Excerpt from this Substack post: https://nickrafter.substack.com/p/the-rent-may-always-be-too-damn-high
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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Can we coin new words to mean the same things, or would fox news ruin them too fast?
Fundamentally, I think trying to shortcut and use terms to consolidate and represent a complex idea is broken.
If you have never encountered the concept or had it explained, then it's some black box. What does "I support DEI policies" mean at face value. How do you parse that sentence if you've never heard the acronym?
"It means diversity, equity, and inclusion" doesn't clarify anything. Diversity of what, specifically? Who is being included in what? How do we measure equity?
Especially for people who have been conditioned to think that you don't qualify for diversity if you're white.
The lesson isn't that we need new terms to rotate through to stay ahead of media. The lesson is we need to speak to the actual fucking meat of the matter.
Yes and no. Yes, we should explain actual policy stances without saying "this is single-payer healthcare" or "wealth redistribution" or whatever phrase causes conservatives to shutdown. However, there still needs to be a name for shorthand purposes. It's like a pronoun in language. It gets tiring fast to keep using a person's name rather than saying "she/he/they/etc." and that causes its own issues.
Ultimately, the outline of a solution I can see is to advocate for "common sense" reforms and explain them (first at a high level so anyone can get an idea and then at finer detail later on). Call the policy something 'Murica-esque that any truck driving, gun totin', farmer from Texas would get behind. Then stay as far away from what the rest of the universe calls the policy and deny that it's what the policy is. Those who know, will know and not care or roll their eyes, and the disengaged will go for it. For example, "This isn't socialized medicine! It's my own idea! The American Patriots Help Each Other Be Healthy policy!"
Repackage social democracy as "the cowboy mentality"
"Fluffy Kitty Cat calls themselves a Zorbloxianist, but that's just because they're too ashamed to say what they really are: a socialist."
Even in cases where people aren't just trying to come up with another word for socialist policies, they still get accused of being socialists. There's a whole narrative of environmentalists secretly being socialists, using the environment as a cover, there's people calling Joe Biden a socialist, etc. The Democrats have been doing everything they possibly can to avoid the label for at least the past 40 years and it just doesn't work, it's how we got into this mess in the first place.
Imo there's no shortcuts. Embrace the label, and say, "Well yes I am a socialist, and what's so bad about that? Here's what we socialists believe and why." And when they try to say socialism means this or that you can push back on it and have some credibility in terms of what socialism means because you've accepted the label. That's what Mamdani actually did, and it worked.
If you deny being a socialist, then you'll be expected to denounce it, and then the other side is free to say, "Socialism is when you eat babies" and if you try to say "That's not what socialism means" it will be met with, "Well if you're 'not a socialist' then why are you defending socialism?" And if you agree, then you're validating and strengthening the boogeyman, and if socialism is the most horrible thing ever, then it's just a question of who can look less like a socialist, which will always be the right.