UNFINISHED BUSINESS.

The local preservation railways attempt to use car-cards no newer than those in use when the owning railroad abandoned service or retired the cars, trackless trolleys, or buses.

That ticket only won in a notorious headline prematurely published by the then-very-anticommunist Chicago Tribune; Joseph McCarthy did win a Senate seat in Wisconsin, something that did not require advertising buys on Illinois Terminal cars running out of St. Louis, and a subsequent Republican president appointed Earl Warren to the Supreme Court, touching off a number of unintended consequences.

The current president, however, is again cautioning people against a communist menace, to the disdain? dismay? amusement? of one Robert B. Reich.

He kicked off America’s 250th anniversary celebrations on Friday with a speech at Mount Rushmore extolling American culture and warning of a resurgence of the “communist menace.” With the granite faces of four of his predecessors behind him, Trump took aim at what he called “radicals” and “extremists.”

Oh, please.

For years, Trump has been trying to scare Americans about progressive Dems who advocate Medicare for All, universal childcare, free public higher education, and higher taxes on the super-wealthy to pay for them (all of which the rising young Democrats are advocating).

But he hasn’t gotten anywhere because these initiatives are supported by most Americans.

So now he’s throwing the commie label at the wall and seeing if it sticks.

Communism was the scare word used by right-wingers after World Wars I and II to crack the whip on the left. It provoked witch hunts and ruined careers.

It made former Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy a one-man bomb squad in the early 1950s, when he ridiculed the “pitiful squealing” of “those egg-sucking phony liberals” who “would hold sacrosanct those Communists and queers,” and forced American citizens to “name names.”

McCarthyism was a by-product of the Republican Party’s postwar effort to eradicate the New Deal. The GOP had portrayed the midterm election of 1946 as a “battle between Republicanism and communism,” and the Republican National Committee chairman claimed that the federal bureaucracy was filled with “pink puppets.”

Thus the background for the car-card, which continued the 1946 campaign into a presidential election.  It is to those "rising young Democrats," dear reader, that I seek to turn my attention.

The victory in last week’s Democratic congressional primary elections of three candidates endorsed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and calling themselves “democratic socialists”—two of them unseating incumbents—is another expression of a political radicalization in the United States.

Millions confront a society of staggering inequality, in which a financial oligarchy accumulates vast wealth while life becomes more precarious for everyone else. They are living through the breakdown of American democracy under a Trump administration that is assembling the framework of a presidential dictatorship, rounding up immigrants, deploying troops in American cities, and prosecuting its opponents.

Immense resources are being funneled into an expanding world war, waged by means of war crimes and genocide. The word “socialism,” which the ruling class spent the better part of a century trying to expunge from political life, has become attractive again because the existing order offers working people nothing.

Trump and the Republicans respond with hysterical denunciations of “communism.” Within the Democratic Party, a group of “centrist” Democrats has responded to the primaries with a manifesto reaffirming that they are “capitalists” who stand for “fiscal responsibility” and “law and order.”

As surely as water will wet us, as surely as fire will burn, the heirs to Leon Trotsky will call out the heretics calling themselves "democratic socialists."

Asked what democratic socialism means, Mamdani answered that it “at the heart is pragmatic, because if we cannot deliver for working people, then what is this for? I’m interested in delivering.” He waved away the party centrists’ manifesto, saying he had no interest in writing one or reading one.

He offered his own mayoralty as an illustration of the meaning of socialism. “We don’t have to ask ourselves what life looks like if a socialist wins,” he said. “I won last November, and over the course of these last six months, what we’ve delivered for working people are the very things we were told were impossible.” The proof he cited: free childcare for two-year-olds, refunds to overcharged tenants, 165,000 potholes paved, and “the lowest recorded crime in our city’s history.”

This is a definition of socialism designed to empty it of content. To call socialism “pragmatic,” to abjure all “manifestos” in the interests of “concrete results,” is to insist that nothing needs to be analyzed: not the source of the oligarchy’s wealth, not the class character of the state, not the nature of the Trump administration, not the forces driving the world toward dictatorship and war. The system is accepted as a permanent framework within which a sympathetic official manages potholes and rents.

If you're working to keep the Socialist International alive, that's heresy.  If your name is Robert Reich, you might be fine with being that sympathetic official.

The problem for Trump is that the new stars of the Democratic Party whom Trump wants to defile have nothing whatsoever to do with communism. They barely have anything to do with socialism.

New York’s Zohran Mamdani, AOC, Seattle’s Katie Wilson, Colorado’s Melat Kiros, and dozens of others — including many who have won recent primaries — are popular because they’re taking on corporate America, attacking political corruption by big money, and dealing with the real problems of ordinary Americans.

Labels are becoming irrelevant, anyway. In an Axios-Generation Lab poll of young Americans, 67 percent say they have a positive or neutral association with the word “socialism” compared with 40 percent who are positive or neutral toward “capitalism.”

It has to be galling to a century of Leon Trotsky wannabes that their granny glasses, goatees, and jargon gets them nothing by way of elective office, while adherents of the Democratic Socialists of America hold a few prominent elective offices.

This is what Mamdani’s “socialism” delivers: the administration of a capitalist city.

What Mamdani presents as fresh and undogmatic is, in fact, the oldest snake oil. In the 1890s, the German social democrat Eduard Bernstein argued that capitalism had learned to master its crises and that socialism would arrive through the gradual accumulation of reforms within the existing state, compressing his outlook into a phrase that could serve as the DSA’s motto: “The final goal, whatever it may be, is nothing to me; the movement is everything.” Rosa Luxemburg’s reply still holds. Those who choose reform “in place of and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power,” she wrote, do not take a calmer road to the same goal, but choose “a different goal:” a capitalism made marginally more bearable.

In the United States, this tradition runs through the DSA, founded by Michael Harrington on the principle that socialists should constitute “the left wing of the possible”—the word possible meaning the Democratic Party. Over the past four decades of this strategy of “realignment,” the Democrats have shifted even further to the right, towing the DSA alongside with them.

The DSA is not a workers’ party, in contrast to the mass social democratic parties from which Bernstein’s revisionism emerged. It is an organization of the upper-middle class, a faction operating within the Democratic Party.

And it offers no genuine reform program. Mamdani appeals for a return to “a New Deal understanding of what working people deserve,” a politics he laments “you can only find in history books.” But the New Deal was not the achievement of pragmatic administrators. It was wrenched from the ruling class by the upheavals of the 1930s at a time when an ascendant American capitalism could still afford concessions, even in the midst of the Great Depression, to buy social peace.

Several things stand out in that complaint.

First, consider that "organization of the upper-middle class."  James "Long Emergency" Kunstler also sees that, and he sees something far more troublesome than the betrayal of the Proletarian Revolution.

Darializa Avila Chevalier, Claire Valdez, and Melat Kiros are going to Congress to link arms with “The Squad” — AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley — and they will bring their cargo of DSA policy ideas with them: racial, gender, and social justice; abolish ICE (no more deporting anybody); defund the police; end incarceration (no more jails); free housing and medical care; green this-n-that; government ownership of business; abolish the Senate and the electoral college; pack the SCOTUS. . . .

The platform apparently has a lot of appeal to a certain demographic — which, I suspect, includes the many young recent graduates of the diploma mills who are pissed-off that Mr. Trump & Company are methodically shutting down the NGOs that were supposed to furnish these young race-and-gender studies majors with cushy, six-figure jobs doing “activism.” Alas, that pathway is increasingly blocked and the country only needs so many baristas. What to do then? Take it to the limit! Be communists. . . with all that entails. What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine, too.

That way might be, as Joseph Kishore complains, utopianism begetting reaction.  "This is not socialism. It is the means by which the immense social anger building up in American society is to be contained, dissipated and betrayed—and in this way strengthen the far-right."

On the other hand, Peter Dreier and Dick Flacks see potential in that "left wing of the possible."

In 1968, in a famous speech against the Vietnam war, Norman Thomas, the aging leader of the rather moribund Socialist Party, proclaimed, “I come to cleanse the American flag, not burn it.”

“It was as a Socialist, and because I was a Socialist, that I fell in love with America,” wrote Michael Harrington, the founder of Democratic Socialists of America, in his 1973 book, Fragments of a Century. “In saying that, I am not indulging in romantic nostalgia about youthful days on the road but rather underlining a crucial political truth. If the Left wants to change this country because it hates it, then the people will never listen to the Left and the people will be right. To be a Socialist is to make an act of faith, of love even, toward this land. It is to sense the seed beneath the snow; to see, beneath the veneer of corruption and meanness and the commercialization of human relationships, men and women capable of controlling their own destinies. To be a radical is, in the best and only decent sense of the word, patriotic.”

Harrington was identifying with the many radicals and progressive reformers who proudly asserted their patriotism. To them, America promised democratic fulfillment—economic and social equality, mass participation in politics, free speech, and civil liberties, elimination of the second-class citizenship of women and people of color, a welcome mat for the world’s oppressed people. The reality of corporate power, right wing xenophobia, and social injustice only fueled progressives’ allegiance to these principles and the struggle to achieve them.

That essay also tells the story of patriot-washing music originally penned as a protest of existing conditions, which will reward careful study although it takes us astray from our main message, which is that the ideological purity of the Socialist Equity Party (or the Socialist Workers Party or the Socialist Labor Party) has resulted in precious few candidates elected let alone means of production seized, while "reform if you would preserve" gives people whose socialism might not even be intended as socialism produces the occasional victory.

The public will remain dissatisfied and our society in a dangerous crisis until a President and Congress sets a new course—one that is, in fact, an old course, albeit adjusted for the 21st Century—and a broadly social democratic FDR-inspired social contract is re-implemented nationally.

No other set of policies has worked to generate such a prosperous society with aggregate wealth justly-distributed among the population. There is no other model that will deliver what Americas want and expect as citizens of the wealthiest country in the world.

For lack of a pithier description, Alan Minsky champions democratic socialism with American characteristics.

Tellingly, no other countries, not even China, has achieved the average level of household wealth as these countries (or even come close) during the entire neoliberal era. That’s because only one economic model can develop and sustain this level of general prosperity: the FDR/Keynes/Social Democratic/Democratic Socialist model.

That's dubious political economy and questionable economic history.  And yet, it's tied to reality in a way that Trotskyite purity tests reading claimants to the socialist label out of the Fourth International are not.