u/Buddhaonatricycle

Forget the shouting match about the 91% tax rate. Yes, it existed (1944–1963). No, nobody paid it on their full income. Both sides are right, and both are arguing about a decoy. The real number in the 1950s was 55% — the measured, effective rate the top 0.01% actually paid, all taxes combined. Today, the 25 richest Americans pay 3.4% against their actual wealth growth.

That didn't happen by accident. It happened like a chess game — a few quiet moves, decades apart, each one repositioning the board while everyone argued about the loudest piece. Here's the game. The opening position: high rates, no exits. The 1950s code had the rich in check. The 91% bracket started at $200,000 — $2.4 million today, 45x the median household income. Capital gains were capped at 25%, sure — but dividends were taxed as ordinary income, all the way up the ladder. And dividends were how wealth got paid, because stock buybacks were illegal — repurchasing your own shares was market manipulation. Corporate profits had one road to shareholders, and it ran straight through the top brackets. A family living on $300K a year in dividends (~$3.6M today) paid full freight on every dollar. That's how you get to 55% — not virtue. No escape squares.

Move one: 1982 — free the rook. The SEC adopts rule 10b-18, legalizing buybacks. They go from zero to a trillion dollars a year, replacing dividends as the way corporations return cash. The play: a dividend is taxable the moment it lands. A buyback pumps the share price instead — same money, same shareholders, but now it's an unrealized gain. Invisible to the tax code until you sell. Which brings us to why you'd never sell.

Move two: 2003 — capture the dividend. Whatever dividends still got paid the old way get reclassified from ordinary income to capital gains rates. The income type that hit 91% under Eisenhower now tops out at 23.8% — below the 25% cap the 1950s reserved for capital gains. The rate that was the floor of privilege in 1955 is above the ceiling now.

Move three: the endgame — buy, borrow, die. Never sell the stock. Borrow against it to live — loans aren't income; the tax code can't see you. Then die, and stepped-up basis wipes the board: heirs inherit at market value, and every dollar of lifetime gain escapes income tax forever. This rule existed all along, but it only became the operating system of billionaire wealth once moves one and two made unrealized gains the dominant form of top-end income. The pieces interlock. That's the design.

Checkmate, in numbers: 1950s top 0.01%: ~55% effective Today's top 0.01%: ~41% on reported income Today's 25 richest, against actual wealth growth: 3.4% (ProPublica, from IRS data). Buffett: 0.1%. Bezos: under 1%. Several years of literal $0. All legal. And here's where "bankrupt the economy" stops being a metaphor.

Every dollar rerouted around the tax code is a dollar the country still spent — on defense, Medicare, roads, wars — and borrowed instead. Corporate tax revenue sank below the OECD average. The 2017 cuts didn't pay for themselves (CBO). The 2025 extension adds $4.7 trillion to deficits through 2035 (CBO again). The US now sits at roughly 125% debt-to-GDP — the steepest fiscal deterioration among major advanced economies — while the "growth will pay for it" promise runs 45 years past due: GDP growth averaged 4.2% a year in the 1950s under the 91% rate versus 1.8% in the 2000s under 35%, and the Congressional Research Service found no clear association between top rates and growth across six decades. Productivity rose ~80% since the 1970s. Wages flatlined. The growth went somewhere — check the scoreboard above for where.

So that's the game. Buybacks made wealth payouts invisible. Reclassification cut the rate on whatever stayed visible. Stepped-up basis erased the bill at death. And the tab for running the country didn't shrink — it just moved to the national credit card while the biggest fortunes in human history slipped quietly off the board.

We didn't just lower the tax on wealth in America. We rerouted wealth around the tax entirely — and billed the difference to the American people.

From 1944 to 1963, the U.S. top marginal tax rate was 91–94%. It stayed at 70% until 1981. That's not a typo. Eisenhower-era America — the guy who built the interstate highway system and warned about the military-industrial complex — ran tax rates that would make today's pundits combust on live TV.

And before anyone types "nobody actually paid 91%" — correct, and the real number is worse for your argument. The 91% bracket kicked in above $200,000 in 1950s dollars — roughly $2.4 million today, about 45x the median household income. It wasn't a tax on workers; it was aimed squarely at the top few hundredths of a percent. The ultra-rich paid an effective rate of roughly 55% in the 1950s, all taxes combined. Today that same group pays about 41%. That's a 14-point cut for the wealthiest people in America over seven decades. And that 41% only counts reported income — measured against actual wealth growth, ProPublica's IRS data showed the 25 richest Americans paying a 3.4% true tax rate, with several paying $0 in specific years. All legal. Buy, borrow, die. Meanwhile that 55% from the 1950s still beats Norway's top rate today (~40%), matches Switzerland's, and sits right in Denmark's range (~52–60.5%). The "loopholes" defense doesn't rescue the modern tax code — it indicts it twice.

And before anyone types "the rich just used the 25% capital gains rate" — that only covered realized gains, one slice of the pie. Dividends were taxed as ordinary income back then, straight up the ladder toward 91% — and dividends were how wealth paid out, because stock buybacks were effectively illegal until 1982. Now trace what changed: buybacks became legal and replaced dividends (deliberately — they convert taxable payouts into untaxed unrealized gains, about a trillion dollars a year now). In 2003, dividends got moved to capital gains rates. Today the top rate on both is 23.8% — below the 1950s 25% cap. The rate that was the floor of privilege then is above the ceiling now. Every path in the 1950s code led to high ordinary rates; every path today leads to capital gains treatment — with stepped-up basis at death as a legal exit ramp to zero.

Here's the detail that gives the whole game away: "socialism" accusations were everywhere in the 1950s. Eisenhower railed against "creeping socialism." The AMA branded Medicare "socialized medicine." McCarthyism was at full boil. And through all of it, the 91% top bracket sat there — under a Republican president — and was never the target. Every government program was "socialism." The tax rate on the rich never was. The word has never been about tax rates.

It's a panic button, and it gets pushed the second any policy would move money from corporate profits back to workers — universal healthcare, higher wages, stronger unions, you name it. Why does it work? Because fear gets clicks, clicks get ad revenue, and cable news is in the attention business, not the accuracy business. "They want higher effective tax rates on income over $10 million" doesn't trend. "They want to turn America into Venezuela" does.

Meanwhile, the actual numbers:

U.S. productivity is up roughly 80% since the 1970s — wages didn't come close to keeping pace

Corporate tax rates were slashed from 46% to 21% since 1980, and U.S. corporate tax revenue as a share of GDP now sits below the OECD average — 88 profitable corporations paid $0 in federal income tax in 2025 on a combined $105 billion in profit

The top 10% now hold 72% of U.S. wealth — Gilded Age concentration, versus a far flatter 1950s

The U.S. spends more per person on healthcare than any country on Earth (~$14,900/year), still leaves tens of millions uninsured, and dies younger for it — 79.0 years vs. 82.7 in peer countries that spend a third less

And the part that really breaks the narrative: who's actually fiscally reckless? Denmark — the go-to "socialist boogeyman" — is running a budget surplus with debt around 27% of GDP and falling. Norway's $1.7 trillion sovereign wealth fund dwarfs its entire gross debt; its net fiscal position is deeply positive. Switzerland sits at 38%.

The U.S. — the one lecturing everyone about big government spending — sits at roughly 125% debt-to-GDP with CBO projecting a continued climb for a decade, the steepest fiscal deterioration among major advanced economies. The single biggest legislated driver: the 2025 tax cut extension, which CBO scores at $4.7 trillion added to deficits through 2035.

And yes — the sharpest pushback is true, so let's just say it: the Nordic countries don't fund their systems by only soaking the rich. Their top brackets kick in at 1.3–1.8x the average wage — roughly $122,000 in Denmark, $138,000 in Norway — versus $640,600 in the US. Add a 25% VAT on consumption, and the upper middle class is doing a lot of the lifting. But notice what that argument actually concedes: a nurse in Copenhagen pays top-bracket rates, gets universal healthcare, free university, and real safety nets back — and by international measures reports more personal freedom and life satisfaction than her American counterpart, who pays less tax and then hands the difference (and more) to insurers, hospitals, and student loan servicers. The Nordic model isn't "tax the rich." It's "everyone pays in, everyone gets covered." Call that whatever you want — it's running surpluses in market economies with private companies and stock exchanges. What it isn't, is socialism. And what the US definitely isn't, is fiscally responsible.

So the "reckless socialist experiments" are running surpluses and stockpiling trillion-dollar wealth funds. The country cutting taxes on top earners and calling it fiscal responsibility is the one with the fastest-deteriorating debt position in the developed world. Make it make sense.

Next time someone yells "sOciAliSm," ask them which countries actually have their fiscal house in order — while also delivering greater economic mobility, lower income inequality, universal healthcare, stronger safety nets, and higher measured levels of personal freedom and life satisfaction.

From 1944 to 1963, the U.S. top marginal tax rate was 91–94%. It stayed at 70% until 1981. That's not a typo. Eisenhower-era America — the guy who built the interstate highway system and warned about the military-industrial complex — ran tax rates that would make today's pundits combust on live TV.

And before anyone types "nobody actually paid 91%" — correct, and the real number is worse for your argument. The 91% bracket kicked in above $200,000 in 1950s dollars — roughly $2.4 million today, about 45x the median household income. It wasn't a tax on workers; it was aimed squarely at the top few hundredths of a percent. The ultra-rich paid an effective rate of roughly 55% in the 1950s, all taxes combined. Today that same group pays about 41%. That's a 14-point cut for the wealthiest people in America over seven decades. And that 41% only counts reported income — measured against actual wealth growth, ProPublica's IRS data showed the 25 richest Americans paying a 3.4% true tax rate, with several paying $0 in specific years. All legal. Buy, borrow, die. Meanwhile that 55% from the 1950s still beats Norway's top rate today (~40%), matches Switzerland's, and sits right in Denmark's range (~52–60.5%). The "loopholes" defense doesn't rescue the modern tax code — it indicts it twice.

And before anyone types "the rich just used the 25% capital gains rate" — that only covered realized gains, one slice of the pie. Dividends were taxed as ordinary income back then, straight up the ladder toward 91% — and dividends were how wealth paid out, because stock buybacks were effectively illegal until 1982. Now trace what changed: buybacks became legal and replaced dividends (deliberately — they convert taxable payouts into untaxed unrealized gains, about a trillion dollars a year now). In 2003, dividends got moved to capital gains rates. Today the top rate on both is 23.8% — below the 1950s 25% cap. The rate that was the floor of privilege then is above the ceiling now. Every path in the 1950s code led to high ordinary rates; every path today leads to capital gains treatment — with stepped-up basis at death as a legal exit ramp to zero.

Here's the detail that gives the whole game away: "socialism" accusations were everywhere in the 1950s. Eisenhower railed against "creeping socialism." The AMA branded Medicare "socialized medicine." McCarthyism was at full boil. And through all of it, the 91% top bracket sat there — under a Republican president — and was never the target. Every government program was "socialism." The tax rate on the rich never was. The word has never been about tax rates.

It's a panic button, and it gets pushed the second any policy would move money from corporate profits back to workers — universal healthcare, higher wages, stronger unions, you name it. Why does it work? Because fear gets clicks, clicks get ad revenue, and cable news is in the attention business, not the accuracy business. "They want higher effective tax rates on income over $10 million" doesn't trend. "They want to turn America into Venezuela" does.

Meanwhile, the actual numbers:

U.S. productivity is up roughly 80% since the 1970s — wages didn't come close to keeping pace

Corporate tax rates were slashed from 46% to 21% since 1980, and U.S. corporate tax revenue as a share of GDP now sits below the OECD average — 88 profitable corporations paid $0 in federal income tax in 2025 on a combined $105 billion in profit

The top 10% now hold 72% of U.S. wealth — Gilded Age concentration, versus a far flatter 1950s

The U.S. spends more per person on healthcare than any country on Earth (~$14,900/year), still leaves tens of millions uninsured, and dies younger for it — 79.0 years vs. 82.7 in peer countries that spend a third less

And the part that really breaks the narrative: who's actually fiscally reckless? Denmark — the go-to "socialist boogeyman" — is running a budget surplus with debt around 27% of GDP and falling. Norway's $1.7 trillion sovereign wealth fund dwarfs its entire gross debt; its net fiscal position is deeply positive. Switzerland sits at 38%.

The U.S. — the one lecturing everyone about big government spending — sits at roughly 125% debt-to-GDP with CBO projecting a continued climb for a decade, the steepest fiscal deterioration among major advanced economies. The single biggest legislated driver: the 2025 tax cut extension, which CBO scores at $4.7 trillion added to deficits through 2035.

So the "reckless socialist experiments" are running surpluses and stockpiling trillion-dollar wealth funds. The country cutting taxes on top earners and calling it fiscal responsibility is the one with the fastest-deteriorating debt position in the developed world. Make it make sense.

Next time someone yells "sOciAliSm," ask them which countries actually have their fiscal house in order — while also delivering greater economic mobility, lower income inequality, universal healthcare, stronger safety nets, and higher measured levels of personal freedom and life satisfaction.

I'm tired of the same old fear tactics of the corporate sponsored right-wing media preying on the ignorance of viewers for power and profit. Their propaganda tactics have convinced viewers that any policy that benefits the real engines of the economy — the working class — is ScCiaLisM and the destruction of America.

Nobody brings up on cable news the fact: from 1944 to 1963, the U.S. top marginal tax rate was 91–94%. It stayed at 70% all the way until 1981. That's not a typo. Eisenhower-era America — the guy who literally built the interstate highway system and warned about the military-industrial complex — taxed top earners at rates that would make today's pundits combust on live TV.

Nobody calls that decade "socialist America." It wasn't. Same private companies, same stock market, same free enterprise — just a much bigger tax bill at the very top. And here's the kicker: that 70–91% rate was higher than Norway's top rate today (~47%), higher than Switzerland's (~40% combined), and higher than or roughly tied with Canada's (~53%) and Denmark's (~60.5%). So if 91% didn't make 1950s America communist, 47% in Norway definitely doesn't make Norway communist either.

The word was never actually about the tax rate. It's a panic button, and it gets pushed the second any policy would move money from corporate profits back to workers — universal healthcare, higher wages, stronger unions, you name it. Suddenly it's "socialism," "communism," take your pick, no definition required.

Why does the trick work so well? Because fear gets clicks and clicks get ad revenue, and cable news is in the attention business, not the accuracy business. "They want higher marginal tax rates on income over $10 million" doesn't trend. "They want to turn America into Venezuela" does.

Meanwhile, actual numbers keep doing their own quiet thing:

- U.S. productivity is up roughly 80% since the 1970s — wages didn't come close to keeping pace

- Corporate tax rates have been slashed repeatedly since 1980, from 46% down to 21%

- Wealth concentration at the top is back to Gilded Age levels

- The U.S. spends more per person on healthcare than any country on Earth (~$14,900/year) and still leaves tens of millions uninsured — countries getting called "socialist" spend a third less for the same or better outcomes

And here's the part that really breaks the narrative: who's actually being fiscally reckless? Denmark — one of the go-to "socialist boogeyman" countries — is running a budget surplus, with debt at under 30% of GDP. Norway sits around 44% debt-to-GDP, but that number is almost meaningless in isolation: Norway's $1.7 trillion sovereign wealth fund is worth several times more than its entire gross debt, meaning its net fiscal position is deeply positive. Switzerland's at 38%. Meanwhile, the U.S. — the one lecturing everyone about the dangers of big government spending — is sitting at roughly 126% debt-to-GDP in 2026, on pace to hit 142% by 2031, the steepest deterioration of any major economy on Earth. A big driver: the 2025 tax cut extension, which added an estimated $4.5 trillion to the debt over ten years.

So the countries constantly painted as reckless, bloated, tax-and-spend "socialist" experiments are running surpluses and stockpiling trillion-dollar sovereign wealth funds. The country cutting taxes on top earners and calling it fiscal responsibility is the one racing toward a debt crisis. Make it make sense.

Next time someone yells "socialism," maybe ask them who's actually got their fiscal house in order, while having greater income mobility, less inequality, universal healthcare, and even more freedom according to studies. Watch what happens.

This isn't speculation or hyperbole. This is documented, traceable, and proven with receipts.

THE ORIGINAL BLUEPRINT

In 1971 a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell wrote a memo explicitly calling the judiciary "the most important instrument for social, economic, and political change" available to corporate interests. Weeks later Nixon appointed him to the Supreme Court. The plan worked exactly as designed over the following decades.

THE DARK MONEY PIPELINE

A single operative named Leonard Leo, working through the Federalist Society, has directed over $250 million in anonymous dark money specifically to select, confirm, and influence Supreme Court justices. Trump's own White House Counsel Don McGahn publicly admitted the judicial selection process had been "in-sourced" to the Federalist Society. 86% of Trump's Supreme Court and appellate court nominees were Federalist Society members.

One anonymous donor gave $17 million to attack Merrick Garland's nomination. Another $17 million from possibly the same donor to prop up Kavanaugh's confirmation. That's $35 million spent by people we will never identify to determine the composition of the highest court in the country. People don't spend that kind of money expecting nothing in return.

THE PERFECT WIN RECORD

Here's the number that should make every American furious. Through the Roberts Court there have been 80 partisan 5-4 decisions in civil cases involving major Republican donor interests. The donor-favored outcome won. All 80 times. Not most. All of them. A perfect record.

WHAT THAT RECORD ACTUALLY PRODUCED

Citizens United (2010) — opened the floodgates for unlimited corporate money in elections. Funded by the same donor network that built the court that decided it.

Janus v. AFSCME (2018) — gutted public sector union dues, directly targeting the financial foundation of organized labor. Pushed by anti-labor front groups tied to the same Federalist Society donor network.

Sackett v. EPA (2023) — stripped federal protection from millions of acres of wetlands. A direct win for polluter interests, backed by a coordinated swarm of dark money amicus briefs.

Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta (2021) — allowed dark money donors to hide their identities even from state regulators. The court protecting the exact mechanism that built it.

The student loan forgiveness case — struck down relief for millions of borrowers, backed by the same Koch-funded network.

Today, June 29 2026 — Trump v. Slaughter overturned a 91 year old precedent, giving the president unrestricted power to fire independent agency officials at will, including the NLRB members who protect your right to unionize.

THE PATTERN IS NOT SUBTLE

Every justice in the Court's six member Republican-appointed majority is a current or former Federalist Society member. They headline Federalist Society galas. Kavanaugh chose a Federalist Society gala for his first public appearance after his confirmation hearings.

The same billionaires who fund the justices' confirmation campaigns also fund the front groups that file coordinated amicus brief swarms instructing the justices how to rule. In one case over 50 separate dark money funded briefs were filed at the certiorari stage alone, specifically to signal the donor class's expectations before the case was even heard. The same billionaires have also been documented giving justices undisclosed gifts, luxury travel, and real estate deals.

WHY THIS MATTERS RIGHT NOW

This isn't ancient history. The court built through this scheme just ruled today that the president can fire independent regulators at will — stripping away the last legal protection for agencies that are supposed to operate independently of corporate and political pressure. The NLRB. The FTC. Every agency built to protect you from exactly the kind of unchecked power this ruling just handed back to whoever sits in the Oval Office.

THE BOTTOM LINE

You are not imagining it. The Supreme Court was not corrupted by accident or through normal democratic appointment processes functioning imperfectly. It was deliberately built, financed, and staffed by a documented, traceable, $250+ million dark money operation specifically designed to deliver outcomes for corporate donors regardless of what the public wants or what the law previously protected.

The receipts are public. The voting pattern is documented. The funding network has names attached to it. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is a Senate Judiciary Committee documented, Washington Post investigated, multi-decade operation that has succeeded completely.

Be angry. The anger is earned and the evidence is overwhelming.

This should make every working class person angry and rightly so. Control the narrative and you control the people is the business model of right-wing media and the GOP. Let's start with what socialism actually is, because the word being deployed against every policy that might inconvenience a billionaire has almost nothing to do with its actual definition.

Socialism in its actual form means public or collective ownership of the means of production. The government owns the factories, the banks, the energy infrastructure. The Soviet Union was socialist. Cuba is socialist. Venezuela is socialist. These are the images the right wing media machine wants in your head the moment anyone proposes letting Medicare negotiate drug prices.

Now let's look at what actually gets called socialist in America.

Medicare. A program where the government pays private doctors and private hospitals to treat elderly Americans using money those Americans paid in their entire working lives. Socialist.

Social Security. A retirement insurance program funded by payroll contributions from workers and employers, administered by the federal government, paid out to people who earned it. Socialist.

The Affordable Care Act. A law that expanded access to private insurance purchased through private markets from private companies. Not a government insurance program — private markets with subsidies. Socialist.

A $15 minimum wage. Requiring private employers to pay their private employees a minimum hourly rate. Socialist.

Universal Pre-K. Government funded childcare so working parents can afford to work. Socialist.

Student debt relief. Reducing the outstanding balance on loans taken out by working class people to access education that the economy requires them to have. Socialist.

Prescription drug price negotiation. Allowing the largest purchaser of prescription drugs in the world to negotiate prices the way every other developed country on earth already does. Socialist.

Paid family leave. Requiring employers to allow workers to take time off when a family member is born or critically ill without losing their job or income. Socialist.

Taxing billionaires. Requiring people who have accumulated more wealth than entire nations to pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes. Socialist.

Regulating pollution. Requiring corporations to not poison the air and water of the communities they operate in. Socialist.

Not one of those things is socialism. Not one of them involves the government owning the means of production. Not one of them resembles in any meaningful way the Soviet Union, Cuba, or Venezuela — the images being deliberately conjured every time these policies are discussed.

So what are they actually?

They are the policy agenda of every other wealthy developed democracy on earth. Germany has universal healthcare, free university education, codetermination laws that put workers on corporate boards, and some of the strongest labor protections in the world. Germany is not socialist. It is the fourth largest economy on earth and one of the most competitive manufacturing nations in history. Denmark has universal healthcare, free university, generous parental leave, and a robust social safety net. Denmark is not socialist. It consistently ranks as one of the happiest, most prosperous, and most economically mobile countries on earth. Canada has universal single payer healthcare. Canada is not socialist. It is America's largest trading partner and has a higher standard of living by multiple measures than the United States. Norway. Sweden. Finland. The Netherlands. Australia. Japan. All of these countries have robust social programs, strong labor protections, and universal healthcare. None of them are socialist. All of them have higher life expectancy, lower infant mortality, lower poverty rates, better educational outcomes, and higher economic mobility than the United States.

The thing these countries have that America doesn't isn't socialism. It's a working class that wasn't successfully convinced that basic human dignity is a communist plot.

HOW THE LABEL ACTUALLY WORKS

The deployment of the socialist label is not accidental and it is not organic. It is a deliberate, documented, corporate funded strategy that has been running for over a century.

When Franklin Roosevelt proposed Social Security in 1935 opponents called it socialism. When Harry Truman proposed universal healthcare in 1948 the American Medical Association spent what was then the largest lobbying campaign in American history calling it socialized medicine. When Lyndon Johnson passed Medicare in 1965 Ronald Reagan — then a corporate spokesman for General Electric — recorded an album warning that Medicare would lead to socialism and that Americans would spend their old age telling their children what it once was like to live in a country that was free. Medicare is now the most popular government program in American history and the Republican Party spends every election cycle promising not to touch it.

When Barack Obama proposed the Affordable Care Act — a plan originally developed by the Heritage Foundation, a right wing think tank, and first implemented by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts — it was called socialism. A Heritage Foundation plan implemented by a Republican governor called socialism when a Democrat proposed it nationally. That is not ideological consistency. That is a label being deployed as a weapon regardless of what it is being aimed at.

The pattern is identical every single time. A policy that would materially benefit working class people at the expense of corporate profit margins gets the socialist label attached to it. The corporate funded media ecosystem amplifies the label. Working class people who have been trained to associate socialism with Soviet breadlines and Cuban poverty vote against their own economic interests. The policy fails or gets watered down. Corporate profits are protected. The working class continues to struggle. And the cycle repeats.

THE REAL PURPOSE OF THE LABEL

Here is what the socialist label actually does. It takes policies that working class people would overwhelmingly support if described on their merits and attaches them to an image — the Soviet gulags, the Venezuelan food lines, the Cuban poverty — that triggers visceral fear and rejection before any rational evaluation can occur.

Polling consistently shows that when Americans are asked about specific policies without the socialist label attached, majorities support them across party lines. Lowering prescription drug prices — 88% support. Paid family leave — 82% support. Raising the minimum wage — 67% support. Universal pre-K — 63% support. Expanding Medicare — 69% support. The moment you call any of these things socialism the numbers collapse — not because people's actual interests changed but because the label short circuits rational evaluation and replaces it with fear.

That is the point. That has always been the point.

The corporate interests funding the right wing media ecosystem don't actually believe Medicare is socialism. They know it isn't socialism. They call it socialism because socialism is the only label that reliably convinces working class people to vote against policies that would improve their lives and threaten corporate profit margins.

It is the most successful political manipulation in the history of American democracy. And it has cost working class Americans more in wages, healthcare, retirement security, and economic mobility than any foreign adversary ever has.

THE COMMUNIST LABEL

The communist label is the nuclear version of the same weapon deployed when the socialist label isn't landing hard enough.

Zohran Mamdani wins a Democratic mayoral primary in New York City — an election, in a democracy, where more people voted for him than anyone else — and Facebook memes compare him to Lenin. Bernie Sanders proposes Medicare for All — a policy that exists in some form in every developed country on earth — and he is called a communist. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposes a 70% marginal tax rate on income above $10 million — a rate lower than the United States maintained through the entire Eisenhower administration, a period conservatives romanticize as the golden age of American prosperity — and she is called a communist.

Dwight Eisenhower was a communist by the standards being applied today. The United States interstate highway system — built by the federal government, funded by taxpayers, owned by the public — is communist infrastructure. The U.S. military is the largest socialist institution in the history of human civilization — entirely government owned, government funded, government operated, with housing, healthcare, education, and retirement benefits provided to its members by the state. Nobody calls it socialist because the people who own the media ecosystem that deploys these labels also profit from defense contracts.

WHAT THEY'RE ACTUALLY PROTECTING

When the right wing media machine calls something socialist or communist it is never actually concerned about the ideology. It is concerned about the profit margin.

When Medicare drug price negotiation gets called socialism what is actually being protected is the pharmaceutical industry's ability to charge Americans ten times what the same drugs cost in Canada. When minimum wage increases get called socialism what is actually being protected is the ability of corporations to pay workers poverty wages while their executives collect nine figure compensation packages. When universal healthcare gets called socialism what is actually being protected is the health insurance industry's $1.3 trillion in annual revenue extracted from Americans for the privilege of sometimes paying for their medical care. When labor protections get called socialism what is actually being protected is the ability of corporations to extract maximum labor at minimum cost without accountability to the people doing the work.

The label is a shield. Behind the shield is a very simple transaction: corporate money funds a media ecosystem that deploys the socialist label, working class people who consume that media vote against policies that would benefit them, and the corporate interests that funded the media ecosystem collect the returns on their investment in the form of protected profit margins, blocked regulations, and a political class that serves them rather than the people who elected them.

THE COUNTRIES THAT DIDN'T FALL FOR IT

Germany's workers sit on corporate boards by law. German companies cannot make major decisions without worker representation at the highest levels of governance. German workers have stronger job protections, higher wages relative to productivity, more vacation time, universal healthcare, and better retirement security than American workers. Germany is the fourth largest economy on earth and one of the most competitive export nations in history. Codetermination — workers on corporate boards — has not destroyed German capitalism. It has made it more stable, more productive, and more equitable.

Denmark's workers have some of the highest wages in the world, the most generous unemployment benefits, universal healthcare, free university education, and a social safety net so robust that economic disruption doesn't produce the kind of desperate poverty it produces in America. Denmark is consistently ranked the happiest country on earth. Its economy is thriving. Its democracy is healthy. Its people are not standing in breadlines.

Norway discovered oil in the 1960s and instead of letting oil companies extract the profits and distribute them to shareholders, created a sovereign wealth fund owned by the Norwegian people that is now worth over $1.6 trillion — more than $300,000 for every Norwegian citizen. That is a government owning a productive asset and distributing its returns to the public. By American right wing media standards that is raging socialism. By every measurable outcome it is one of the greatest wealth creation and distribution successes in human history.

These countries are not perfect. They have problems. But not one of them would trade their healthcare system, their labor protections, or their social safety net for the American model. Not one of their working classes has been convinced that basic human dignity is a communist plot.

A DIRECT APPEAL

The next time you hear a policy called socialist or communist ask yourself one question: who benefits from you rejecting it?

Lowering prescription drug prices — who benefits from you calling that socialism? The pharmaceutical companies charging you ten times what Canadians pay for the same drugs. Raising the minimum wage — who benefits from you calling that socialism? The corporations paying poverty wages while their executives collect nine figure bonuses. Universal healthcare — who benefits from you calling that socialism? The insurance industry extracting $1.3 trillion annually from Americans for the privilege of sometimes paying their medical bills. Taxing billionaires — who benefits from you calling that socialism? The billionaires.

The people calling these things socialist are not protecting your freedom. They are protecting their profit margins. The media ecosystem amplifying those labels is not informing you. It is managing you. And the working class Americans who have been most successfully convinced that basic human dignity is a communist plot are the ones paying the highest price for that management — in wages, in healthcare costs, in retirement insecurity, in economic anxiety, and in the slow steady erosion of the living standards their parents and grandparents built.

The Soviet Union collapsed. Cuba is poor. Venezuela is a disaster. None of that has anything to do with whether your employer should be required to give you paid sick leave.

The label is a weapon. Now you know who it's aimed at. 

What you're about to read is not the Fox News version of reality. It's not MSNBC either. It's the actual policy record, the documented votes, the nonpartisan data, and the institutional history that the corporate media ecosystem — on both sides — has every financial incentive to obscure, distort, or bury under outrage and noise.

Most political analysis looks at presidents. That's the wrong frame. Presidents don't pass budgets. Presidents don't write legislation. Presidents don't draw district maps or confirm Supreme Court justices alone. To understand how we got here you have to look at the balance of power in Congress, the ideological aims of both parties when they held that power, and what they actually did with it. That picture is unambiguous. And it points in one direction. Here is the full accounting.

THE BALANCE OF POWER — THE FRAME NOBODY USES

In the last 45 years Democrats have held unified control of Congress and the presidency for approximately six years. Six years out of forty five. In those six years we got the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Affordable Care Act, expanded Medicaid, the largest infrastructure investment in American history, the CHIPS Act returning semiconductor manufacturing to American soil, the first ever Medicare drug price negotiations, and the Inflation Reduction Act — the most significant climate legislation ever passed. Every single one was working class legislation. Every single one passed without a single Republican vote. The moment Republicans regained any legislative leverage the response was obstruction, government shutdowns, debt ceiling hostage taking, and repeal attempts.

Republicans meanwhile held unified control for significantly more of that period and used it to pass the Reagan tax cuts, the Bush tax cuts, two unfunded wars, Medicare Part D without a funding mechanism, the 2017 Trump tax cuts, and Citizens United was handed down by a Republican appointed Supreme Court majority. Every major policy that has driven wealth upward and debt higher was passed or enabled during periods of Republican legislative dominance.

That is not both sides. That is one side governing for working people in the limited windows it was allowed to govern and one side using every window it had to govern for corporations and the wealthy — then using obstruction, gerrymandering, and judicial capture to make sure those windows stayed limited. Now here is the full accounting of what that project actually produced.

TRICKLE DOWN ECONOMICS

In 1981 Ronald Reagan sold America on the idea that cutting taxes on corporations and the wealthy would generate prosperity that flowed down to working people. Supply side economics. Reaganomics. Call it what you want — the mechanism was the same and the promise was explicit. Forty five years later the results are in and they are unambiguous. Real wages for working class Americans are essentially flat adjusted for inflation. CEO compensation has exploded more than 1,000% since 1978 while worker pay grew 26%. Union membership collapsed from 33% of the American workforce in the 1950s to under 10% today — engineered through decades of deliberate Republican policy, from Reagan firing 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981 to send a message, to right to work legislation spreading state by state, to sustained judicial and legislative attacks on collective bargaining. When workers lost their ability to organize they lost their leverage. When they lost their leverage wages stagnated. Wealth inequality has grown every single year since 1981. The people who do the actual work of this country have been running in place their entire lives while the people at the top captured virtually all of the economic gains.

That is not a partisan talking point. That is 45 years of documented measurable outcome from the dominant economic policy framework of our time.

THE NATIONAL DEBT

If you genuinely care about fiscal responsibility the data will disturb you — but probably not in the direction you expect.

Republican tax cuts alone are responsible for 57% of the increase in the debt ratio since 2001. Excluding the emergency crisis spending that Republican policies largely created that number rises to 90%. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected before the Bush tax cuts were made permanent that revenues would exceed spending for every single one of the next 65 years — accounting for an aging population, rising healthcare costs, all of it. Sustainable indefinitely. That projection collapsed the moment those cuts were locked in. Not because spending increased. Because revenue was gutted so catastrophically it could never recover.

Reagan nearly tripled the national debt through simultaneous tax cuts and the largest peacetime defense buildup in American history. George W. Bush inherited a surplus — an actual surplus, the first since 1969 — from the Clinton administration and turned it into the largest deficits in American history through two unfunded wars and two rounds of tax cuts for the wealthy. Trump added $1.9 trillion through his 2017 tax cuts before COVID ever arrived — a purely ideological peacetime choice with no crisis justification whatsoever.

All four Republican presidents since 1980 increased the federal deficit — Reagan by 94%, Bush Sr by 67%, Bush Jr by 1,204%, Trump by 317%. Both completed Democratic presidencies in that same period decreased the deficit — Clinton by 150% ending with a surplus, Obama by 53%.

The United States does not have a spending problem. It has a revenue problem with a 45 year paper trail leading directly to Republican tax policy.

THE WARS

The invasion of Iraq was not a crisis response to September 11th. It was a premeditated ideological objective documented in Project for the New American Century papers from 1998 — years before George W. Bush took office, years before the towers fell. The same architects — Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz — who signed those documents used September 11th as the pretext to execute a plan that already existed.

Every previous American war was financed through revenue increases. World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam — all funded by raising taxes on the American people. Bush cut taxes twice while launching two simultaneous wars and put the entire cost on the national credit card. The result was a completely unnecessary strategic catastrophe that cost trillions, destabilized an entire region, created the power vacuum that produced ISIS, caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, and whose consequences we are still paying for decades later. It was not forced upon us by circumstance. It was chosen by people who had wanted it for years and saw their moment.

DEREGULATION AND THE 2008 COLLAPSE

The 2008 financial crisis didn't come from nowhere. It was the predictable endpoint of decades of Republican driven deregulation that stripped away the protections put in place after the Great Depression specifically to prevent exactly that kind of collapse. Glass-Steagall, which separated commercial and investment banking, was dismantled by a Republican Congress — and signed, to his discredit, by Bill Clinton. Derivatives markets were left completely unregulated. Predatory lending was allowed to run unchecked. When it all came apart millions of working class Americans lost their homes, their retirement savings, and their jobs. The banks that caused it received hundreds of billions in taxpayer bailouts. The architects of the deregulation faced no consequences. And within a decade the GOP was back pushing deregulation again as if none of it had happened.

CITIZENS UNITED AND THE CAPTURE OF DEMOCRACY

In 2010 a Republican appointed Supreme Court majority ruled in Citizens United v. FEC that corporations and outside groups could spend unlimited money influencing elections. The vote was 5-4 with every Republican appointed justice in the majority and every Democratic appointed justice dissenting. Corporate money flooded into politics at a scale never seen before. The fossil fuel companies, financial industry groups, pharmaceutical corporations, and billionaire donor networks that funded that money got exactly the return on investment they paid for — favorable legislation, blocked regulations, and a political class increasingly accountable to donors rather than voters.

Then Republicans gerrymandered congressional districts with surgical precision using modern GIS technology and census data. Project REDMAP was a coordinated $30 million national strategy conceived at the highest levels of the Republican Party, specifically timed to the 2010 census, designed to lock in congressional majorities for a generation regardless of how people actually voted. It worked. Republicans repeatedly won House majorities while losing the national popular vote.

Then they passed voter ID laws, purged voter rolls, closed polling locations in minority communities, and attacked early voting and mail in voting. Not because of any documented fraud. Because higher turnout consistently hurts their candidates. When you cannot win on the popularity of your ideas you change the rules of who gets to vote.

SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE

Every serious threat to Social Security and Medicare in modern American history has come from the Republican Party. Newt Gingrich called Medicare a program that would wither on the vine. Paul Ryan spent years pushing plans to privatize Social Security and convert Medicare into a voucher program. Rick Scott proposed sunsetting all federal legislation every five years — which would have included Social Security and Medicare — and only added exemptions after facing fierce public backlash. He walked it back under pressure. That is not a defense. That is a confession of what the plan actually was. Democrats created Social Security. Democrats created Medicare. Democrats have defended both against every attempt to cut, privatize, or dismantle them. Republicans have spent four decades trying.

THE SUPREME COURT

Republicans spent 40 years systematically packing the federal judiciary with ideological conservatives specifically to entrench these policy outcomes beyond the reach of democratic accountability. The culmination was Mitch McConnell refusing to hold hearings for Merrick Garland for 11 months — then rushing Amy Coney Barrett through confirmation in 8 days before another election using the majority he claimed that principle prohibited.

The resulting Republican supermajority has overturned 50 years of reproductive rights precedent, gutted the Voting Rights Act, declared partisan gerrymandering unreviewable by federal courts, granted presidents near total immunity from criminal prosecution, and neutered federal regulatory agencies. This is a coordinated 40 year project to place the outcomes of Republican policy permanently beyond the reach of voters.

JANUARY 6TH AND THE DEATH OF ACCOUNTABILITY

A sitting president incited a mob to stop the certification of a free and fair election. That is the textbook definition of sedition. Republicans needed only 17 senators to convict and remove him permanently from public life. They got 7. The Republicans who voted to convict were censured by their own state parties. McConnell stated Trump bore moral and practical responsibility for the attack — then voted to acquit on procedural grounds. Every Republican senator who voted to acquit after watching a mob beat police officers with American flags and hunt for the Vice President made a calculated decision that protecting the party's electoral future was worth more than protecting the Constitution they swore to defend. And then they gave him the nomination again. And then they gave him the presidency again.

And they are still choosing Trump. Every day that Republican elected officials stand silent while this administration dismantles 250 years of American democracy piece by piece — the courts, the agencies, the norms, the guardrails, the checks and balances that generations of Americans built and died defending — they are making that choice again. Not under duress. Not out of necessity. Out of complicity.

THE MEDIA ECOSYSTEM THAT MADE ALL OF IT POSSIBLE

None of this happened in a vacuum. It started with the Powell Memo in 1971 — a blueprint written by corporate lawyer Lewis Powell, who would become a Supreme Court justice, explicitly calling for a coordinated campaign by business interests to reshape American political, intellectual, and media life in their favor. What followed was the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the Federalist Society, talk radio, Fox News, and eventually the social media manipulation apparatus that amplified all of it.

All of it funded by the same corporate interests who benefit from keeping working class people angry at each other rather than at the people extracting wealth from them. Rupert Murdoch didn't build Fox News out of civic duty. The Kochs didn't fund decades of think tanks because they cared about your freedom. These are investments with an expected return. The return is a working class that blames immigrants, socialists, and the radical left for problems engineered from the top down by people who have never worried about their healthcare, their rent, or their retirement.

The media model doesn't just misinform. It doesn't just manipulate. It has systematically eroded the very concept of shared reality — the foundation without which democratic accountability becomes impossible. When you cannot agree on facts you cannot have a policy debate. When you cannot have a policy debate you cannot hold power accountable. When you cannot hold power accountable the people with the most money win by default. That is not a bug in the system. That is the system working exactly as designed by the people who funded it.

A DIRECT APPEAL

I am not asking you to become a Democrat. I am not asking you to agree with every progressive policy position. I am asking you to do one thing: look at the actual receipts.

Look at the wage data going back to 1980. Look at who held power when the debt exploded and when it contracted. Look at the CBO projections before and after the Bush tax cuts. Look at who voted for Citizens United and who fought it. Look at who engineered REDMAP and who went to court to dismantle it. Look at who threatened Social Security and Medicare and who defended them. Look at who designed the Iraq War years before 9/11 gave them the pretext. Look at who had the power to hold January 6th accountable and chose not to. Look at who funds the media ecosystem telling you both sides are equally responsible for where we are.

When you follow the policy history — not the rhetoric, not the memes, not the cable news outrage cycle, but the actual votes and the actual outcomes — a very clear picture emerges. One party has consistently fought for the economic interests of working class Americans with the limited power it has been allowed to hold. The other has consistently fought for the economic interests of corporations and the wealthy, while using culture war, fear, racial resentment, and media propaganda to convince working class people to vote against their own interests.

The receipts are public. The votes are on record. The outcomes are measurable. The media ecosystem profiting from obscuring them is documented. When you look at who is actually responsible for where we are, it is not subtle.

This is for everyone who considers themselves a reasonable, fair-minded person who believes "both sides are equally responsible" for the state of this country. I understand the appeal of that position — it feels intellectually honest, like you're above the partisan fray. But false balance isn't neutrality. It's avoidance. And when the policy record is this clear, it becomes something worse — it becomes cover for the side that has been operating in bad faith for four decades.

Let's look at the receipts.

THE ECONOMY AND THE WORKING CLASS

Reagan sold America on trickle-down economics in 1981 — the idea that cutting taxes on corporations and the wealthy would create prosperity that flowed down to everyone else. Forty-five years later the results are in and they are unambiguous. Wealth inequality has grown every single year since. Real wages for working class Americans have been essentially flat for 50 years, adjusted for inflation, while CEO compensation has exploded more than 1,000% since 1978. The people who do the actual work of this country have been running in place their entire lives while the people at the top have captured virtually all of the economic gains.

Union membership sat at roughly 33% of the American workforce in the 1950s — the same era conservatives romanticize as the golden age of American prosperity. Today it's under 10%. That collapse didn't happen by accident. It was engineered through decades of deliberate Republican policy, from Reagan firing 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981 to send a message, to right-to-work legislation spreading state by state, to sustained judicial and legislative attacks on collective bargaining. When workers lost their ability to organize, they lost their leverage. And when they lost their leverage, wages stagnated. Those two facts are not a coincidence.

THE NATIONAL DEBT

If you genuinely care about fiscal responsibility, the data will disturb you — but probably not in the direction you expect.

Ronald Reagan nearly tripled the national debt — from just under $1 trillion to $2.86 trillion — through tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy and a 35% increase in defense spending. George W. Bush inherited a surplus — an actual surplus — from the Clinton administration, the first surpluses since 1969, and turned it into the largest deficits in American history through two unfunded wars and tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy. The numbers tell the story clearly: all four Republican presidents since 1980 increased the federal deficit — Reagan by 94%, George H.W. Bush by 67%, George W. Bush by 1,204%, and Trump by 317%. Both completed Democratic presidencies in that same period decreased the deficit — Clinton by 150%, ending with a surplus, and Obama by 53%.

The 2008 financial collapse cost the American economy an estimated $20 trillion in lost wealth. Working people lost their homes. The banks got bailed out. Then came the 2017 Trump tax cuts — sold as middle class relief, structured to benefit corporations and the wealthy, and projected by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to add $1.9 trillion to the debt over a decade. Every single Republican in Congress voted for it. Not one Democrat did.

Meanwhile the deficit was actually declining under Obama until the Tea Party GOP took Congress and manufactured a debt ceiling crisis as a political weapon. The pattern is consistent and documented: Republicans cut taxes for the wealthy, explode the deficit, then when Democrats take power they demand austerity and use the debt they created as a political cudgel against social programs.

It is a strategy. It has always been a strategy.

DEREGULATION AND THE 2008 COLLAPSE

The 2008 financial crisis didn't come from nowhere. It was the predictable endpoint of decades of bipartisan but Republican-driven deregulation that stripped away protections put in place after the Great Depression. Glass-Steagall, which separated commercial and investment banking, was dismantled in 1999 by a Republican Congress — and signed, to his discredit, by Bill Clinton. Derivatives markets were left completely in the dark. Predatory lending was allowed to run unchecked. When it all came apart, millions of working class Americans lost their homes, their retirement savings, and their jobs. The banks that caused it received hundreds of billions in taxpayer bailouts. The architects of the deregulation faced no consequences. And within a decade the GOP was back to pushing deregulation again as if none of it had happened.

The Glass-Steagall repeal was bipartisan in its signing, but the push was Republican-led, Republican-named — the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, authored by three Republican senators — and it was Republicans who spent the following decade blocking every attempt to restore meaningful oversight. The responsibility is not equal.

CITIZENS UNITED AND THE CAPTURE OF DEMOCRACY

In 2010 the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. FEC that corporations and outside groups could spend unlimited money influencing elections. The vote was 5-4, with every Republican-appointed justice in the majority and every Democratic-appointed justice dissenting. It was one of the most consequential rulings in American political history. Corporate money flooded into politics at a scale never seen before. The people funding that money — fossil fuel companies, financial industry groups, pharmaceutical corporations, billionaire donor networks — got exactly the return on investment they were paying for: favorable legislation, blocked regulations, and a political class increasingly accountable to donors rather than voters.

Then they gerrymandered congressional districts with surgical precision to make those maps nearly impenetrable, ensuring that even when a majority of Americans voted against Republican candidates, Republicans could retain power. Then they passed voter ID laws, purged voter rolls, closed polling locations in minority communities, and attacked early voting and mail-in voting — not because of any documented fraud, but because higher turnout consistently hurts their candidates. When you can't win on the popularity of your ideas, you change the rules of who gets to vote.

SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE

Every serious threat to Social Security and Medicare in modern American history has come from the Republican Party. Newt Gingrich called Medicare a program that would "wither on the vine." Paul Ryan spent years pushing plans to privatize Social Security and convert Medicare into a voucher program. And in 2022, Senator Rick Scott — then chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee — proposed sunsetting all federal legislation every five years with no exceptions, which would have included Social Security and Medicare. He only added exemptions for those programs after facing fierce criticism from Democrats and members of his own party. He walked it back under pressure. That's not a defense — that's a confession of what the plan actually was.

These are programs working Americans pay into their entire working lives. The GOP has spent four decades trying to cut, privatize, or dismantle them.

Democrats created Social Security. Democrats created Medicare. Democrats have defended both against every attempt to dismantle them. That is not both sides.

WHAT DEMOCRATS ACTUALLY DID WITH POWER

Here's the number that should stop every both-sides argument cold: in the last 40 years, Democrats have held unified control of Congress and the presidency for approximately six years. SIX YEARS OUT OF FORTY. And in those six years we got: the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Affordable Care Act, expanded Medicaid coverage to millions of uninsured Americans, the largest infrastructure investment in American history, the CHIPS Act returning semiconductor manufacturing to American soil, the first ever Medicare drug price negotiations reducing prescription costs for seniors, and the Inflation Reduction Act — the most significant climate and clean energy legislation ever passed.

Every single one was working class legislation. Every single one passed without a single Republican vote. And the moment Republicans regained any legislative leverage, the response was obstruction, government shutdowns, debt ceiling hostage-taking, and repeal attempts.

That is not gridlock caused by both sides. That is a deliberate strategy to make government fail so they can campaign on government failure.

THE MEDIA MACHINE BEHIND THE MEMES

The viral political content that circulates on social media every day wasn't created in a vacuum. There is an entire media ecosystem — funded by the same corporate interests who benefit from keeping working class people angry at each other — designed to generate exactly this kind of content. Rupert Murdoch didn't build Fox News out of civic duty. The Kochs didn't fund decades of think tanks and media infrastructure because they cared about your freedom. These are investments with an expected return, and the return is a working class that blames immigrants, or socialists, or the "radical left" for problems that were engineered from the top down by people who have never worried about their healthcare, their rent, or their retirement.

Comparing a democratic socialist winning a city primary election to Lenin seizing power through armed revolution isn't history. It's propaganda. And the fact that it works — that it gets shared, that it gets likes, that it shapes how people vote — is the whole point.

A DIRECT APPEAL

I'm not asking you to become a Democrat. I'm not asking you to agree with every progressive policy position. I'm asking you to do one thing: look at the actual receipts.

Look at the wage data going back to 1980. Look at who held power when the debt exploded and when it contracted. Look at who voted for Citizens United and who fought it. Look at who gerrymandered your state and who tried to restore independent redistricting. Look at who has tried to cut Social Security and Medicare and who has defended them. Look at who voted for the ACA, the infrastructure bill, the prescription drug negotiations — and who voted against every single one of them. Look at who drove the deregulation that caused the 2008 collapse and who put guardrails back on Wall Street afterward.

When you follow the policy history — not the rhetoric, not the memes, not the cable news outrage cycle, but the actual votes and the actual outcomes — a very clear picture emerges. One party has consistently fought for the economic interests of working class Americans. The other has consistently fought for the economic interests of corporations and the wealthy, while using culture war, fear, and media propaganda to convince working class people to vote against their own economic interests.

The receipts are public. The votes are on record. The outcomes are measurable. So the next time someone starts with the "bothsidesism," you'll know they haven't done the work.