The S-Word

Every election cycle the word arrives on schedule. It is printed over a grainy photograph of the opponent, usually tinted red. It is spoken in a voiceover an octave lower than the announcer's natural register. In 2026 it has been aimed at a sitting United States senator from Georgia, at candidates for state legislature in a dozen states, and at school boards debating whether to feed children breakfast.

The word is doing a specific job, and the job is not description. It is a stop sign — a way of ending an argument before anyone has to have it. If a policy is socialism, you do not have to explain what is wrong with it. The label is the argument.

So let us do the thing the label is designed to prevent. Let us find out what socialism actually is, what it has actually delivered and actually destroyed, which American programs actually qualify — and then ask an honest question about proportion. Because while the country has spent fifteen years being warned about creeping socialism, something else happened to American self-government, in public, with a published opinion and a docket number. Almost nobody called it a threat.

I. What socialism actually is

Start with the definition, because almost every American argument about socialism is conducted without one.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — the standard scholarly reference in the field — locates the core of socialism in ownership and control of productive property. Socialism, on its account, requires that the bulk of the means of production be under the effective control of workers or society as a whole, rather than held by a capitalist class.¹ Britannica defines it as "a system of social organization in which private property and the distribution of income are subject to social control," while noting that "social control" is interpreted in widely diverging ways, so that socialism "ranges from statist to libertarian, from Marxist to liberal."² Merriam-Webster keeps the same center of gravity: collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.³

Notice what every one of those definitions is about, and what none of them is about.

They are about who owns the factory. They are not about whether the government helps pay for things.

This is the single most important distinction in the entire debate, and it is the one American political speech has almost completely erased. A government that taxes a private steel company and uses the revenue to buy school lunches has not socialized anything — the steel company still has its owners, its shareholders, its profits, and its right to fire you. A government that seizes the steel company has. The first is redistribution. The second is socialism. They are different in kind, not in degree.

If the means of production remain in private hands, you are arguing about tax rates. That is a real argument. It is not this one.

II. Four things that are not the same thing

Once you have the ownership test, the family tree sorts itself out. Four distinct things get flattened into one word:

• Socialism — social or worker ownership of the means of production. The defining claim is about property, not benefits.¹
• Democratic socialism — the pursuit of that same transformation of ownership, but strictly through democratic elections rather than revolution, with civil liberties and multiparty competition preserved.⁴
• Social democracy — acceptance of a capitalist market economy, with guardrails: a robust welfare state, regulation, progressive taxation, strong labor protections. It does not seek to transfer ownership of industry. This is the Nordic model.⁴
• New Deal / Great Society liberalism — American social insurance layered on a private economy: Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, the GI Bill. Narrower than social democracy and not remotely socialist by the ownership test.

The distinction between the middle two is not academic hair-splitting, and the country most often invoked has said so itself. Standing at Harvard's Kennedy School, Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen addressed the American habit of calling his country socialist:

Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy. Lars Løkke Rasmussen, Prime Minister of Denmark, Harvard Kennedy School, 2015⁵

He went on to describe the Nordic model as "an expanded welfare state which provides a high level of security for its citizens, but … also a successful market economy with much freedom to pursue your dreams and live your life as you wish."⁵ Denmark has private firms, private profits, billionaires, and a stock exchange. It also has universal health care and tuition-free university. Those facts are not in tension, which is precisely the point the label is designed to obscure.

So when an American campaign ad calls a candidate a socialist for supporting a child tax credit, it is not exaggerating. It is naming the wrong thing entirely — like calling someone a burglar because they borrowed a lawnmower.

III. Where socialism actually failed

An essay that only defended the word would be worth nothing, so here is the part that must not be skipped.

Actual socialism — actual state seizure of the means of production, actual central planning — produced some of the worst human catastrophes of the twentieth century. The Soviet collectivization of agriculture and the resulting famines of the early 1930s killed millions. Mao's Great Leap Forward killed tens of millions more, the deadliest famine in recorded history, and it was caused not by drought but by policy. Command economies chronically misallocated goods, suppressed the price signals that tell a society what it actually needs, and required political repression to sustain themselves, because an economy that cannot be criticized cannot be corrected. Venezuela took an oil-rich country with the largest proven reserves on earth, nationalized and mismanaged it, and produced hyperinflation and mass emigration within a generation.

None of that is a smear invented by American conservatives. It is the historical record, and any honest accounting owes it plainly. The ownership question is not trivial, and the people who won the twentieth-century argument about central planning won it for real reasons.

But that is exactly why the word matters. If socialism means the thing that starved Ukraine, then it cannot also mean school breakfast. A term cannot carry the moral weight of the Holodomor and simultaneously be applied to a bus subsidy. When a campaign borrows the horror of the first to attack the second, it is not making an argument. It is laundering one.

IV. What Americans call socialism, and refuse to give up

Apply the ownership test to the American programs most often labeled socialist, and almost none of them qualify.

• NOT SOCIALISM Social Security and Medicare. Government-run insurance. Your doctor's office, the hospital, the drug company and the medical-device maker all remain private businesses earning private profits.
• NOT SOCIALISM Public schools, fire departments, police, roads. Public services, funded by taxes. No industry is owned.
• NOT SOCIALISM Farm subsidies and federal crop insurance. Direct government payments that stabilize private farm income — one of the largest and least controversial transfer programs in the country, concentrated in the most conservative districts in America.
• NOT SOCIALISM Disaster relief, FEMA, flood insurance. Socialized risk, private property.
• NOT SOCIALISM The Paycheck Protection Program. Forgivable federal loans to private businesses — cash from the taxpayer to owners, with the debt erased. Hold this one.
• ACTUALLY SOCIALISM The Tennessee Valley Authority. A federally owned corporation created in 1933 that generates and sells electricity to about nine million people across seven states, including a corner of north Georgia — the largest public power provider in the country. The government owns the means of production.¹⁷
• ACTUALLY SOCIALISM The Veterans Health Administration. The government owns the hospitals and employs the doctors — the largest integrated health system in the United States, and genuinely socialized medicine by the strict definition.
• ACTUALLY SOCIALISM Municipal utilities and public power. Georgia has 52 of them — 51 cities and one county — owned outright by the communities they serve, 49 of which buy their wholesale power through the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia.¹⁷

The politically inconvenient result: the handful of American programs that are socialist by the textbook definition are also among the most fiercely defended by the voters most alarmed by socialism. The VA is socialized medicine. Try running on abolishing it. Rural electrification — the reason much of Georgia has power at all — was public money building public infrastructure because private utilities had declined to serve farmers who weren't profitable enough.

V. The Georgia receipts

Which brings us to the part that is not a matter of definition but of documentation.

The Paycheck Protection Program sent forgivable federal loans to private businesses during the pandemic. The loans were forgiven — meaning the government handed private owners money and then erased the obligation to repay it. Whatever you want to call that, it is a government benefit flowing to individuals, and it is far closer to "a handout" than a school lunch is to Soviet agriculture.

The GA Files has verified PPP loans held by thirteen Georgia public officials or their businesses, drawn from federal SBA disclosure records and published reporting.⁶ The total:

All forgiven. Twelve of the thirteen are Republicans; one, Sen. Emanuel Jones of Legacy Ford of McDonough, is a Democrat — the pattern is lopsided but not exclusive, and we report it that way. Clyde's loan was forgiven at $156,697, slightly more than the $154,950 borrowed, because forgiveness included accrued interest. Full per-official detail and sourcing lives on each fact sheet.⁶

Three of those officials — Collins, Clyde and Kemp, holding $1,113,087 in forgiven federal loans between them — are on the public record opposing student-loan forgiveness.⁷ Clyde, whose $156,697 was wiped clean, publicly attacked debt relief for borrowers. Kemp joined 22 Republican governors urging the withdrawal of the federal student-loan plan. Collins backed the resolution to overturn it, then put more than $500,000 of his own money into his 2022 congressional campaign after his company's $920,000 loan was forgiven.⁶

This is not an accusation of illegality. The PPP was lawful, widely used, and designed to be forgiven; taking one was not wrong, and many of these businesses employed Georgians who needed the paychecks. The point is narrower and harder to escape: the objection was never actually to government money going to private individuals. When the recipient was a business owner, it was relief. When the recipient was a graduate with a loan, it was socialism.

VI. About those free lunches

Since school meals are the recurring symbol, they deserve honest treatment rather than a talking point in the other direction.

The research on universal free school meals is genuinely mixed, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The consistent findings are administrative and social rather than academic: universal programs increase meal participation, improve food security, cut the paperwork burden of means-testing, reduce per-meal costs through economies of scale, and measurably reduce the stigma attached to being the kid with the free-lunch card.⁸ The academic findings are inconsistent. New York City saw test-score gains from free lunch; South Carolina saw improved math scores and attendance; North Carolina saw better attendance and fewer suspensions; Tennessee saw lower discipline rates but no test-score or attendance effect. One national study found graduation rates improved by about 1.5 percentage points in schools where fewer students had originally qualified. A Georgia study found no attendance effect at all.⁸

So the fair summary is: feeding every child reliably reduces hunger, stigma and paperwork, and sometimes helps them learn. That is a modest, defensible claim. It is not a revolution, and it is certainly not the abolition of private property.

The cost of means-testing is the part that rarely gets argued honestly. To avoid giving a $2.50 meal to a child whose family could have afforded it, a district must build an application system, verify incomes, chase paperwork, track debts, and in some places deny hot food to children whose parents fell behind. The bureaucracy exists to enforce a moral distinction, not to save money — and it frequently costs more than it saves.

VII. The thing that actually changed who governs you

Now the proportion question.

On January 21, 2010, the Supreme Court decided Citizens United v. FEC, holding that the government may not restrict independent political expenditures by corporations, unions and associations, because such spending is protected speech under the First Amendment.⁹ Two months later, the D.C. Circuit decided SpeechNow.org v. FEC, which — building directly on Citizens United — struck down limits on contributions to groups making only independent expenditures. Together, those two rulings created the super PAC.¹⁰ Neither invented the underlying doctrine: Buckley v. Valeo had established in 1976 that spending money on politics is a form of protected speech, and that a candidate may spend unlimited amounts of his own fortune on his own campaign.¹¹

Here is what followed.

That is not a slippery slope or a projection. It is a completed change to how American elections are financed, and it is measurable to the dollar — except for the part that is, by design, not measurable at all.

Georgia is not a bystander to this. Our own reporting this cycle has documented:

• $59M pledged by outside groups to a single Georgia Senate race — including $15 million from One Nation, a 501(c)(4) whose donors are never disclosed to the public, and $44 million from the Senate Leadership Fund.¹⁴
• $195M the approximate scale of one self-funded governor's campaign — roughly $108 million of the candidate's own money to win a primary, followed by an $87 million general-election advertising buy. Entirely legal, and legal specifically because of Buckley.¹⁵
• $140M the size of the Ponzi scheme whose operator pleaded guilty in May 2026 after routing more than half a million dollars of investors' money into political giving — money that reached Georgia congressmen, one of whom returned part of it and one of whom did not.¹⁶

Consider what the last item means concretely. Roughly 300 people, many of them retirees and church neighbors, lost at least $140 million. Some of that money became political contributions. The disclosure system did not catch it, because the system is built to record the name on the check, not the source of the funds. And the $15 million from One Nation will never even reach the stage of having a name to record.

VIII. The asymmetry

Set the two fears side by side and look at them honestly.

A universal school lunch costs a few dollars per child per day, leaves every private business in the country exactly as privately owned as it was the day before, and has been studied to death with results ranging from modest benefit to no measurable effect. It is called a threat to American freedom.

An undisclosed $15 million expenditure by a corporate-funded nonprofit, in a state race, on behalf of a candidate who will later vote on that industry's regulation, changes who writes the laws — and the voter is denied even the ability to know who paid. It is called speech.

One of these two things transferred power. It was not the lunch.

You can believe in strict limits on government spending and still notice this. You can think universal school meals are bad policy — a defensible position — and still notice this. The asymmetry is not partisan arithmetic; it is a question about which risks a self-governing people are trained to fear, and who benefits from the training.

Notice, too, who is never called a socialist. The farmer collecting federal crop insurance. The developer taking a tax abatement. The defense contractor whose entire revenue is a government appropriation. The data-center company negotiating a sales-tax exemption while ratepayers absorb the grid cost. The business owner whose $920,000 loan was forgiven. Government money is only ever socialism on its way down.

IX. Doing it better

None of this requires agreeing about the welfare state. It requires only that we argue about the actual thing. Four concrete standards:

• Use the ownership test. If the policy leaves the means of production in private hands, it is not socialism. Say what it is: a subsidy, an insurance program, a tax credit, a public service. Then argue about whether it is worth the money — which is a real argument with real stakes.
• Demand the number. Any candidate who calls an opponent a socialist should be asked which industry they believe the opponent proposes to nationalize. The question is answerable in one sentence if the charge is true.
• Apply the standard in both directions. If forgiving a student's debt is a handout, so is forgiving a business owner's. A rule that changes depending on who receives the check is not a principle.
• Disclose the money. The most effective anti-corruption measure available is also the least ideological: require every organization spending money to influence an election to name the humans funding it. It restricts no one's speech. It only ends anonymity — and anonymity, not generosity, is what has actually reshaped American politics since 2010.

Georgia will be told a great deal about socialism between now and November. The word will appear over red-tinted photographs, in lower registers, on mailers paid for by committees whose donors you are not allowed to know.

When it arrives, ask the only question that separates an argument from an incantation: what, exactly, does he propose to take?

And then ask who paid for the ad.