The Important Missing Word That Discredits the Centrists’ New Letter

The letter organized by moderate Rep. Tom Suozzi praises capitalism—but it somehow forgets to name the biggest enemy of any decent capitalism.

So Democratic Congressman Tom Suozzi of Long Island has come out swinging against the socialists. “We are capitalist, not socialist,” reads a letter that The New York Times reports he and 14 other legislators signed and began circulating last week. This went out Thursday, two days after three self-described democratic socialists backed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani won Democratic congressional primaries in the city.

The letter, which is on the short and vague side, states two broad principles to which the signatories adhere. The first is “growth, competition, and broad prosperity.” “Growth” and “prosperity” are time-honored centrist buzzwords, as they’re hoisted into use to send the message that these Democrats value economic dynamism more than “fairness,” which is a word that moderates fear signals endorsement of excessive statism, although interestingly, the concept is tucked into the first sentence (“We believe in a growing, fair, and competitive economy…”). The second is “safety, security, and human dignity,” under which the letter lists four components: fiscal discipline, a government that works, free speech, and patriotism.

There’s nothing wrong with these things as far as they go. But they don’t go far enough. In particular, there’s one big missing word. I’ll circle back to that, but first, let’s talk about why these democratic socialists are winning in some places.

The first reason is that people are really pissed off at a system they see as totally rigged. Suozzi is roughly my age. He and I grew up in a United States in the 1960s and ’70s that Lord knows had many problems, but that was at least trying to build a robust middle class and was taxing excessive wealth appropriately.

The Gini coefficient is a number that measures economic inequality. Like golf, lower scores are better, and the lowest Gini scores, invariably logged by the Scandinavian countries, are in the mid-20s. The highest is always South Africa, in the low-60s.

When Suozzi and I were toddlers, the U.S. number was fairly high—around 37. Then came the Great Society—the civil rights, fair housing, and other anti-discrimination laws that first brought large numbers of Black families into the middle class, and other anti-poverty programs. The right has sold middle America on the idea that the Great Society—which I’d hope most Democrats today are proud of, but much of which was, as the word is used today, “socialism”—was a failure. But by the 1980s, right before Ronald Reagan took........

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