Let’s Be Clear on What We Voted For By Rob C.

By Rob C.

TL;DR: The Blue Tsunami wasn’t a thank-you card for establishment Democrats—it was a non-negotiable demand for a refund on fifty years of broken corporate promises. The Democratic Socialists of America just pulled off their best electoral night in a century, and before cable news commentators completely lose their minds over the word “socialism,” let’s get one thing straight: you’ve been living under a massive socialist program called the United States military since the day you were born, and nobody’s ever asked you to feel guilty about it. It’s time for an honest conversation about who actually broke our economy, and spoiler alert: it wasn’t just the Republicans.

Welcome back to the corporate-authoritarian dumpster fire, folks.

Let’s start with the scoreboard, because it is an absolute beauty. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) just logged their most successful electoral night in over one hundred years of American socialist organizing—stacking up 84 victories across every level of government.

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This isn’t some fringe political side-show anymore. At least five to seven DSA-backed candidates just won seats in the House of Representatives, more than tripling their federal presence beyond Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib. Melat Kiros, at just 29 years old, made history as the first Black woman elected to Congress from Colorado. Over in Florida, Angie Nixon came within striking distance of knocking off an incumbent Republican senator while being outspent 10 to 1 and virtually ignored by national Democratic leadership until the campaign’s final 48 hours.

These weren’t protest votes. These were hard-fought victories in competitive districts by candidates who looked corporate power in the eye, said the quiet part out loud, and won anyway.

The Economic Literacy Check the Media Refuses to Give You

So let’s do what the cable news pundit class refuses to do and actually define the terms everyone is so terrified of.

Capitalism, socialism, and communism are economic systems. They are not forms of government. That distinction sounds pedantic until you realize how much of the right-wing panic machine relies on keeping the public completely ignorant of it.

Democracy, dictatorship, oligarchy, and theocracy describe who holds political power and how. Capitalism, socialism, and communism describe how resources get produced and distributed. Russia and China are autocratic police states operating hybrid economies, not communist utopias. By its strict, original definition, true communism—the equal communal sharing of all resources without a state apparatus—has basically never existed at scale because human nature and unchecked greed are a package deal.

On the flip side, pure unregulated capitalism doesn’t exist either, because somebody has to pay for the roads, bridges, and fire departments. Our own Founding Fathers were deeply suspicious of unchecked wealth concentration for the exact same reason you should be: immense wealth buys political power, and too much of either rots a republic from the inside out.

Socialism, properly understood, isn’t a government takeover of your personal property. It’s simply the collective investment a society chooses to dedicate to the health, safety, and well-being of its own citizens. And guess what? You already live in a nation running multiple socialist programs:

· The U.S. Military: The largest state-funded, single-payer collective defense system on planet Earth.

· Social Security & Medicare: Lifelines that keep millions of seniors from dying in destitution.

· Public Infrastructure & First Responders: Fire departments and public roads paid for by collective tax dollars.

· Corporate Welfare: The massive, eye-watering pile of government subsidies handed out to fossil fuel giants and defense contractors—the same corporations that turn around and lecture you on the “dangers of government handouts.”

America has always operated as a mixed economy sitting on a spectrum between pure capitalism and pure socialism—the exact same spectrum occupied by Canada, the UK, Germany, Sweden, and Denmark (countries that, coincidentally, rank at the top of the global happiness index every single year). The only real question has always been where on that spectrum we choose to sit.

And for the last fifty years, three Democratic presidents in a row chose to drag that dial straight toward corporate deregulation while trying to convince you it was “progress.”

The Corporate Democratic Lineage: How We Got Here

It’s time to stop rewriting history and say it plainly: Jimmy Carter was the original neoliberal Democrat, and Ronald Reagan simply took the victory lap for policies Carter put in motion first, and then compounded it.

Carter aggressively deregulated the airline, trucking, railroad, and banking industries. He leaned heavily on his chief deregulation economist, Alfred Kahn, who famously testified to Congress with a straight face that unbridled markets are superior precisely because nobody can predict their outcomes—which is a hell of a sales pitch for deliberately tearing down the guardrails.

Carter appointed Paul Volcker to head the Federal Reserve explicitly to crush inflation by choking out working-class wages. Volcker admitted it outright: “The average American’s standard of living has to decline.” Carter’s own senior staff acknowledged that the president knew exactly what he was signing off on. Carter slashed domestic spending, picked fights with the United Mine Workers, and jacked up the defense budget at the expense of social programs. That wasn’t an accident—it was the blueprint, drafted by a Democrat years before Reagan ever picked up the pen.

Then came Bill Clinton. Filmmaker Michael Moore nailed it decades ago: “Bill Clinton was the best Republican president we ever had.”

After Newt Gingrich’s right-wing “Republican Revolution” swept Congress in 1994, Clinton didn’t fight back—he surrendered and called it “triangulation.” His 1996 welfare reform bill destroyed the federal safety net for poor families. Within a decade, the poorest ten percent of children raised by single mothers saw their family income collapse by 18%, and the number of kids living in deep poverty exploded from 1.5 million to 2.2 million.

Over on Wall Street, Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, along with his protégé Larry Summers, spearheaded the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act—the battle-tested Depression-era law that had prevented commercial banks from gambling with your life savings for 66 straight years without a single systemic collapse. Clinton signed the repeal with a smile. Economists have drawn a direct line from that decision to the catastrophic 2008 financial crash ever since.

And just when working families thought Barack Obama would finally hold Wall Street accountable for burning down the global economy, Obama walked into the White House and hired the arsonists to run the fire department.

His economic team was stacked almost exclusively with Rubin’s old network:

· Timothy Geithner: The man who personally oversaw the Citigroup and AIG bailouts, installed as Treasury Secretary.

· Larry Summers: The same guy who gutted Glass-Steagall and pocketed over $20 million from financial institutions before re-entering government, appointed as chief economic adviser.

I campaigned for Obama. I believed in the message. But what we got was a president who possessed historic political capital, a supermajority, and an absolute mandate to rein in the financial crooks—and instead handed them back the keys to the vault. Robert Reich, Clinton’s own former Labor Secretary, admitted it plainly: Obama let Wall Street lobbyists run the table. While Dodd-Frank introduced a few regulatory tools, not one single major Wall Street executive ever saw the inside of a courtroom for wiping out trillions in working-class wealth.

The Free Market Myth

Here is the fundamental question that should be echoing off the walls of every corporate lobbying firm in Washington: If capitalism is so unbelievably efficient, why do we have to keep spending trillions of taxpayer dollars bailing out private corporations from crises of their own making?

If billionaires can deliver a higher quality of life for working Americans while saving everyone money, why do they spend every waking hour lobbying Congress for more corporate subsidies?

Every business on Earth utilizes economies of scale to drive down prices—except, by law, the single largest purchaser of healthcare and medicine in the world: the U.S. government. Congress explicitly banned Medicare from negotiating drug prices for decades to protect pharmaceutical profit margins. That isn’t a free market working as advertised; that’s corporate cronies rigging the system and calling it capitalism.

What the Voters Actually Demand

We’ve suffered through five decades of Democratic administrations managing our economic decline while Republicans ran an authoritarian playbook openly handing control of the state to billionaires.

Voters just delivered the clearest mandate either party has received in a generation: We are done being told that wanting healthcare, affordable higher education, and a living wage makes us un-American.

This country has operated a mixed economy all along—the ruling class just conveniently forgot to mention that the working-class half of the deal got canceled decades ago.

The DSA didn’t win 84 races by scaring people. They won by stating the obvious truth: our government has been bought and sold. Now that the new Congress is taking the field, the only question left is whether they will deliver real structural relief, or if they will fold into the arms of the same corporate donors who bought the last fifty years.

Keep the pressure on. We didn’t vote for a polite rebuke—we voted for a government that finally works for us.