24/11/2025
Many iconic American businesses are socialist:
Vanguard Mutual Funds, State Farm Insurance, Land O'Lakes, Credit Unions, Newman's Own, USAA, Ocean Spray, Welch's, Farmers Cooperatives, Condominium Associations, many hospitals, universities, museums, libraries, fire departments, churches, synagogues, mosques, etc
When 86 House Democrats—including corrupt party leader Congressman Hakeem Jeffries—join with the GOP to “condemn the horrors of socialism & take away Americans right to form cooperative businesses" you don’t need a political science degree to understand what’s happening.
What they voted for was not a resolution about history—it was a ritual affirmation of state power A pledge of loyalty to Oligarchs and Wall Street.
It was, effectively, a loyalty oath to the economic system that funds their campaigns, writes their legislation, and keeps their donors comfortable.
The debate was not about Stalin or Mao. It was about ensuring that any alternative to American capitalism—no matter how democratic, humane, or community-based—is outlawed.
The most revealing part wasn’t that the usual Republican bloc approved it. It was that dozens of Democrats joined them, dutifully reciting the catechism that socialism is synonymous with tyranny while pretending that the economic system we inhabit is somehow neutral, benevolent, or beyond critique.
Meanwhile democratic socialist capitalist Norway, Sweden & Denmark are prosperous with universal healthcare & free university & trade schools. Norway has a sovereign wealth fund instead of a national debt.
We have ideological conformity in a phony democracy: the political class locking arms to denounce freedom while the real ones sit in plain view.
Look around.
A society where tens of millions of full-time workers need food stamps to eat is not free.
A society where billionaires buy elections and dictate public policy is not free.
A society where 40% the population can’t absorb a $400 emergency without risking eviction or homelessness — while housing is hoarded as an investment vehicle — is not free.
A society where people fear that a routine traffic stop might cost them their life is not free.
A society that cages migrants fleeing conditions created by U.S. foreign policy is not free.
A society where workers are tracked, monitored, and disciplined by algorithmic systems built by Palantir and other surveillance firms—deeply woven into law enforcement and immigration enforcement—is not free.
And a society where ICE raids terrify entire communities, tearing families apart for the crime of working low-wage jobs that the economy depends on, certainly has no standing to lecture the world about liberty.
These are not deviations from capitalism. They are its everyday operations.
They are what you get when the economy is organized around the prerogatives of capital rather than the needs of people.
If one were actually concerned about “horrors,” they might start with the fact that the U.S. spent trillions of dollars on a war that killed between five hundred thousand to a million Iraqis—money that could have funded a Green New Deal, universal healthcare, and a generation of public infrastructure.
Or the horror of a government that allows tens of thousands of people to die every year for lack of medical care.
Or an economy where deaths of despair—including su***de, overdose, and alcohol-related disease—now kill tens of thousands every year in places where workers have been abandoned by globalization and automation.
Or a political culture that treats the poverty of 35 million Americans not as a national crisis but as something to ridicule or dismiss, illustrated most recently by the Republican push to shame the 42 million people who depend on SNAP.
Or an ecological crisis caused by industries that effectively govern themselves—using their wealth to neutralize regulation, suppress alternatives, and ensure that elected officials serve corporate interests rather than planetary survival.
These horrors are excluded from official discussion because they implicate the interests of the people who crafted the resolution.
The irony is that the resolution condemns socialism for producing centralized, unaccountable power, while capitalism—especially in its American form—has produced precisely that: enormous concentrations of economic power that deeply shape political life, immune to democratic control and unrestrained by public oversight.
When Amazon or BlackRock or Exxon exerts influence over policy, that is not “the free market at work.” It is private unaccountable power—exactly the phenomenon the resolution claims to oppose.
The mythology that capitalism equals freedom only survives because the propaganda system is so sophisticated.
Corporate media, academic orthodoxy, political theater—all work to define capitalism as the natural condition of human life, rather than a specific historical arrangement that serves specific interests.
In this worldview, anything that threatens elite power must be equated with authoritarianism, even if it takes the form of workers controlling their workplaces, publicly-owned utilities, universal healthcare, or people having a democratic say over the economy.
Those are the forms of socialism that actually frighten the political class—not secret police or gulags, but the prospect of ordinary people exercising real power.
At its core, the House vote to condemn socialism was an attempt to discipline the imagination and police the bounds of acceptable thought.
To make sure people never ask why a wealthy nation spends more on the military than the next nine nations combined while claiming we can’t afford basic healthcare; why workers cannot unionize without facing retaliation; why billion-dollar corporations pay nothing in taxes while teachers buy classroom supplies out of pocket; or why a country that lectures the world on human rights continues arming regimes charged with war crimes at the ICC.
If the political class were genuinely interested in human flourishing, they would condemn the horrors that exist today, which they participate in—not the ones invoked to frighten the public. But doing so would require challenging the power of capital, and that is something most of them will never do.
The real task before us is not to defend socialism as a slogan, but to insist on democracy as a principle—economic as well as political.
A society where people control the institutions that shape their lives is neither a dream nor a danger. It is the minimal requirement for freedom.
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Tim Hjersted is the director and co-founder of Films For Action, an online library dedicated to supporting the people and movements working to create a more free, regenerative, and democratic society. He lives in Lawrence, KS.
