Republicans Screaming About Socialism Is Gaslighting 101

There’s no such thing as a socialist country or a capitalist one. We just decide where the slider sits.

“Socialism is about to destroy the entire country!”

This is gaslighting 101.

A 32-year-old organizer named Darializa Avila Chevalier just beat a five-term congressman in New York, and somewhere a Republican is already filming a video about how the socialists are coming for your kids.

She wasn’t alone. Claire Valdez won her primary by more than 20 points. Brad Lander took out a sitting House member. All three are Democratic Socialists of America, all three got Zohran Mamdani’s blessing, and all three are now headed toward Congress. So the MAGA panic button got hit again, right on cue.

Here’s what nobody condemning “socialism” wants you to notice. They’re yelling about a thing that doesn’t exist anywhere on earth.

There is no fully socialist country. There is no fully capitalist one either. Every functioning democracy is a blend – including the US – some stuff we run together, some stuff we leave to the market. We pool money for roads, schools, fire departments, Social Security, Medicare, the interstate, and the post office. Nobody calls the fire department a communist plot when their house is burning. You don’t swipe a card when you dial 911.

So when a politician stands up and warns that socialism will destroy America, they’re betting on one thing – that you don’t know any of this. The whole move runs on people not having the info. It’s a scare word they use to keep you arguing over a label instead of asking the actual question: what do we think is worth pitching in on together?

Now – I’ve said this before – and I will keep pointing it out until people get it:

The single biggest collectively-funded, government-run program in THE WORLD is the US military.

Think about what a service member actually gets. Healthcare with no premium, no deductible, no shopping around. Housing or a housing check. A food allowance. College paid for through the GI Bill. A pension after 20 years. Disability care if they get hurt. None of it depends on how much money you walked in with. All of it comes from taxpayers and gets handed out based on service and need.

Strip the flag off it and here’s the bottom line – government provides your doctor, your house, your food, your school, your retirement – and it’s the exact thing people scream “socialism” about when anyone suggests it for nurses or teachers or you.

Now, the textbook definition of socialism is workers owning the factories, and I’m not saying that the military is that. It’s really the social-democratic version – collective money, collective care. The thing every MAGA republican is posting about right now as the worst thing that could ever happen. And the loudest guys warning you about it have spent whole careers living inside it, drawing a pension, and shopping the base commissary.

Which tells you the fight was never really about economics.

Socialism and capitalism are just tools. A hammer doesn’t have a soul. The difference is who’s swinging it and what they’re building. Capitalism gave us iPhones and also company towns that paid workers in scrip they could only spend at the company store.

Socialist-leaning policy gave Nordic countries some of the highest living standards on the planet, and it also gave the world the Soviet bread lines and worse. Same labels, wildly different outcomes, because the outcome was never about the label. It was about the people in charge and whether anyone could hold them accountable.

Norway, Denmark, Finland, Germany – none of them are “socialist” countries. They’re capitalist economies that decided some things are too important to leave to chance, so they share the cost. Healthcare. College. Childcare. They didn’t collapse. They keep topping the happiness rankings while we argue about whether helping people is Marxism.

So strip it all down and you’re left with a slider. On one end, everybody’s on their own. On the other hand, we share everything. Every country lives somewhere in the middle, and we get to decide where our slider sits. That’s the whole game. That’s democracy actually working – us choosing what matters enough that we all chip in.

And somehow, in this country, we got talked into believing the one thing we should definitely all pay for together, no questions asked, is making war. Healthcare for a kid is creeping socialism. A trillion-dollar defense budget is just patriotism. We share the cost of bombs without blinking and fight like hell over sharing the cost of insulin.

We picked that. We can pick something else.

There’s no such thing as a socialist country or a capitalist one. We just decide where the slider sits.

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