OCTOBER 21, 2025

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Meyerson on TAP

Just plain everyday American socialism

Transcontinental socialism—California Democrats deliver affordable insulin; Gotham Democrats champion affordable child care and groceries.

The past decade’s rise of a significant socialist movement within the Democratic Party has prompted the nation’s media to focus on such avowed socialists as Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani, as well as the Democratic Socialists of America. What’s been missing from most media coverage has been stories about socialist policies and programs devised, championed, and implemented by non-socialists—and that have won overwhelming support from America’s non-socialist citizens.

Consider, for instance, the program unveiled last week by California’s non-socialist governor, Gavin Newsom. He announced that beginning in January the state would put on sale insulin pens for a flat $11, in pharmacies not only across the state but across the nation. At his suggestion, in 2022 the legislature allotted $50 million for a contract with Civica Rx, a nonprofit drug manufacturer, to produce the insulin; now that the drug has been produced in sufficient volume, it will go on the market.

Back in 2022, criticism was rising about the absurdly high prices, and profit margins, that Big Pharma companies including Eli Lilly were imposing (the prices) and reaping (the profits). Though production of a vial of insulin costs roughly $8, the price of such vials often reached well into three digits. Bernie Sanders highlighted this disparity with considerable impact, so much so that pharma’s main insulin providers were compelled to reduce their prices, and the Inflation Reduction Act limited the monthly out-of-pocket costs to insulin purchasers to $35—if and only if they were on Medicare. A 2023 bill by Sanders and Rep. Cori Bush to limit the price of insulin for all consumers went nowhere. California, by contrast, is targeting its pens to diabetics (there are an estimated 3.5 million in the state) who have no insurance, as the $11 rate is less than their co-pays. Additionally, the state capped monthly co-pays at $35 for those with private insurance and Medicaid—a bill that passed the legislature with unanimous support from both parties.

Comparing the heat that Mamdani has taken for his proposal to open five publicly owned groceries in New York City to the heat that Newsom has taken for the public funding of insulin production and sales suggests, among other things, that socialist programs that come from non-socialists don’t arouse the same level of right-wing hysteria. (They also don’t arouse the same level of left-wing enthusiasm; while focusing, understandably enough, on Mamdani’s proposals, the DSA has largely failed to notice California’s dive into objectively socialist production and marketing—chiefly, I suppose, because it comes with no socialist label attached.) To be sure, today’s Wall Street Journal ran an editorial arguing that the private sector can match California’s everyday low prices, but this is based on a selective sampling of pharma’s insulin prices, and neglects to point out that it took Bernie Sanders bringing the issue to public attention to compel Eli Lilly et al. to rein in some of their prices. (Within the Murdoch empire, Journal opinion writers are known for their selective documentation and memories, while Fox News commentators are known for their fictitious documentation and memories, though this may be too kind to the Journal.)

What Mamdani’s groceries and Newsom’s insulin have in common is that both are responses to market failures. In today’s economy, affordable food and affordable health care are sometime things at best, and it should come as no surprise that Americans welcome public provision of life’s essentials even when it flies in the face of laissez-faire economics. The most popular government programs are Social Security and Medicare, and Republicans who frontally oppose them do so at their own political risk, though it took Donald Trump to figure that out. For decades, though, many doctrinaire GOP right-wingers understood some of that. Even when extolling Ronald Reagan, they declined to bring up that he first came to national attention by opposing the adoption of Medicare in 1964-1965, which, he repeatedly declared, would plunge the nation into the swirling pit of socialism. By the time Reagan became president, 15 years later, he’d concluded that the better part of valor was to clam up about Medicare’s socialist perils.

The lesson here is clear for any who wish to understand the largely unstated reality of American politics: When market failure threatens lives and livelihoods, when it offers no secure retirement or access to health care, when it fails to fund rural electrification or the basic research needed for medical cures, the public usually supports public provision of same. As is not the case in Europe, Americans tend not to label such provision as socialist or social democratic, and precisely because American capitalists believe their own mythology and work to impose it on the citizenry, both the S-word and, more importantly, needed public provision are still in lamentably shorter supply here than they are in the happier nations of Scandinavia (see the polls on national levels of happiness) and across Europe more generally. Younger Americans, bearing the brunt of our market failures, may be changing that, if the polls on the popularity of socialism and capitalism are even somewhat correct.

That said, Mamdani and Newsom point the way to how Democrats should deal with the market failures that pervade today’s economy. Democrats in trifecta states and blue cities, take heed: Where governments can address the crises of affordability the private markets haven’t and can’t correct, you have a world to win and nothing to lose but your ideological chains.

– HAROLD MEYERSON

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