America does not need yet another fire-and-brimstone sermon. This culturally polarized empire needs a double shot of truth, straight, bitter, smoking, and served in a glass with fingerprints from the 250-year-old active crime scene.

America, rumblin’, stumblin’, tumblin’, and bumblin’ around in King Trump’s gold-lamé Confederacy, packages hunger as character, cruelty as divine toughness, poverty as failed discipline, medical debt as freedom of choice, and billionaire plunder as genius. This country is so marinated in the conservative “con game” that any demand for decency sounds predictably “1961 Che Guevara” radical.

So let us be clear before the fainting patriots clutch their automatic muskets because somebody whispered “socialism” near the living room curtains. I’m damn sure not issuing an apology. I argue that democratic socialism is not alien to decency, democracy, or the American moral imagination. It is the native tongue of anyone who believes a civilized civilization should feed the hungry, house the people, heal the sick, educate the child, dignify the worker, and stop treating old-fashioned biblical greed like the national anthem.

I’m citing icons, not basement podcasters. Einstein called for “the establishment of a socialist economy.” Roosevelt, FDR himself, gave America the Second Bill of Rights. Malcolm X called capitalism what it looked like from underneath: bloodsucking. Mary Elizabeth Lease said if one man cannot eat while another sits on $25 million, something has been stolen. Mark Twain named “the king, the capitalist.” This is not fringe. It is a trail of witnesses who saw the same hustle wearing different suits.

At MAGA’s cold, rotten heart is a centuries-old, WASP-drenched fantasy of America before the rest of us got too visible, educated, loud, elected, and hard to “handle.” It wants diversity only in brochure form, where Black and brown faces smile while power stays locked in the country-club penthouse. MAGA fears a shared democracy where the people who cooked, cleaned, fought, labored, raised the children, and carried the country finally sit down, vote, lead, and own the damn room.

Merely suggest in mixed company, whatever in the hell that means, that people ought to eat, heal, learn, sleep indoors, keep the lights on, and work without hocking their dignity like a stolen watch, and MAGA comes clutching its automatic muskets, shrieking like socialism just crawled through the vents, dragging a bloody meat cleaver.

Einstein saw through the cheap trick. Society’s “grave evils,” he argued, could not be cured by charity, pity, or another banquet where rich people applaud themselves for noticing the poor. The cure required a socialist economy and education aimed at social responsibility, not worshiping power and success. Plain English: an economy should serve human beings, not train them to worship the boot on their neck.

That is, well, genius, isn’t it?

That is why I brand myself a Democratic Socialist. Not because I hate America. Not because I want some gray clerk measuring soup with a ruler. Not because I caught Karl Marx fever. I am a Democratic Socialist because a “civilized” civilization should not make survival a hustle.

You know, civilized: enlightened, educated, advanced, developed.

Water, power, food, housing, medicine, education, and transportation are not luxuries. They are the bones of civilized life. A republic rich enough to bail out banks, subsidize billionaires, build bombs, and shovel public money into private pockets, but too cheap to keep children warm, workers housed, and sick people treated, is not advanced. It is a cave with Wi-Fi, a flagpole, and a lobbyist calling the shadows innovation.

Roosevelt understood that freedom without economic security is theater. A hungry man is not free. A sick woman choosing between insulin and rent is not free. A family one surprise bill from eviction is not free. His Second Bill of Rights was a moral ledger: a useful job, a living wage, a decent home, medical care, education, and protection from old age, sickness, unemployment, and disaster. A floor under ordinary people so life does not become a trapdoor.

A civilized civilization does not turn necessities into a casino and call the roulette wheel liberty. It does not make families gamble on groceries, rent, heat, medicine, and bus fare while billionaires float overhead in rockets shaped like unresolved childhood issues. That is feudalism in a necktie.

Mary Elizabeth Lease caught the labels barehanded and threw them back hot: “You may call me an anarchist, a socialist, or a communist; I care not, but I hold to the theory that if one man has not enough to eat three times a day and another man has $25,000,000, that last man has something that belongs to the first.”

That is the whole sermon wearing work boots. If one man cannot eat and another man has $25 million, the problem is not envy, laziness, grit, prayer, branding, or financial literacy. The problem is a nation so hypnotized by money that it calls a starving man bitter for noticing the Texas Roadhouse.

Lease warned in the Gilded Age that Wall Street had swallowed the country whole, that government was no longer of, by, and for the people, but of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The disease has cleaner fingernails now. Monopoly has medical debt, student loans, rent hikes, private equity, and a customer-service line where hope goes to be strangled by hold music.

Twain saw the same racket. “Who are the oppressors?” he asked. “The few: the king, the capitalist...” America claims to hate kings, then drools when somebody gets rich enough to act like one. We threw out crowns and built boardrooms. We mocked aristocracy and invented billionaires, substitute monarchs with tax lawyers, bought politicians, rockets, and mummy-dry hearts.

Twain knew where power slept: among the “myriads of toilers” whose labor keeps the country from collapsing into a rich man’s daydream. When those people rise, call it whatever name pleases your ear, but the fact remains: a nation has risen.

Call it socialism if that helps the faint-hearted practice their gasps. Call it communism if your political education came from talk radio and an uncle who thinks Medicare is sacred but Medicaid is Bolshevism with a stethoscope. I call it public responsibility. I call it Thomas Paine with a utility bill. I call it the moral plumbing of a civilized civilization sick of pretending cruelty is sophistication.

I do not hate billionaires because they are rich. Keep the yachts, rockets, panic rooms, marble lobbies, and whatever toys men collect when love, shame, and therapy all fail. But do not ask us to kneel before fortunes built on underpaid labor, tax dodges, union-busting, price-gouging, subsidies, and a nation picked clean like a Sunday chicken carcass.

Twain called the vote “a pistol,” and he was right. Democracy is not a parlor decoration. It is a weapon, a warning, and a promise. The ballot reminds kings, capitalists, monopolists, and private-equity vampires that this country does not belong to Wall Street, Silicon Valley, oil barons, pharmaceutical pirates, or billionaires trying to buy immortality because decency was out of stock.

So when they ask why I am a Democratic Socialist, I will not sweeten the answer. I believe an economy should serve the people who live and labor inside it. A child should eat before a billionaire gets another loophole. Sick people should be treated before shareholders are kissed on the mouth. Housing, education, medicine, food, water, power, and transportation are necessities, not investment prey.

I stand with Einstein’s moral intelligence, Roosevelt’s economic realism, Malcolm’s anti-capitalist blade, Lease’s prairie thunder, Twain’s savage eye, labor’s bruised knuckles, the nurse’s aching feet, the bus driver’s dawn shift, the warehouse worker’s bent back, and the mother stretching a paycheck so thin it ought to be studied by physicists.

Tell them the way Shirley Chisholm told them: unbought, unbossed, and unwilling to confuse politeness with justice.

A nation is measured by how little its ordinary people have to crawl. If that sounds radical, maybe the sickness is not socialism. Maybe the sickness is a society so captured by the con that the first duty of a civilized civilization sounds like a crime: feed the hungry, house the people, heal the sick, educate the child, dignify the worker, and stop calling greed the national anthem.

Power to the people!