Comrade Chris

Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters at the Republican National Committee this summer that Congress is now deciding whether the country keeps its constitutional republic or it goes “down this dark road of death to communism.”¹ Just days earlier, he warned that “crazy little mini Mamdanis” were popping up all around the country and posed a danger to American families.² Florida congressman Carlos Giménez went even further, telling the same press conference that Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani are not democratic socialists at all but communists, and that Mamdani reminded him of a young Fidel Castro.³

In New Hampshire, Scott Brown’s Senate campaign ran a digital ad pasting Chris Pappas beside photos of Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez under the caption “Comrade Chris.”⁴ Pappas is a fourth-generation co-owner of the Puritan Backroom in Manchester, a restaurant his family has run since 1917, where his grandfather is credited with inventing the chicken tender.⁵ Whatever else the man might be, he is likely not a Bolshevik.

The sloppiness is precisely the point here. It is a deliberate substitution being made, and it works so very well because most Americans have never had reason to learn that the word carries at least three separate meanings.

Three definitions, one word

Let’s see. We have:

Marxist-Leninist state socialism. State ownership of the means of production, central economic planning, single-party enforcement. The Soviet Union, Maoist China, Cuba. This is what Americans meant by the word in 1949, when Gallup first asked it, and it is still what MAGA types mean when they say it in our modern day.

Social democracy. A market economy with private ownership, higher taxation, and universal public services layered in. Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Sweden are comparative examples here. Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen got tired enough of being cited in American presidential debates, in fact, that he went to Harvard’s Kennedy School in 2015 to say it himself. “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”⁶ He was correcting a record that had been repeatedly caricatured, and he went on to add that Denmark was close to a perfect country, which is hardly the remark of a man defending capitalism from Bernie Sanders.

Democratic socialism. This is where the right has a legitimate point that often gets wasted on really bad arguments. The Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) own stated platform pairs immediate reforms like Medicare for All and tenant protections with a long-term aim of social ownership and democratic control of the economy. DSA uses that position to distinguish itself from welfare-state social democracy.⁷ The organization has said plainly that Sanders’ program, for example, does not satisfy the socialist goal of worker and social ownership.⁸

So DSA, by definition, is not the aforementioned Nordic model either. The group says so itself.

What follows from that admission is quite the opposite of what Johnson wants you to conclude whenever the word is used. The actual legislative agenda attached to these politicians is in the realm of childcare, housing construction, rent stabilization, bus fare, wage floors, and public health insurance. Every one of those programs already exists in some form or fashion in any NATO member state with a stock exchange. Nobody in Congress has introduced a bill to nationalize the steel industry, for example. The distance between DSA’s long-range theoretical goals and DSA’s Tuesday-morning policy work is enormous, and the right has decided to argue exclusively with a somewhat pie-in-the-sky theory while the policy sits on the table unaddressed.

The label and the ledger

Bernie Sanders did not endorse Francesca Hong.

Why is that important? Hong is a Madison chef and Wisconsin state lawmaker who ran for governor as an open democratic socialist, led the polling for weeks, and lost narrowly Tuesday night to David Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive and the more conventional pick. Sanders stayed out of it entirely, in fact.⁹ Note that detail, because Sanders is supposed to be the movement’s patriarch, and he declined to spend a nickel of his credibility on an actual DSA-member candidate in a purple state.

Then look at who did get the endorsement. Peggy Flanagan won Minnesota’s Democratic Senate primary the same night with backing from both Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and she does not call herself a democratic socialist.¹⁰ In Michigan the week before, Abdul El-Sayed took the Senate nomination running on much the same policy list, also without the label.¹¹

The label is tracking something besides the policy, likely generational identity and a signal that a candidate has not been bought.

Mamdani is a dues-paying DSA member and I take his membership at face value. His budget, however, is the better evidence of his immediate intentions. His first win came just eight days into the job, when Governor Hochul committed funding for free childcare for two-year-olds, starting at 2,000 seats and scaling to 12,000.¹² Free buses stalled out because the MTA is a state agency and Albany declined to fund it.¹³ The city-owned grocery stores, the item conservatives cite most often as proof of Bolshevism, amount to five stores, one per borough, roughly $70 million in a budget request, and not one of them is open.¹⁴

Five grocery stores. In a city of eight and a half million people, with thousands of food retailers already operating, and Atlanta even running a municipal store of its own. Whatever that is, it is at best a pilot program.

Judge these people by their bills and not just their rhetoric. Ocasio-Cortez has spent eight years in Congress and the most radical document carrying her name is a nonbinding resolution about climate infrastructure. Sanders has spent four decades in elected office without once introducing legislation to nationalize an industry. Mamdani runs the largest city in the country and his flagship achievement is subsidized daycare for toddlers.

The obvious rebuttal to all of this is that I am being naive, that incrementalism is the strategy and the horizon is real. Fair enough. Then let the argument happen about the horizon, in plain language, conducted by people willing to actually say what social ownership would require and how they intend to get us there. Nobody is currently doing that.

The left keeps a word it never cashes, the right keeps a word it never defines, and the country argues about Havana instead of about daycare. It’s frustrating and I wish they would drop it. The word buys them nothing and seems to trigger everyone.

The polling shows the trick working

A fascinating poll from Gallup last December asked Americans what they liked and disliked about three economic terms. Free enterprise drew 81% positive. Capitalism drew 54%. Socialism drew 39%.¹⁵ Forty-two points of spread describing overlapping arrangements here. The country is largely arguing about vocabulary.

Push a bit further and it gets even stranger. Only 17% of Americans now define socialism as government ownership of the means of production, half the share who said so back in 1949.¹⁶ Among those who name something positive about it, the top answers are access to healthcare, education, and housing at 26%, and greater equality at 23%. Broader government control barely registers.¹⁷

The partisan split this demonstrates is the glaring fact. Fifty-four percent of Republicans, asked to name anything good about socialism, answered “nothing.” The highest positive response Republicans gave, at 12%, was a stronger social safety net.¹⁸ One in eight Republicans, when presented the entire concept, could only think to praise the very part their own party has spent two years cutting.

The best version of the other side

Conservative Christians have a real argument in here somewhere but I think it isn’t the one they think it is, exactly. Charity extracted at gunpoint is not charity. Agreed. The virtue in almsgiving lives in the giving itself, and a tax bill produces no virtue in the taxpayer, only revenue in the treasury. The early church in Acts shared its possessions voluntarily and locally, among people who knew each other’s names, and Peter tells Ananias directly that the property was his to keep. Substituting a federal agency for a local congregation replaces that model rather than scaling it. Further, the historical record on state provision crowding out private and religious charity is not nothing.

At a practical level, incentives are real. Universal programs are expensive, prone to capture, and administered by people with no particular stake in the outcomes they produce. The Nordic countries the American left admires are small, ethnically homogeneous, high-trust societies with very different labor markets and very different histories, and their models have never been demonstrated to transfer particularly well. That’s the reality.

Every part of that argument warrants a real, substantive answer. The problem is that the people making this argument in public are not making it. Or at least they’re not making it well. They seem to be more fond of just shouting “Fidel.”

What the text actually legislates

The economic provisions of the Hebrew Bible were law. The model was statute, embedded in the covenant code, with real enforcement attached. A creditor who kept seventh-year debts on his books had broken it.

Leviticus 25 requires agricultural land to return to its original family every fiftieth year, canceling accumulated holdings, because the land belongs to God and Israel are merely tenants. Deuteronomy 15 mandates the release of debts every seventh year and warns creditors specifically against calculating the calendar to avoid lending. Leviticus 19 and Deuteronomy 24 forbid farmers from harvesting the corners of their fields or going back for what they dropped, reserving that portion of the yield for the poor and the immigrant. Deuteronomy 14 sets aside a third-year tithe for the resident alien, the orphan, and the widow. Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy all prohibit charging interest to a fellow Israelite.

These are wealth caps, debt jubilees, mandatory food redistribution, and an interest ban. They were not optional and they were not administered by volunteers. That is a government doing exactly what American conservatives insist governments have no business doing, written into the founding legal document of the very tradition they claim as heritage.

The prophets show up when the laws lapse. Isaiah pronounces woe on those who add house to house and field to field until they live alone in the land. Micah condemns people who lie awake devising ways to seize property because they happen to have the power to do it. Amos indicts merchants who cheat the scales and buy the poor for silver. The target in every case is accumulation that requires someone else’s dispossession. Wealth by itself draws no fire.

The objection arrives right on schedule, of course. That was ancient Israel, a covenant nation under a theocratic legal code, and America is neither. Correct on every count, and it proves far too much. The same people making that argument cite Leviticus 18 on sexuality, hang the Decalogue in courthouses, and quote Deuteronomy on parental authority, none of which survives the objection either. A hermeneutic that retires Jubilee as culturally bound while preserving the sexual code as timeless moral law has ceased being a hermeneutic at all and has become an agenda.

The narrow version of my claim requires nobody to translate the sabbatical year into federal statute. Claiming a tradition’s authority while treating its most sustained and repeated economic commands as a period detail is a choice, though, and it ought to be defended as one. Land redistribution, debt cancellation, wage protection, and food access recur across the Torah, the prophets, the Gospels, and the epistles more often than almost any other subject in the canon. If that entire body of material carries no weight for how a society orders itself, then the Bible isn’t your worldview. It’s your vocabulary.

Jesus opens his public ministry in Luke 4 by reading Isaiah’s Jubilee language aloud and announcing it as fulfilled. James tells landowners that the wages they withheld from their harvesters are crying out. Matthew 25 makes the criterion of the final judgment food, water, clothing, medical attention, and visitation in prison, with no eligibility screening or theological exam anywhere in the passage.

The standard counter-text is typically 2 Thessalonians 3:10, “anyone unwilling to work should not eat,” which Paul writes to a specific congregation about specific idlers who had quit their jobs expecting the imminent return of Christ. He is rebuking apocalyptic freeloading inside a house church. The verse has traveled a long way from there to a Medicaid eligibility form. And the other favorite, “you always have the poor with you,” is Jesus quoting Deuteronomy 15:11, a verse whose second half commands Israel to open their hand wide to the needy precisely because poverty will persist.

None of this, it’s important to remember, makes the Bible a policy manual. The ancient agrarian economy maps onto virtually nothing modern, and anyone claiming Jesus endorsed a twenty-first-century tax structure is clearly selling something. But the direction of travel in the text is also not ambiguous at all, and it does not run toward the party currently invoking it with some frequency.

What they actually did

Johnson has been asked what he thinks about issues under the sun and answered that people should pick up a Bible off the shelf and read it, because that is his worldview.¹⁹ He is welcome to that standard, of course, but let’s apply it instead of just declaring it.

The reconciliation bill Johnson shepherded through the House and Trump signed on July 4, 2025, cut an estimated $1.1 trillion from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act marketplaces over ten years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.²⁰ It attached work requirements and six-month eligibility redeterminations to Medicaid, mechanisms that Arkansas already field-tested, where people lost coverage over paperwork errors rather than any real failure to work.²¹ It cut food assistance and stripped internet costs from SNAP benefit calculations, trimming roughly ten dollars a month from about thirteen million households.²² CBO projected around ten million fewer Americans with health coverage as a result.²³

The savings paid for tax cuts.

Set that scenario against Deuteronomy 24, which forbids taking a poor man’s cloak as collateral overnight because he needs it to sleep in. The bill’s authors did not merely fail to enact Jubilee. They ran it in full reverse, moving resources from the sick and hungry toward people who already had enough, or more than enough, and then defended the maneuver by warning that the only alternative was Havana, USA.

The equivocation being employed here is the delivery mechanism for the policy. If the choice on offer is prescription drug caps or a gulag, guess what? The caps lose every time. Every hour spent litigating whether Chris Pappas is a communist is an hour not spent explaining why ten million people should lose insurance so the top bracket can keep even more. Don’t think for a moment this isn’t all by design.

The receipt

I don’t think Scripture flat-out endorses democratic socialism, as defined. I think Scripture predates the entire argument and would find the categories themselves unrecognizable. What Scripture does contain, however, is a legal code that caps accumulation, forgives debt, mandates food access, bans predatory lending, and treats the treatment of poor people as the measure of whether a society is in good standing with God. That much holds up. A movement that puts that book on the podium and then legislates in the opposite direction has a real problem, and the problem is not Zohran Mamdani or AOC.

I’m sorry, but the chicken tender guy is not the imminent threat to Christian civilization either. Someone ought to check the corners of the field, however.

. . .

Endnotes

1. Mychael Schnell, “House Republicans target democratic socialists in midterm messaging,” The Hill, July 2026.

2. Miles Parks and Franco Ordoñez, NPR Politics Podcast, transcript, August 2, 2026.

3. Schnell, The Hill, July 2026 (same report as note 1).

4. Paul Steinhauser, “Republicans relentlessly use Mamdani as socialist cudgel to bash vulnerable Democrats,” Fox News, July 11, 2025.

5. Chris Pappas candidate biography, LGBTQ+ Victory Fund; “Puritan Backroom,” Wikipedia (chicken tender attributed to Charlie Pappas, 1974).

6. “Danish PM in US: Denmark is not socialist,” The Local Denmark, November 1, 2015.

7. Democratic Socialists of America, “Workers Deserve More!” political platform, dsausa.org.

8. Democratic Socialists of America, “History,” dsausa.org.

9. Maham Javaid, “Four takeaways from Tuesday’s primaries in six states,” NPR, August 12, 2026.

10. Javaid, NPR, August 12, 2026.

11. Javaid, NPR, August 12, 2026.

12. “With 100 days in office, how is Mayor Zohran Mamdani doing?” The Haitian Times, April 13, 2026.

13. “Mamdani’s first 100 days: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly,” City & State New York, April 2026.

14. Amethyst Martinez, “When will Mamdani open a city-owned grocery store?” USA Today; budget figure per “100 Days in Office,” The Politics Society, April 21, 2026.

15. Lydia Saad, “How Americans View Capitalism, Socialism and Free Enterprise,” Gallup, August 6, 2026 (survey fielded December 1-14, 2025).

16. Frank Newport, “The Meaning of ‘Socialism’ to Americans Today,” Gallup.

17. Saad, Gallup, August 6, 2026.

18. Saad, Gallup, August 6, 2026.

19. Mike Johnson, interview with Sean Hannity, Fox News, October 26, 2023.

20. “By the Numbers: Harmful Republican Megabill Will Take Health Coverage Away From Millions of People and Raise Families’ Costs,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, August 2025, citing Congressional Budget Office estimates.

21. Congressional Budget Office and KFF analyses of the enacted reconciliation package; Arkansas precedent per contemporaneous state coverage-loss reporting.

22. “Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Explained,” NAACP Legal Defense Fund, citing CBO estimates.

23. Coverage-loss estimates vary by source and vintage, from roughly 7.8 million attributable to the Medicaid provisions alone to 16.9 million when ACA subsidy expiration and the 2025 CMS marketplace rule are included. “Around ten million” is used here as the figure defensibly attributable to the law itself.