Fetterman Declares Democrats ‘the Party of Socialism’ After CBS Poll

Fetterman Declares Democrats ‘the Party of Socialism’ After CBS Poll

John Fetterman has discovered, with the startled urgency of a man who has just noticed weather, that a substantial portion of his own party’s base has soured on capitalism. A CBS News poll of 648 Democratic respondents found 58% viewing socialism positively and a mere 32% saying the same of capitalism. Fetterman posted to X on August 16, declared the trend “lunacy,” and announced himself “a proud free market capitalist.” One imagines the statement laminated and framed in a Braddock office that has not seen a policy paper on wage stagnation since the Clinton administration.

What we are observing here is not, as Fetterman would have it, an ideological infection spreading through the Democratic base like some contagion requiring quarantine. It is a rational response to material conditions that the senator’s brand of reflexive pro-capitalism cannot accommodate. When 50% of your own party’s respondents view capitalism negatively, you are not looking at a messaging problem. You are looking at a structural one.

Infoporfin at English Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0) via Wikimedia Commons

The literature on this is not thin. Decades of wage stagnation, the financialization of the American economy, the systematic dismantling of organized labor, the conversion of housing into a speculative asset class, and a healthcare system that functions as the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States have produced exactly the attitudinal shift the CBS poll captures. Younger Democrats, college-educated Democrats, and white Democrats trend more favorably toward socialism, according to CBS. This is not surprising. It is, if anything, overdetermined. These are cohorts that entered a labor market defined by precarious employment and debt servitude and were then asked to feel grateful for the arrangement.

Fetterman’s rhetorical move, though, is the more interesting failure. He recounted to Forbes a trip to Croatia in which locals were “mystified” by American interest in socialism, relaying that one person called would-be American socialists “morons” in need of “a reality check.” The anecdote is doing a great deal of work, and none of it is honest. Croatians lived under actually existing state socialism, a command economy enforced by a one-party apparatus. The American Democrats who tell pollsters they view socialism positively are not, by and large, advocating for the nationalization of steel production. They are expressing dissatisfaction with a capitalism that has stopped delivering the broadly shared prosperity that was its principal legitimating claim for the better part of the postwar era. Conflating the two is either careless or cynical, and I leave the senator to determine which.

What Fetterman calls “lunacy” is, in the social-scientific sense, a predictable consequence of a political economy that has systematically redistributed upward for forty years while its beneficiaries insisted, with increasing desperation, that no alternative exists. The polling does not describe a party gone mad. It describes a constituency that has begun to notice the architecture of its own dispossession.

Nancy Pelosi from San Francisco, CA (CC BY 2.0) via Wikimedia Commons

That Fetterman, a senator from a state whose industrial heartland was hollowed out by precisely the free market he now champions with such evident pride, cannot see this is less an intellectual failing than a structural one. He occupies a position in which acknowledging the legitimacy of his base’s dissatisfaction would require acknowledging the inadequacy of the framework he has chosen to defend. And so the framework holds, and the polling worsens, and the senator will post again.

The overall numbers in the CBS survey, it should be noted, still show capitalism viewed positively by 46% of all Americans against 35% for socialism. The Democratic base is ahead of the country on this question, which is another way of saying it is ahead of the senator in drawing conclusions from available evidence. Fetterman may continue to call this lunacy. The data, as is its habit, will continue not to care what he calls it.