond to demand, reduce waste, and sometimes lower prices. But the same capability works in the other direction.

If a system can identify where demand is strong, it can also identify where consumers have little choice. If it can detect when inventory is scarce, it can detect when a customer is unlikely to walk away. And if it can make those calculations continuously, pricing stops being an occasional judgment.

It becomes an optimization problem. That distinction matters because optimization always depends on the objective.

Efficient at what?

From the Market to You

This is where another form of algorithmic pricing enters the picture.

Dynamic pricing asks: What will the market bear? Personalized pricing asks: What will you bear?

The difference can be subtle. A dynamic system might raise the price of a hotel room because demand increased. A personalized system could use information about the person searching for that room to estimate how much that individual is willing to pay. That information can come from many places: browsing history, location, demographics, purchasing behavior, or other characteristics.

The Federal Trade Commission has been investigating this emerging market under the term surveillance pricing. In 2024, it ordered eight companies offering surveillance-pricing products or services to provide information about how they use consumer data to set or influence prices. The FTC has said these systems can use information such as location, browsing history, demographics, and shopping behavior.

The technology is not hypothetical. The economics aren’t hypothetical either.

A field experiment published by economists Jean-Pierre Dubé and Sanjog Misra found that machine-learning-based personalized pricing could increase firm profits substantially beyond an optimized uniform price. Consumers did not all lose: more than 60 percent received lower prices. But total consumer surplus fell substantially compared with uniform pricing.

That distinction is important. Personalized pricing is not simply a machine programmed to charge everyone more.

It is more sophisticated than that. Some people pay less. Some pay more. The system’s purpose is to identify the difference and capture more of the value.

The old question was: What is the price of this thing? The new question can become: What is this particular person likely to pay?

That changes the relationship between buyer and seller. The price is no longer simply attached to the product. It can become attached to the person.

And that raises a more important question: What happens when the person has no good alternative?

The People Who Can’t Walk Away

For a luxury purchase, pricing power has limits. You can decide not to buy the watch. You can wait for the vacation. You can order something else.

But not every market works that way. People need housing. They need food. They need transportation. They need medicine and childcare.

The fewer alternatives a person has, the less meaningful the choice to simply walk away becomes. That is where algorithmic pricing collides with something older than artificial intelligence: unequal bargaining power.

A corporation may have sophisticated data, pricing software, economists, lawyers, and capital behind a transaction. The person on the other side may have a paycheck and a deadline.

The technology does not create that imbalance. But it can measure and exploit the consequences of it with extraordinary precision. And nowhere is that easier to see than housing.

The Apartment

Consider the case of RealPage. In 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice sued RealPage, alleging that its software helped competing landlords coordinate apartment pricing rather than compete independently. The basic mechanism was strikingly simple.

Landlords provided the software with information about their properties and rental markets, including sensitive information about rents and lease terms. The system processed that information and generated pricing recommendations.

The DOJ alleged that this allowed landlords to use competitors’ nonpublic information to make pricing decisions and reduced the incentive to compete for tenants. The department later expanded the case to include several major landlords.

This matters because there is a major difference between an algorithm responding to a competitive market and an algorithm helping competitors coordinate within that market. The first can make markets move faster. The second can make competition itself weaker. And the issue has not disappeared.

In 2026, the DOJ has continued to reach settlements and proposed judgments involving landlords accused of using RealPage’s system in ways that restricted competition. A proposed September 2026 consent decree involving Pinnacle, for example, would prohibit certain uses of competitors’ sensitive data and certain anticompetitive algorithmic pricing practices.

The machine is not merely calculating the market here. It is becoming part of the market’s structure. That is the important shift.

The algorithm is no longer just a faster calculator sitting behind a human decision. It can influence what competitors charge, how they respond to one another, and what prices consumers encounter.

The tenant does not get a machine. The landlord does. That difference matters.

The Algorithm Doesn’t Need to Hate You

It is tempting to describe all of this as if the algorithm itself were the villain.

That would be a mistake. An algorithm does not hate renters. It does not resent grocery shoppers. It does not want to extract money from anyone. It has no desires. It has an objective.

People choose the objective. That is why saying “the algorithm decided” can obscure more than it explains.

The important questions are:
  • Who built the system?
  • What information does it use?
  • What has it been told to optimize?
  • Who owns it?
  • Who benefits when it succeeds?

The machine does not introduce the incentive. It inherits it.

If a company rewards its pricing system for maximizing revenue, the system will look for revenue. If it rewards the system for increasing occupancy, it will pursue occupancy. If it rewards the system for extracting more from customers who have fewer alternatives, it will become better at finding those customers.

The technology is powerful because it does not have to believe in the objective. It only has to optimize it.

Algorithms didn’t invent exploitation. They industrialized its optimization.

When Optimization Becomes Extraction

This is where algorithmic pricing becomes more than a story about automation.

The system can observe. Then predict. Then price. Then observe what happened. Then learn. Then price again.

That creates a feedback loop. The market provides data. The data improves the model. The model changes the price. The new price changes consumer behavior. That behavior produces more data. And the cycle begins again.

A human pricing department cannot operate at this speed across thousands of products, customers, properties, or markets. A machine can. That gives the owner of the system a new form of economic power.

Not simply the power to set a price. The power to continuously discover how far a price can be pushed.

This is why the question cannot stop at whether algorithms are efficient. Of course they are.

The more important question is: Efficient for whom?

What Happens When the Machines Compete?

There is another problem hiding inside that question.

Competition assumes that sellers have a reason to undercut one another. But what happens when pricing systems become sophisticated enough to learn that constantly undercutting competitors is not the most profitable strategy? Researchers have already explored this possibility.

A 2020 American Economic Review study found that AI pricing algorithms can learn to collude and raise prices without ever talking to each other. More recent economic theory has examined similar problems, including models in which algorithmic pricing can produce inflated outcomes even without the traditional forms of communication antitrust law is designed to detect.

These studies do not prove that every pricing algorithm will collude. They prove something more useful: A machine does not need to be told to collude for competition to become a problem.

If the system is rewarded for profit, it can discover strategies that make more money. Sometimes those strategies may benefit consumers. Sometimes they may benefit the firm at the consumer’s expense. And sometimes they may weaken the competition that was supposed to protect the consumer in the first place.

That brings us back to the question underneath all of this. Who gets the gains from the machine?

Who Benefits From the Optimization?

The answer is not automatically “the corporation.” Businesses can use algorithmic systems to reduce waste, manage inventory, improve forecasting, and operate more efficiently. Those gains can sometimes reach consumers through lower prices or better service.

That is the strongest case for algorithmic pricing. But efficiency does not tell us how the gains are distributed.

The people buying the product generally do not own the pricing system. Renters do not own the housing software. Workers do not own the corporate data. Consumers do not decide what the algorithm is rewarded for maximizing. The companies do. And when the system becomes better at extracting value, the question becomes who captures that additional value.

That is the deeper economic issue. Technology can increase the size of the pie. It does not determine who gets the larger slice.

That depends on ownership, bargaining power, competition, regulation, and the rules surrounding the market.

An algorithm can therefore look like a neutral piece of software while operating inside a very non-neutral economic structure.

The machine may be new. The incentive is not.

The Machine Is Working

There is something almost unsettling about how ordinary this can look.
  • You search for an apartment. A price appears.
  • You look for groceries. A price appears.
  • You book a hotel. A price appears.

You assume the number is simply the price. But behind that number may be a system processing enormous amounts of information, predicting behavior, responding to competitors, and optimizing an objective chosen somewhere above you.

None of this requires a conspiracy. It does not require an evil executive sitting in a dark room. It does not even require anyone involved to believe they are doing something wrong.

The machine can be working exactly as designed. That is the point. The question is not whether the machine works. The question is what we have asked it to work toward.

We built systems capable of measuring human behavior at extraordinary scale. We gave them access to markets, consumer data, competitor information, and real-time feedback. Then we told them to optimize. So they did.

The problem is not that algorithms make decisions instead of humans. It is that we can encode our existing economic incentives into systems capable of pursuing those incentives faster, more precisely, and at a scale no human workforce could match.

Once that happens, pricing is no longer just a number. It becomes a reflection of power.
  • Who owns the data?
  • Who owns the software?
  • Who chooses the objective?
  • Who has the ability to walk away?
  • Who captures the gains?
  • And who pays for the optimization?

Those questions matter because algorithms did not create the economic system they operate inside. They made that system more capable.

Perhaps that is the question we should be asking when the machine sets the price: Was the thing we built it to optimize ever working for us in the first place?

Fascism Becomes Background Noise

Posted: September 3, 2026 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

What Happens When Everyone Becomes a Fascist?

There is a word we have become remarkably comfortable using. Fascist.

We use it for politicians, parties, governments, corporations, institutions, strangers online, and people who disagree with us.

Sometimes the accusation is justified. Sometimes it isn’t. That distinction matters.

Fascism is not simply another word for bad politics. It is a historically specific political phenomenon with a documented history, recognizable characteristics, internal variations, and decades of scholarship attempting to distinguish it from authoritarianism, nationalism, populism and other forms of political repression.

The word itself has always been contested. Fascist movements fought over its meaning. Political movements have used it as a weapon. Scholars still disagree about its precise boundaries.

But contested does not mean meaningless.

The more interesting problem is what happens when a historically specific political concept becomes a generalized political insult.

Because if everyone is a fascist, eventually nobody is.

And if nobody is, we may become less capable of recognizing one when we actually encounter one.

Fascism was not Always a Comment-Section Insult

Fascism emerged in the early twentieth century, most famously through Benito Mussolini’s movement in Italy. Nazi Germany developed its own distinctive form, combining authoritarian nationalism with racial ideology, antisemitism, expansionism, and genocidal violence.

The two regimes were not identical, and fascism has never been one perfectly uniform ideology. But that does not mean the word can mean whatever we want it to mean.

Scholars have identified recurring characteristics including ultranationalism, political violence, rejection of liberal democracy, leader-centered politics, the creation of internal enemies, mass mobilization, and visions of national rebirth.

Different scholars weight these characteristics differently. That debate is useful. It reminds us that fascism requires analysis rather than a simple checklist. It also gives us some necessary distinctions.

  • Authoritarianism is not automatically fascism.
  • Nationalism is not automatically fascism.
  • Conservatism is not automatically fascism.
  • Populism is not automatically fascism.
  • Political repression is not automatically fascism.

A politician behaving badly is not automatically fascist. A government making a cruel or unjust decision is not automatically fascist.

And calling someone fascist does not make them fascist. Evidence does. That should be the starting point.

When a Warning Becomes a Weapon

Political language does more than describe reality. It shapes how we interpret it. Calling someone a fascist can therefore be an analytical claim and a rhetorical act at the same time.

It can mean: This person represents a dangerous political tendency. That can be a legitimate warning. But it can also become shorthand for: This person is beyond the boundaries of acceptable politics.

Once that happens, the word stops helping us distinguish political phenomena and starts helping us sort people into moral camps. This isn’t new.

Historian Stanley Payne has examined the complicated “career” of the concept of fascism and the semantic changes surrounding the term since the 1930s. Fascist movements themselves understood the political value of controlling language. Mussolini’s regime worked to attach “fascism” to the state, nation, empire, and political loyalty.

The fight over the word did not begin after fascism. The fight over the word was part of fascist politics itself. Today the word operates inside a different machine.

Social media and cable news reward speed, outrage, tribal identity and certainty. A careful explanation of political characteristics does not travel as quickly as a one-word condemnation.

“Fascist” is efficient. It tells your audience who the villain is. It tells your tribe that you recognize the villain. And it can end the conversation before the investigation begins.

That is where a useful political concept starts becoming political ammunition.

When Everything Becomes Fascism

Imagine a smoke alarm that goes off every time you make toast.

At first, you investigate. Eventually, you become annoyed. Then you stop listening. That is the danger of semantic inflation.

If “fascist” can mean authoritarian government, corporate power, censorship, a political opponent, an unpopular policy, capitalism, socialism or simply someone we find intolerable, the word can retain enormous emotional force while losing its ability to distinguish one political phenomenon from another.

The result is not merely bad vocabulary. It is bad perception. If everything is fascism, we lose the ability to identify what specifically makes something fascist.

And then something worse can happen. People begin treating the accusation itself as noise. The warning system still works. Nobody listens to it.

That is how a word designed to identify danger can become part of the environment that makes danger harder to see.

Fascism and Capitalism

This is where the history becomes uncomfortable.

There is a popular argument that fascism is simply capitalism in its most extreme form. Another argument is that fascism and capitalism are fundamentally incompatible. History supports neither simplification. Fascist governments did not simply abolish private enterprise.

In Nazi Germany, private businesses continued to operate. At the same time, the regime exercised enormous control over economic activity, redirected production toward military objectives, destroyed independent labor organizations, and incorporated economic institutions into a political system built around dictatorship, racial persecution, and war.

Businesses participated in processes including the expropriation of Jewish property and the exploitation of forced labor.

The relationship between private economic interests and the fascist state was not simply ideological agreement.
  • Profit mattered.
  • Institutional survival mattered.
  • Access to contracts and resources mattered.
  • Power mattered.

A company does not necessarily need to believe in an ideology to discover that cooperation with the government controlling its operating environment is useful.

Fascism did not require private ownership to disappear. It could subordinate economic activity to political objectives while allowing private businesses to operate and profit.

Nor does that mean capitalism naturally produces fascism. It doesn’t.

The historical lesson is more precise: Private economic power and authoritarian political power can coexist, cooperate, bargain, and become mutually useful without becoming identical.

That relationship is not confined to the history books.

A Recent Example

Look at India.

Recent scholarship has explicitly examined the relationship between Hindutva, fascism, neoliberal development, and global corporate capital. One 2025 Oxford chapter describes contemporary Hindutva as a Hindu supremacist fascist project increasingly intertwined with neoliberal global capital accumulation. Another study of Modi’s Gujarat model describes a political economy combining top-down development, favoritism toward big business, violently practiced Hindu nationalism, and repression of dissent.

Other scholarship is more cautious about the precise fascism label but reaches a related conclusion about the political economy. Research on Modi’s India describes an authoritarian project combining Hindu nationalism with neoliberal policy themes, while a 2023 study of authoritarian neoliberalism in India examines the alliance between right-wing authoritarian forces and neoliberal capital and its effects on labor, inequality and dispossession.

The point is not that India is simply another Nazi Germany. It isn’t. The point is that we now have a contemporary capitalist democracy in which scholars are documenting a relationship between majoritarian nationalism, authoritarian political practices, repression of dissent, market-oriented economic policy and concentrated economic power.

That is worth knowing. It also gives us a better vocabulary. The relationship between authoritarian politics and capitalism does not have to look like a dictatorship abolishing the market.

Sometimes it looks like the market continuing to operate while political power becomes increasingly centralized, dissent becomes increasingly costly, and economic policy increasingly serves particular concentrations of capital.

Turkey provides another example of this broader phenomenon. Scholars studying the Erdoğan era have described the country’s trajectory as “authoritarian neoliberalism,” in which executive centralization, autocratic legalism, cronyism, privatization, commodification, and the criminalization of opposition became intertwined.

That does not make every authoritarian neoliberal government fascist. It does demonstrate something important: Capitalism does not automatically immunize a society against authoritarianism.

And authoritarianism does not require capitalism to disappear. Those two facts are enough to make the relationship worth watching.

What are we looking at in America?

This is where historical comparison becomes dangerous if we stop thinking.

America in 2026 is not Nazi Germany. It is not Mussolini’s Italy.

The United States remains a constitutional democracy, and Freedom House continues to classify it as “Free,” even while its 2026 score declined and the organization identified concerns involving political polarization, institutional dysfunction, executive power, political violence, media concentration, and pressure on democratic institutions.

Democratic erosion is not the same thing as fascism.

But “we are still a democracy” does not mean there is nothing worth examining. Several contemporary conditions are measurable.

Trust in the federal government is near historic lows. Pew Research Center found that only 17 percent of Americans in 2025 said they trusted the federal government to do what is right most or all of the time.

Americans increasingly view political opponents through intensely negative emotional lenses.

Political violence is another measurable concern. A 2025 nationally representative study found that 35.6 percent of respondents considered violence justified for at least one of twenty political objectives. The researchers also found that the year-to-year increase was modest and that willingness to personally commit political violence was substantially lower.

Another 15 percent strongly or very strongly agreed that having a strong leader was more important than having democracy.

None of this demonstrates a fascist America. It demonstrates something more useful: authoritarian attitudes, political polarization, institutional distrust, and tolerance for political violence exist at measurable levels within American society.

That is a condition worth examining. It is not a diagnosis.

Follow the Money

The political system also exists inside an economy characterized by substantial concentrations of wealth and economic power.

The Federal Reserve’s distributional data show enormous disparities in ownership of financial assets between the wealthiest Americans and the bottom half of the population. Organized labor is substantially weaker than it was several generations ago.

In 1983, 20.1 percent of U.S. wage and salary workers were union members. In 2025, the figure was 10 percent. The private-sector rate was only 5.9 percent.

Again, none of this proves fascism.
  • Economic inequality is not fascism.
  • Corporate concentration is not fascism.
  • Declining union membership is not fascism.

But they tell us something about the distribution of power. And that matters because democracy does not exist only inside voting booths.

People encounter power at work. They encounter it when negotiating wages, deciding whether they can leave a job, dealing with dominant employers, confronting concentrated markets, or trying to make their political voices heard.

Economic power can become political power when it becomes sufficiently concentrated. That does not make concentrated wealth fascist. It does mean that any serious examination of modern political power should ask how economic institutions interact with the state.

History gives us reason to ask the question. It does not give us permission to skip the evidence.

The Danger of Looking for a Costume

One of the easiest ways to misunderstand fascism is to imagine that it arrives fully formed.
  • The dictator appears.
  • The uniforms appear.
  • The flags appear.
  • The secret police arrive.
  • Everyone knows what is happening.

History is rarely that clear while it is happening. Political systems are built through institutions. Institutions operate through incentives. And incentives change behavior.

A corporation does not have to become ideologically fascist to find cooperation with authoritarian power useful. A voter does not have to hate democracy to become comfortable with a strong leader. A political party does not have to abolish elections to weaken democratic norms. A government does not have to become a dictatorship overnight to accumulate more power than surrounding institutions can effectively restrain.

This is why historical comparison is useful when handled carefully. History does not give us a script. It gives us patterns worth investigating. And this is where the language problem comes back.

The Word Can Become Camouflage

If every authoritarian politician is simply “fascist,” then authoritarianism becomes a footnote. If every instance of corporate power is “fascism,” then the mechanisms of economic power disappear beneath the label. If every political disagreement is “fascism,” then political repression becomes indistinguishable from ordinary disagreement.

And if every use of state power is “fascist,” we stop asking the most important question: What kind of power is actually being exercised, against whom, and for what purpose?

That question is harder. It requires research. It requires history. It requires following money. It requires looking at institutions instead of personalities. It requires being willing to discover that the people we dislike may not fit the label we wanted to give them. And sometimes it requires discovering that the label fits more closely than we wanted to admit.

That is the uncomfortable part. Because precision is not a shield for our preferred side. It cuts both ways.

So What Should We Call it?

Don’t begin with the label. Begin with the behavior.
  • What is happening?
  • Who has power?
  • How is that power being used?
  • What happens to opposition?
  • What happens to independent institutions?
  • What happens to organized labor?
  • What happens to minorities and designated internal enemies?
  • Is political violence being normalized?
  • Is a leader being elevated above institutions?
  • Is national identity being defined around exclusion and a promise of national rebirth?
  • Are democratic constraints being weakened?
  • Are economic policies being insulated from democratic pressure while concentrated private interests benefit?
  • Are these developments isolated?
  • Or are they reinforcing one another?

Then ask the historical question: Does the pattern actually resemble fascism?

If it does, say so. If it doesn’t, don’t.

The point is not to make the word safer. The point is to make the analysis harder to bullshit.

Recovering the Word

There is a strange irony in all of this. We live in an age obsessed with political labels while becoming increasingly impatient with the work required to understand them.

Everything needs a side. Everything needs a villain. Everything needs a caption. Everything needs to be reduced to a clip that can be consumed before the next outrage arrives.

“Fascist” fits that environment perfectly. One word. Maximum emotional payload. Minimum explanation.

That is precisely why we should resist it. Not because fascism is too strong a word. Because it is too important a word to waste.

Fascism is real. It happened. It killed people. It destroyed institutions. It mobilized ordinary citizens against designated enemies. It subordinated independent organizations. It used violence as politics. It made loyalty to the nation and the leader more important than liberal democratic constraints. And it did not always arrive wearing a costume that announced what it was.

So when the word becomes a generic insult, something more than vocabulary is lost. We lose a piece of our political eyesight. And there is another reason to care.

The modern outrage economy has learned that fear sells. Anger sells. Tribal identity sells.

A frightened population is easier to divide. A divided population is easier to market to. A population that spends all day fighting over which side is fascist has less time to ask who owns the platform, who profits from the conflict, who benefits from the distraction, and what economic and political structures are operating underneath the spectacle.

That does not mean some secret cabal is sitting in a room manufacturing every argument. It means incentives matter. The machine does not need a mastermind. It needs engagement. And we keep feeding it.

That is where the capitalism question becomes impossible to separate completely from the language question. A political culture organized around outrage exists inside an economic system that can monetize attention, conflict, and division.

Political power can become concentrated. Economic power can become concentrated. Media power can become concentrated. And when those concentrations reinforce one another, democracy can weaken without anyone needing to formally announce that democracy has ended.

That is the part worth watching. Not the costume. Not the comment section. Not the person screaming “fascist” loudest.

The structure underneath.

If Everyone is a Fascist, Nobody is

That is not an argument for silence. It is an argument for precision.
  • Call authoritarianism authoritarianism.
  • Call political repression political repression.
  • Call nationalism nationalism.
  • Call economic exploitation economic exploitation.
  • Call concentrated power concentrated power.
  • Call political violence political violence.
  • And if the evidence shows fascism, call it fascism.
But be prepared to show your work.
  • What historical characteristics are present?
  • What evidence supports the comparison?
  • What characteristics are absent?
  • What alternative explanation fits?
  • What incentives are operating?
  • Who benefits?
  • Who loses power?
  • What institutions are being weakened?
  • What happens to people who resist?
  • And what evidence would change your mind?

Those questions do not tell you what to think. They give you something better. A way to think without being handed the conclusion.

Because the greatest danger of turning fascist into a meaningless word is not that somebody gets called a name they don’t deserve. It is that we train ourselves to hear the word and stop listening. And then, when something genuinely dangerous begins operating in plain sight, we may mistake the warning for just another piece of noise.

Fascism does not become less dangerous because we misuse its name. We simply become less capable of seeing it.

So protect the word. Not for fascists. For everyone else. Because political language is a tool.

Use it carelessly, and it becomes a weapon against your own understanding. Use it precisely and it becomes what it was supposed to be all along: a way of seeing power clearly.

The Courage to Dissent

Posted: August 23, 2026 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

When integrity becomes a civic responsibility

There is a quiet moment that happens before most acts of conformity.

Someone says something you disagree with. You know you disagree. You might even know why. Then you look around the room.

You consider who is listening. You think about what happens if you say it. Maybe someone will argue. Maybe someone will think less of you. Maybe you will sound difficult. Maybe your boss will remember. Maybe your friends will stop inviting you. Maybe the conversation will become exhausting.

So you say nothing. Nobody censored you. Nobody threatened you. You simply decided that speaking was not worth the cost. That distinction matters.

Conformity does not always arrive as an order. Sometimes it arrives as a calculation.

And sometimes the most powerful pressure a group can exert is convincing you to perform the calculation yourself.

We Are Built to Belong

Human beings are social creatures. We learn language, customs, values, and expectations from the people around us. Belonging is not a weakness. It is one of the conditions that makes human life possible.

That is part of what makes conformity so complicated.

We should be careful about turning every agreement into evidence of social control. Sometimes other people are right. Sometimes consensus reflects accumulated knowledge. Sometimes changing your mind because someone else made a better argument is exactly what intellectual maturity looks like.

The problem begins when belonging becomes more important than judgment.

Solomon Asch demonstrated one version of this problem in his famous conformity experiments. Participants were asked to compare the lengths of lines. The correct answers were obvious. Yet when a group of other participants unanimously gave the wrong answer, people sometimes went along with the group anyway. In Asch’s original experiments, participants conformed to the incorrect majority on 36.8 percent of the critical judgments, while roughly a quarter remained completely independent.

The lesson is not that people are stupid. It is that social reality can interfere with individual judgment. And that interference does not require anyone to be malicious.

People want to belong. They want to avoid embarrassment. They want to believe that they are not the only person who sees things differently.

That is why dissent can feel strangely physical. You can know what you believe and still feel the pressure of being the only person willing to say it.

Sometimes we mistake that discomfort for evidence that we are wrong. Sometimes it is simply the cost of standing apart.

Nobody Has to Tell You to Be Quiet

The more interesting form of conformity happens after the external pressure has become internal.

Research on the “spiral of silence” has found that people are less willing to express views when they believe those views are unpopular among the people around them. In a 2014 Pew Research Center study examining discussion of the Snowden-NSA revelations, 86 percent of Americans said they were willing to discuss the issue in person, but only 42 percent of Facebook users and 41 percent of Twitter users said they were willing to discuss it on those platforms. People who believed their social-media networks disagreed with them were less willing to speak both online and, in some settings, offline.

That study does not prove that social media has made society uniformly more conformist. It examined one issue at one point in time, and the researchers themselves noted important limitations. But it demonstrates something important.

The expectation of disagreement can be enough to change behavior.

You don’t need a censor. You need an audience. Once we know what kinds of opinions are likely to be rewarded, mocked, challenged, or remembered, we can begin editing ourselves before anyone else does the editing for us.

This happens at dinner tables. It happens in classrooms. It happens at work. It happens in families. It happens online. And it can happen inside political movements, religious communities, activist organizations, professional associations, and every other group humans create.

The mechanism is remarkably ordinary: I don’t want trouble.

That sentence has prevented an enormous amount of unnecessary conflict. It has also prevented an enormous amount of necessary conflict.

The Price of Speaking Up

The workplace offers one of the clearest examples.

Organizational researchers distinguish between employee voice and employee silence. Voice means voluntarily communicating concerns, suggestions, information about problems, or opinions to someone higher in an organization. Silence means withholding that information—even when it could be useful. Research on the subject examines the factors that influence whether people speak or remain silent, as well as the consequences for both employees and organizations.

This is more than office politics. Imagine an employee sees a problem. They know something is inefficient, dishonest, unsafe, or simply stupid. They also know who has authority. They know how that person reacts to criticism. They know who gets promoted. They know who gets labeled “difficult.” The employee does the math. And sometimes silence wins.

It is easy to condemn that person from the outside. It is harder when the consequences are real.

A paycheck is not an abstract principle. Neither is health insurance. Neither is professional reputation. Neither is the fear of becoming responsible for supporting a family while unemployed.

This is why a mature conversation about dissent has to begin with compassion.

People have legitimate reasons to protect themselves. Not every disagreement deserves confrontation. Not every workplace problem requires a crusade. Not every unpopular opinion needs to be broadcast to the world.

But understanding why people remain silent does not mean pretending that silence has no consequences. When everyone who sees the problem decides that someone else should mention it, the problem becomes part of the institution.

Silence stops being an individual decision. It becomes organizational culture.

Dissent Is Not the Same as Being Right

There is another danger here. If conformity is bad, then dissent must be good. That conclusion is tempting. It is also wrong.

History is full of people who stood apart from the majority and were completely mistaken. Being unpopular does not make an idea true. Being censored does not make an idea true. Being mocked does not make an idea true. And being willing to stand alone is not evidence of courage if the person standing alone has simply confused stubbornness with principle.

This is where responsible dissent separates itself from contrarianism.

The contrarian needs to disagree. The person acting with integrity needs to remain willing to disagree when the evidence and conscience require it. Those are not the same thing.

Real intellectual independence requires a much harder discipline than rejecting the consensus.
  • It requires being willing to reject your own side.
  • It requires listening to arguments that make you uncomfortable.
  • It requires changing your mind when the evidence changes.
  • It requires admitting when you were wrong.
  • And sometimes it requires saying, “I don’t know.”
The independent thinker is not the person who disagrees with everyone. It is the person who does not outsource judgment to anyone.
  • Not the majority.
  • Not the minority.
  • Not the algorithm.
  • Not the political tribe.
  • Not the people they admire.
  • Not even themselves.

Integrity Has a Cost

This is where dissent becomes more than an intellectual exercise.

Integrity means that there is some relationship between what you believe and how you behave. That sounds simple. It isn’t.

Every person eventually encounters a moment when convenience and principle point in different directions.You can tell the truth or protect yourself. You can speak or remain quiet. You can participate or refuse. You can laugh along or say that something isn’t funny. You can repeat what everyone else is saying or admit that you don’t believe it.

Sometimes the cost is trivial. Sometimes it isn’t. That is why integrity matters. If doing the right thing never cost anything, integrity would require very little courage.

Civil disobedience is a more extreme version of this principle. In its most widely accepted philosophical definition, it involves a public, nonviolent, conscientious breach of law intended to bring about a change in law or government policy. The willingness to accept consequences is part of the tradition because the protester shows the act is principled rather than merely convenient.

Most acts of integrity are not civil disobedience.

You do not have to break a law to refuse to participate in something you believe is wrong. You do not have to get arrested to tell the truth. You do not have to stand on a street corner holding a sign.

Sometimes dissent is simply saying, “No. I can’t do that.” Sometimes it is asking the question nobody wants asked. Sometimes it is defending someone who has become unpopular. Sometimes it is telling your own political tribe that it has gone too far. Sometimes it is admitting that the other side has a point.

The scale varies. The principle does not. You are choosing not to surrender your judgment merely because surrender would be easier.

Dissent Is a Civic Duty

There is a temptation to think of citizenship as something we do when we vote. It is more demanding than that.

A functioning civic culture depends on people being willing to question authority, challenge institutions, criticize their own communities, expose problems, defend unpopular people, and correct one another.

That does not mean permanent outrage. It does not mean treating every disagreement as oppression. It does not mean assuming that every institution is corrupt or every majority is blind.

It means accepting that a society cannot correct what nobody is willing to name.

Democracy needs disagreement. Not because disagreement is inherently virtuous. Because no institution, political movement, community, or majority is infallible.

Someone has to notice the problem. Someone has to ask the uncomfortable question. Someone has to say that the emperor has no clothes. And sometimes someone has to make a scene.

We should be careful about romanticizing that person. Protesters can be wrong. Whistleblowers can be wrong. Activists can be wrong. Journalists can be wrong. Governments can be wrong. Majorities can be wrong.

The point is not to create a society in which everyone is permanently fighting. The point is to create one in which people remain capable of fighting when something important is at stake.

There is a difference. Civility is valuable. Peace is valuable. Compromise is valuable.

But peace purchased by silence is not always peace. Sometimes it is simply an unresolved problem waiting for someone else to inherit it.

The Courage to Dissent

We do not need more people who think they are rebels. We need more people who are willing to be responsible for their judgment.

That means resisting the easy version of dissent as much as the easy version of conformity.

Don’t disagree because everyone else agrees. Don’t agree because everyone else agrees. Don’t oppose authority because opposition makes you feel independent. Don’t defend authority because obedience makes you feel safe.

Look. Listen. Check. Think. Then decide.

And when the moment comes when your conscience, your evidence, and the social pressure around you point in different directions, understand what is actually being asked of you.

You may be asked to risk being disliked. You may be asked to risk being misunderstood. You may be asked to risk your position. You may even discover that you were wrong. That is part of the bargain.

Courage does not guarantee correctness. It only makes honesty possible when honesty becomes expensive.

A healthy society does not require everyone to agree. It requires people willing to remain honest when agreement becomes easier.

You don’t have to be the loudest person in the room. You don’t have to be fearless. You don’t even have to be certain that you are right.

But you do have to remain willing to speak when silence would require you to betray what you know to be true.

That isn’t rebellion for its own sake. It is citizenship.

When “Woke” Changed Meaning

Posted: August 17, 2026 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

The life, transformation, and political afterlife of a word

Few words in American politics can change the temperature of a conversation as quickly as woke.

For some, it means awareness. For others, progressive politics. For others still, it has become shorthand for political correctness, cultural excess, or an ideology they oppose.

The word is the same. The meaning isn’t. That makes woke worth examining.

Not because one side is right and the other is wrong. Its history offers a clear example of what can happen when a word moves from describing an idea to carrying a political identity.

And the story begins long before today’s culture wars.

A Word for Staying Alert

The earliest known written example of “Stay Woke” appears in a 1924 edition of the Houston Informer, a Black newspaper in Houston. C. F. Richardson, the paper’s editor, described “Stay Woke” as contemporary street slang. He wasn’t talking about sleep.

To stay woke meant staying alert. Paying attention. Looking after yourself, your family, your community, and your interests.

The phrase already carried a social meaning. Decades later, blues musician Lead Belly used “stay woke” in connection with the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women.

Again, the phrase carried the idea of vigilance in a society where failing to pay attention could have serious consequences.

The word’s meaning wasn’t simply awake. It was alert to what was happening around you. For Black Americans living within a society structured by racial inequality, that distinction mattered.

Before Politics

My own introduction to the word came from somewhere far removed from politics. I first encountered woke in hippie and jam-band culture, and later in rave, EDM, and music-festival culture. There, being woke could suggest consciousness, awareness, or simply being attuned to something beyond the ordinary.

For years, I listened to an ambient-music YouTube channel called Woke Nation, built around meditation, relaxation, and sleep. At some point, the channel changed its name to Awake Nation. I remember noticing the change because, by then, woke had begun to mean something very different in the political vocabulary I was encountering.

That experience isn’t evidence of what the word meant everywhere. But it illustrates something important about language: the same word can live very different lives in different communities. And woke had already lived several lives before it became one of the most recognizable words in America’s culture war.

Then It Spread

“Woke” remained part of Black American language for decades before moving into mainstream culture. Musicians and popular culture helped carry it beyond its original communities. Social media then gave the phrase an enormous new distribution network. Then came Ferguson.

Following the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, “stay woke” became closely associated with the emerging Black Lives Matter movement. The word was no longer circulating primarily within a particular linguistic community. It was entering the national political vocabulary.

Merriam-Webster dates the major expansion of the term’s modern usage to this period. By the early 2020s, the dictionary was documenting another meaning of woke: a pejorative for people perceived as excessively politically liberal or progressive.

Something had changed. But what?

From Description to Label

One way to understand the transformation is to separate description from identity.

Originally, calling someone woke could describe a state of awareness. Someone was awake to racial injustice. Someone was paying attention. Someone understood that something was happening beneath the surface.

As the word entered mainstream political conflict, woke increasingly became a label. It could describe not simply what someone believed, but what kind of person they were presumed to be.

That distinction matters.

A descriptive word tells us something about its subject. A political label can tell us something about the person using it.

This is where the story becomes more complicated than ordinary linguistic evolution.

Words change all the time. Meanings expand, contract, and shift as communities use them in new contexts.

But political actors can also participate in that process. A 2025 peer-reviewed study examining woke describes this phenomenon as politicized semantic change: the process by which political conflict can contribute to a word acquiring a new, politically useful meaning. The researchers traced the changing use of woke across mainstream media, Twitter, and Google searches from 2010 through 2022. Their analysis describes a movement from a term associated with awareness of racial and social injustice toward a pejorative associated with excessive liberalism, hypersensitivity, and perceived ideological oppression.

That distinction is important. The argument isn’t that someone invented a new word. The word already existed. The argument is that its existing meaning became politically contested—and that contestation helped produce a new one.

When a Word Becomes a Signal

This is where woke becomes more interesting than a simple argument about whether the word is good or bad.

Words don’t exist in isolation. They exist between people. A word can describe something. But it can also signal belonging, opposition, suspicion, approval, or contempt. Woke increasingly began doing all of those things at once.

Merriam-Webster’s data illustrates how politically charged the word had become. In 2021, searches for woke spiked repeatedly, including a 4,303 percent increase on November 8, coinciding with its use in election coverage.

The word was no longer merely describing a particular form of awareness. It had become a political signal. Political signals are useful because they compress complicated ideas into something immediately recognizable.

You don’t have to explain which policy you oppose. You don’t have to explain which idea you think has gone too far. You don’t even have to explain what you think your opponent believes.

You can just call it woke. The label does the rest.

A Word Can Have Two Lives

There is an important caveat here. Words change. That isn’t evidence of manipulation by itself.

Language isn’t a museum exhibit. Meanings evolve because people use words differently.

So the fact that woke developed additional meanings is not unusual. What makes this case unusual is the speed and political intensity of the transformation.

The dictionary now records both sides of the semantic divide. Woke can describe being actively attentive to racial and social justice, while another sense describes something considered excessively politically liberal or progressive. Both meanings exist. The word didn’t simply acquire a new definition and discard the old one. It became contested territory. And when language becomes contested territory, conversations can become strangely difficult.

Two people can use the same word while talking about entirely different things. One hears awareness. Another hears ideology. One hears justice. Another hears excess. The argument begins before either person has established what they mean.

What Happened to the Word?

Perhaps the most revealing part of the story is that woke didn’t become politically powerful because it stopped meaning something. It became powerful because it began to mean too many things at once. That made it adaptable.

It could describe a political philosophy, a social movement, an activist, a corporation, a university, a television show, a government policy, or a person. Sometimes it was used sincerely. Sometimes sarcastically. Sometimes as an accusation. Sometimes as a badge of identity.

The word became a shortcut. And shortcuts are useful because they eliminate the need to explain everything underneath them. That is also their weakness. When we substitute a label for an explanation, we may win an argument without ever understanding the thing we’re arguing about.

The Battlefield Is the Meaning

The history of woke doesn’t prove that one political side invented language or that the other side corrupted it. It demonstrates something more uncomfortable. Language itself can become political terrain.

A word begins with one meaning. A community gives it context. A larger culture adopts it. Political movements attach themselves to it. Opponents redefine it. Media ecosystems amplify it.

Eventually, the word can become less useful for describing an idea than for identifying which side of an argument someone belongs to. That’s when language stops merely carrying information. It starts carrying identity.

Perhaps that is the more important lesson hidden inside the history of one small word. The next time someone calls something woke, the useful question may not be whether the label is correct.

It may be simpler: What, exactly, do you mean by that word?

Because before we can argue about an idea, we have to agree on what we’re talking about. And sometimes, the fight over the word is the first fight we have to understand.

The Politics of the Commons

Posted: August 13, 2026 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

What happens when a society starts asking whether everything should have a price?

For most of the last century, socialism carried a particular weight in American politics. It was less a political philosophy than a warning label.

Socialism meant government control. Communism. The Soviet Union. Central planning. Bread lines. The loss of individual freedom. For generations of Americans, the argument was settled before it began.

Capitalism meant freedom. Socialism meant the opposite. But something has changed.

In 2025, New York City elected Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, as mayor of the nation’s largest city. He was sworn in on January 1, 2026. A political label that once made national candidates nervous had become part of a winning campaign for one of America’s most prominent political offices. Mamdani is not the beginning of this shift.

Bernie Sanders spent years making democratic socialism part of the American political conversation. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez helped turn that conversation into a generational movement. In August 2026, progressive Democrat Abdul El-Sayed defeated establishment-backed Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, another sign of the political left’s growing influence, although El-Sayed himself is better described as a progressive than a democratic socialist.

The left is not simply talking about socialism anymore. It is asking voters to govern with some of its ideas.

But perhaps the more interesting question is not whether America is becoming socialist. It is why socialism has become politically thinkable again.

Because Americans have been having this argument for a very long time. Sometimes, we just haven’t called it socialism.

The Things We Already Share

Imagine introducing the public library to America today.

A politician proposes building a publicly funded institution where anyone can walk inside, borrow books without paying, use computers, access the internet, attend programs, or simply sit somewhere warm. There is no profit requirement. The service exists because we have decided that access to information benefits the community.

Would we call that socialism? Probably not. We call it a library.

The same is true of fire departments. Nobody asks whether a burning house is profitable enough to justify putting it out. We decided that fire protection is a public good. So we tax ourselves to maintain the institution before anyone needs it.

The same principle applies to public schools, roads, sanitation systems, parks, public transit, and countless other institutions.

The point is not that a library is secretly socialism. It isn’t. The point is that America has never operated according to a pure market model.

We have always maintained a commons: resources, institutions, and services we collectively decide should exist for public benefit. The argument has never really been whether the commons should exist. The argument is where its boundaries should be.

America Has Been Here Before

History makes the argument more complicated.

When Franklin Roosevelt entered the White House in 1933, the United States was in the depths of the Great Depression. The federal government responded by dramatically expanding its role in American economic life.

The New Deal created programs for employment, infrastructure, financial regulation, agricultural support, and social insurance. The Social Security Act of 1935 established federal old-age benefits, unemployment insurance, and assistance for vulnerable Americans.

The United States did not become a centrally planned socialist economy. Private property remained. Private enterprise remained. Markets remained.

But Americans increasingly accepted that some economic risks were too consequential to leave entirely to individuals.
  • Old age.
  • Unemployment.
  • Economic collapse.

The New Deal did not abolish capitalism. It put boundaries around it. That distinction matters. Capitalism and collective provision have never been mutually exclusive in the United States. The American economy has always been a hybrid.

The question has always been how much of that hybrid should belong to the market and how much to the public.

When the Market Becomes the Default Answer

For several decades, American political thought moved strongly in one direction.

Government was increasingly treated as the problem. Markets were increasingly treated as the solution.

There were good reasons for some of this. Markets can be remarkably effective. Competition can drive innovation. Private enterprise can respond quickly to demand. Profit can provide powerful incentives to create things people actually want.

Government can be slow, expensive, bureaucratic, and profoundly incompetent. None of that should be ignored because democratic socialism is having a political moment. But markets have limitations too.

A market does not ask whether something is necessary. It asks whether someone can pay for it. Those are not the same question.

A functioning housing market can coexist with millions of renters spending unsustainable portions of their income on housing. In 2023, more than 21 million U.S. renters, or 49.7% of renters, that the Census calculated, spent more than 30% of their income on housing.

A functioning healthcare market can coexist with enormous medical debt. KFF estimates that Americans owe at least $220 billion in medical debt, including approximately 14 million adults who owe more than $1,000.

And a wealthy economy can coexist with widespread financial fragility. In the Federal Reserve’s latest household survey, 63% of adults said they could cover a hypothetical $400 emergency using cash or its equivalent. That means 37% could not. Thirteen percent said they could not cover the expense by any means.

None of those statistics proves that capitalism is inherently bad. They prove something narrower: Economic growth and economic security are not the same thing.

The Price of Being Poor

This may be where the renewed interest in democratic socialism becomes easier to understand. A market economy can feel remarkably liberating when you have the resources to navigate it.

If a service doesn’t work, buy another one. If housing becomes expensive, move. If healthcare is inadequate, find a better plan. If transportation doesn’t work, buy a car. If wages are inadequate, invest.

But those choices depend on something that isn’t distributed equally: the ability to absorb risk.

A person with savings can survive an unexpected bill. A person without savings may have to borrow.

A homeowner with substantial equity has options. A person with no assets has fewer.

A person with inherited wealth can use it as a safety net. A person without it begins an emergency from zero.

This is where arguments about capitalism can become strangely abstract. We talk about markets, incentives, GDP, productivity and efficiency. But economies are ultimately experienced by human beings.

The question isn’t simply whether the economy is growing. It is whether people can build stable lives inside it.

The Wealth Behind the Safety Net

Wealth changes the meaning of risk.

The Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts show how concentrated household wealth remains. In the first quarter of 2026, the top 1% held roughly 31% of U.S. household wealth, while the bottom 50% held roughly 4%.

The composition matters, too. The top of the distribution holds enormous amounts of financial assets that can appreciate, generate income, and be liquidated when necessary. Households with little accumulated wealth have far less room to absorb a shock.

Income pays the bills. Wealth absorbs shocks.

Wealth buys time. It allows someone to leave a bad job, survive unemployment, help a child through school, make a down payment, absorb a medical emergency, or wait for a better opportunity. Without wealth, the same events can become existential. This is why arguments about “personal responsibility” can become incomplete.

Responsibility matters. So does the amount of room a person has to exercise it.

The Label Problem

There is another problem with the debate. Americans do not necessarily agree on what socialism means.

For some, it means public ownership of major industries. For others, it means universal healthcare.

For some, it means stronger unions, higher taxes on wealthy households, public housing, or expanded social programs. For others, it still means Soviet-style communism.

Those are not the same thing. Democratic socialism is not communism. Social democracy is not democratic socialism.

A mixed economy is not a centrally planned economy. And a public library is not evidence that the United States secretly became the Soviet Union.

These distinctions matter because political language can become so imprecise that the label replaces the argument.

There is an important warning here for the left, too. If “socialism” becomes a catch-all word for every policy someone likes, the word loses analytical meaning. If it means everything, it explains nothing.

Democratic Socialism Gets No Free Pass

Taking democratic socialism seriously does not mean giving it a free pass. Quite the opposite.

If the movement wants to govern rather than merely protest, its ideas have to survive contact with reality.
  • How much should government provide?
  • How much should it cost?
  • Who pays?
  • What happens when public institutions become inefficient?
  • What happens when bureaucracy becomes its own interest group?
  • How much taxation is economically sustainable?
  • Where should government stop?
  • What role should private enterprise continue to play?
  • How do we preserve innovation?
  • What happens when a public program becomes an expensive institution that no longer works very well?

Government is not inherently virtuous. Markets are not inherently virtuous.

Both are systems created and operated by human beings. Both have incentives. Both can be captured by powerful interests. Both can become inefficient. Both can produce extraordinary results under the right conditions.

The point isn’t to replace one ideology with another. It is to stop pretending that either system can answer every question.

The Argument for Capitalism

There is, of course, a serious argument on the other side. Capitalism has generated enormous increases in productivity, technological innovation, consumer abundance, and material living standards. Markets coordinate millions of individual decisions without requiring a central authority to determine what people should produce or consume.

Government intervention can solve problems, but it can also create new ones. Regulation can become bureaucratic. Public programs can become inefficient. Taxation can distort incentives. Politicians can distribute resources according to political incentives rather than social needs.

Some problems attributed to capitalism may actually be failures of policy: restrictive zoning, regulatory capture, insufficient housing construction, monopolistic behavior, or poorly designed government programs.

There is also a legitimate philosophical argument that individuals should retain responsibility for some of life’s risks rather than transferring every risk to the state. That argument deserves to be taken seriously.

But it leaves us with another question: How much individual responsibility is reasonable when the consequences of failure can be catastrophic?

Democratic Socialism Meets Reality

This is where Zohran Mamdani becomes more useful than a political symbol.

His administration is now attempting to turn some of the ideas that defined his campaign into municipal policy. Housing is one example.

Mamdani’s administration has proposed creating 200,000 affordable homes over the next decade, with nearly $5 billion in planned investment over two years. It has also proposed a city-backed housing insurance program intended to reduce insurance costs for affordable and rent-stabilized housing.

His fiscal approach offers another test. The proposed FY2027 executive budget totals $124.7 billion. The administration says it closed a $12 billion inherited budget gap through savings, new revenue, and state partnership while avoiding property-tax increases and preserving long-term reserves.

These are not proof that democratic socialism works. They are not proof that it doesn’t. They are something more useful: a test.

If the movement wants to move from ideology to governance, voters now have the opportunity to evaluate what happens when those ideas encounter budgets, bureaucracy, housing markets, competing priorities, and the practical limits of municipal government.

That is how political ideas should ultimately be judged. Not by the label. By the results.

The Real Political Argument

Maybe this is why the current debate feels different from the old Cold War argument.

The question being asked by many voters isn’t necessarily: “Do you want socialism?”

It is: “Why can’t I afford to live?”

Why is housing so expensive? Why does healthcare threaten financial stability? Why can full-time employment still leave someone economically insecure? Why does an economy capable of producing extraordinary wealth struggle to give ordinary people enough room to absorb an ordinary emergency?

Those questions existed before Bernie Sanders. They existed before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They existed before Zohran Mamdani.

Perhaps the political movement isn’t creating the questions. Perhaps the questions are creating the movement.

We should be careful with that conclusion. Political momentum has many causes, and economic insecurity is not the only possible explanation. But the connection is difficult to ignore.

Gallup’s 2025 polling found that Americans overall still viewed capitalism more favorably than socialism. Among Democrats, however, the balance had flipped: 66% viewed socialism favorably compared with 42% who viewed capitalism favorably.

That is not a socialist revolution. It is something more interesting.

A political constituency is becoming less convinced that the existing economic system deserves to be treated as the unquestioned default.

The Politics of the Commons

The argument over socialism may therefore be less about socialism than we think.

It may be about something much older: What do we owe one another?

Every society answers that question whether it admits it or not. We decide that children deserve education. We decide that roads should exist even when individual roads aren’t profitable. We decide that fires should be extinguished regardless of the homeowner’s income. We decide that libraries should lend books without charging by the page.

During the New Deal, we decided that old age and unemployment should not be entirely private risks. We have repeatedly decided that some things are too important to leave entirely to the market.

The disagreement is over where we draw the line. And that line is never permanent.
  • It moved during the Progressive Era.
  • It moved during the New Deal.
  • It moved during the Great Society.
  • It moved during the neoliberal turn of the late twentieth century.

And perhaps it is moving again. That doesn’t necessarily mean America is becoming socialist. It may mean Americans are reconsidering what they believe the market is actually for.

Markets are extraordinarily useful tools. But tools have purposes. A hammer is excellent at driving a nail. It is terrible at putting out a fire.

Perhaps the question confronting American politics isn’t whether we should choose capitalism or socialism. Perhaps it is whether we’ve spent so long treating the market as the answer that we’ve forgotten to ask what question we’re actually trying to solve.

That is the politics of the commons.

Older Entries