April 6
It’s 2026. Socialism Won’t Save Us.
Will the Beetle Box Save Us?
Tell someone you’re a socialist and watch what happens to their face. Depending on where you’re standing, you’ll see admiration or revulsion, and both will arrive before you’ve said another word. Think about what that reaction reveals, and notice that it has nothing to do with socialism. It has everything to do with the word.
Every word we use is really just a label for something interior that nobody else can access. What’s actually inside the label isn’t a definition. It’s everything that word has ever made a particular person feel, built from their memories, their fears, their experiences, and their history. You can share the word. You can’t share what’s inside it. German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein explored exactly this problem in his 1953 book Philosophical Investigations,¹ describing what he called the beetle in a box. Imagine everyone carries a small box, and inside that box is something they call a “beetle.” No one can look inside anyone else’s box. Everyone learns the word only by pointing at whatever happens to be in their own. The word floats through every conversation carrying the appearance of shared meaning while the thing it actually refers to is different for every person in the room. One box could be empty. It wouldn’t matter, because the word keeps working anyway. Most people never open the box. Life moves too fast and demands too much for that kind of examination, and labels exist precisely because we need them to. The brain runs on shortcuts. It’s a feature, not a bug, though one that bad actors have learned to exploit.
Political “isms” work exactly this way.
A 2019 Pew Research Center survey asked Americans to explain, in their own words, what socialism means to them.² The answers had almost nothing in common. People who viewed socialism favorably described Denmark, expanded social safety nets, and a fairer distribution of wealth. People who viewed it unfavorably described Venezuela, government control of the economy, and collapsed markets.² Two Americans, one word, two completely different beetles. A structural vulnerability, revealed through polling.
When you tell me you’re a socialist, I have no idea what’s in your box. You might mean worker cooperatives. You might mean free college and universal healthcare operating inside a market economy. You might mean something closer to Soviet-style central planning. The word carries all of these and none of them with any precision unless this is a subject you’ve studied at length. The same is true for capitalism, libertarianism, conservatism, and every other ism doing active work in our political vocabulary.
This would be merely inconvenient if the only consequence were confused dinner parties. The actual consequence is that propagandists don’t need to change what you believe. They only need to change what you think the word means.
Fill “socialism” with images of bread lines and gulags, run those images through enough channels for enough years, and you’ve made the word do enormous political work without ever engaging a single specific policy. You don’t have to argue against paid family leave or universal healthcare on their merits. You just have to make sure that when someone hears the label attached to those ideas, the beetle that appears in their box is a Soviet commissar and an empty grocery store shelf. The policy never gets evaluated. The image does all the work.
It happens with ideas, but it happens with people too. Hear the name AOC and something appears in your box. Hear Hillary Clinton and something else appears. Neither image arrived there by accident. It runs through an information environment shaped by people who profit from controlling what goes in the box, and understanding how that machinery works is essential for anyone serious about being an effective agent of change. Not everyone needs the depth of understanding that readers of The Existentialist Republic do, but we are the seed of that movement and the drivers of it through our influence. That’s a longer conversation, and we’ll have it.
This is where the science becomes relevant. Dan Kahan, a professor of law and psychology at Yale, spent decades studying what he calls identity-protective cognition: the tendency of people to unconsciously dismiss evidence that doesn’t fit the beliefs predominant in their group.³ The mechanism doesn’t care whether the person is intelligent or not. Kahan found that the most cognitively sophisticated people are often the most susceptible, because they’re better equipped to rationalize the conclusions their identity has already reached.⁴ That detail can help answer the question we so often ask ourselves about those people in power who seem moral or seem to be on the right side, but then avoid effective opposition to tyranny or who keep repeating the same obvious tactical errors. The smartest people can be the most effective at excusing their halfhearted and weak willed response to tyranny.
When we lead with a label, we trigger a defensive mechanism before our argument gets a word in. Data for Progress found that over a third of Americans support all four policies typically classified as socialist, including Medicare for All, a federal jobs guarantee, and expanded unemployment protections, and more than half support at least three of the four.⁵ The policies poll better than the word. The label is undermining the argument.
If labels help you, they help you. Call yourself a socialist if it means something to you, if it connects you to a tradition or a community or a set of ideas you want to stand inside. If it brings value to your life and doesn't hurt anyone, go for it. But this conversation is about something specific: persuasion, communication, and consensus building toward the kind of radically transformative social change that takes years and moves millions. The organized labor movement did it. The Protestant Reformation did it, and if you think changing someone’s political identity is hard because of how deeply it’s tied to who they are, consider what the Reformation actually accomplished. It changed people’s relationship with their holy book, with their God, with the institution that had organized their entire understanding of life and death for generations. It argued that the Bible should exist in every language, that every person deserved a direct relationship with their own faith without a priest or a corrupt institution standing between them and it. Whether you call that changing their religion or changing how they practiced it probably depends on which side of the Reformation you were standing on. Either way, it worked.
Albert Einstein published “Why Socialism?” in the inaugural issue of Monthly Review in 1949, arguing that private capital, left unchecked, concentrates until it controls the major sources of information and makes it nearly impossible for ordinary citizens to reach independent conclusions.⁶ Helen Keller joined the Socialist Party in 1909, spent decades on the lecture circuit connecting industrial capitalism to disability and poverty, and said plainly that she found the Socialist Party too slow and joined the Industrial Workers of the World instead.⁷ George Orwell called himself a democratic socialist until his death and wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier that socialism means “justice and common decency” and a commitment to the overthrow of tyranny.⁸ Martin Luther King Jr. told the Negro American Labor Council in 1961: “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.”⁹
It’s impossible to defend a loaded “ism” the way that you can with statements such as “healthcare being for profit means companies make more money when you’re more sick” or “if you’re working full time you should be able to afford a house.” Every minute spent defending the word is a minute not spent talking about the actual thing we believe. If building consensus matters more to you than wearing the label, don’t let the label kill the argument before it starts.
Most Americans are already on this side of the argument when you say “people are dying because healthcare is for profit” or “people are working full time and sleeping outside” or even “people can't afford to have families on what they're being paid.” Stated clearly, these are moral emergencies, rather than policy disputes, and there is no room for half measures when the problems are this serious. Half measures are a moral failing, and morals are the landscape of identity. Respect for human life, the suffering of others, fairness, wanting to protect the innocent from harm, these are the moral terms that shape people's identity and as a result their behavior; those conversations can actually inspire the politically lost and dejected to act and make change that lasts. The path from the present moment to change is found by evangelizing justice. Door to door if need be because otherwise we get no future at all. And the beetle box labelled 'we are all dead because of greed,' that beetle box is unambiguous.
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Works Cited
Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical investigations. Blackwell.
Pew Research Center. (2019, October 7). In their own words: Behind Americans’ views of socialism and capitalism. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/10/07/in-their-own-words-behind-americans-views-of-socialism-and-capitalism/
Kahan, D. M. (2017). Misconceptions, misinformation, and the logic of identity-protective cognition. Cultural Cognition Project Working Paper Series No. 164. Yale Law School.
Kahan, D. M. (2013). Ideology, motivated reasoning, and cognitive reflection. Judgment and Decision Making, 8(4), 407-424.
Motta, M., & Higgins, M. (2020, June). How Americans feel about socialism in the midst of the coronavirus crisis. Data for Progress. https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2020/6/10/how-americans-feel-about-socialism
Einstein, A. (1949, May). Why socialism? Monthly Review, 1(1). https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
Keller, H. (1912, November 3). How I became a socialist. The New York Call. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/keller-helen/works/1910s/12_11_03.htm; Foner, P. S. (Ed.). (1967). Helen Keller: Her socialist years. International Publishers.
Orwell, G. (1937). The road to Wigan Pier. Victor Gollancz.
Jackson, T. F. (2007). From civil rights to human rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the struggle for economic justice. University of Pennsylvania Press.
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