Today, the roll call of America’s social democrats has grown exponentially, not due to anything resembling socialist propaganda, but rather, to the economy’s thousand unnatural shocks— deunionization, financialization, globalization, deregulation, and steadily more regressive taxation, for starters—that have enriched our nation’s wealthiest 10 percent while plunging everyone else into either problems or crises of unaffordability, whether of homes, health care, or tuition. As I documented in my article in the Prospect’s December print issue, had that 90 percent of American workers retained the same share of the nation’s income that they had before Ronald Reagan began breaking unions and dismantling the tax and regulatory policies created by the New Deal, they would have earned $79 trillion more than they did in the years since Reagan was elected president in 1980. In 2025 alone, each of the roughly 140 million American workers in the bottom 90 percent would have earned an additional $28,000. That upward redistribution of income, wealth, and political power amounts to a systemic crisis for which rank-and-file Democrats now favor systemic solutions, whether they call them socialist or social democratic or not.