In an appearance on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show on Monday, Kamala Harris called Donald Trump a “tyrant.” That much wasn’t surprising or interesting. As the second Trump administration has mounted ever more brazen assaults against free speech, due process, and universally guaranteed citizenship over the course of the last eight months, numerous Democrats and progressives have called Trump a “tyrant.” The divide among anti-Trump forces has centered on whether to exclusively focus on the broadly pro-democracy message (“no kings”) or to integrate it with the broader critique of “oligarchy” offered by politicians like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), and Zohran Mamdani.

In her subsequent comments to Rachel Maddow, though, former Vice President Harris went in another direction entirely.

We used to compare the strength of our democracy to communist dictators. That’s what we’re dealing with right now in Donald Trump. And these titans of industry are not speaking up!

The contrast between this and the “Fighting Oligarchy” message could hardly be starker. Where Sanders and AOC have been crisscrossing the country promoting the message that Trump should be rejected because he’s a servant of wealthy and powerful “titans of industry,” Harris wants to appeal to the oligarchs themselves to save us from the “communist” Trump.

California governor Gavin Newsom recently took a similar line. In his appearance on the Pivot podcast, Newsom responded to host Kara Swisher’s question about Mamdani by bringing up Trump’s deal with Intel, whereby the government agreed to buy almost 10 percent of the company’s stock.

Mamdani and Trump, the governor suggested, weren’t so different. Newsom said it “sounds like Trump’s been paying a lot of attention to” Mamdani, given Trump’s “desire to socialize great American companies.” Just like Mamdani wants to start a few municipally owned grocery stores in New York, Trump wants to do something similar, Newsom contended, through public ownership of a slice of Intel. According to Newsom, it’s “just perverse” that someone like Mamdani could be “shaping the Democratic Party in the context of the socialist brand” when Democrats should be pointing out every day that Trump “is the leading nationalist and socialist of our time.”

Sanders, meanwhile, came out in favor of the Intel deal, reasonably pointing out that, if “microchip companies make a profit from the generous grants they receive from the federal government,” then the public as a whole has “a right to a reasonable return on that investment.” Newsom is right to see at least a narrow parallel to Mamdani’s proposal for municipal grocery stores, insofar as both ideas have triggered hysterical meltdowns from critics, even though a quick look around the world shows that there’s nothing particularly groundbreaking about them.

Publicly owned funds that invest in private firms and use the proceeds to bankroll social programs (or just pay out direct dividends to citizens) have been a crucial element of social democracy in nations like Denmark and Norway. And anyone who wants to look for a successful example of publicly owned grocery stores need look no further than the hundreds of commissary stores operated by the US Department of Defense.

Of course, the difference between someone like Mamdani (or Sanders) and a politician like Trump is that, in Trump’s case, this minor departure from free-market orthodoxy is being implemented not as part of a broader effort at building a Nordic-style social democracy. In the rest of his policy agenda, Trump has ruthlessly attacked the regulatory and welfare states, busted labor unions, slashed taxes for the wealthy, and done everything in his power to return American capitalism to something approximating the capitalism of the nineteenth century.

Pushing back against this agenda, Sanders has, in the words of popular Substack polling analyst Ettingermentum, “effectively taken a role as President of anti-Trump America,” regularly “giving national address-style videos for major events and getting millions of views each time.” His Fighting Oligarchy Tour rallies have consistently drawn massive crowds from coast to coast, as more centrist politicians often struggle to attract comparable numbers. The costar of those rallies, AOC, is emerging as a serious contender for the 2028 Democratic nomination.

Meanwhile Mamdani, a representative of the same message, not only won the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York with record primary numbers but has emerged as a major national figure. He did that not by accusing reactionaries of being crypto-socialists, but by aggressively promoting socialist policies that can make the city more affordable for working-class New Yorkers.

It’s far too soon to tell whether all of this is a flash in the pan or the beginnings of a long-term boost in the fortunes of American socialism. But we can be sure of one thing: the Democratic base is excited by the message tying opposition to Trump’s authoritarianism to a broader call for economic equality. In one recent poll, out of the Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters who have heard of the Fighting Oligarchy rallies, 62 percent consider themselves supporters and only 10 percent opponents.

Who, then, is the constituency for the Harris/Newsom approach, which tries to tie opposition to authoritarianism to a fanatical defense of the sacred cows of neoliberal economics? Are the 1 percent themselves supposed to rise up against the “communist dictator”? Even Harris seems to get that the “titans of industry” aren’t exactly answering that call. Why would they? They’ve been making out like bandits under Trump.

The Fighting Oligarchy message makes much more sense. Trump surrounded himself with a phalanx of billionaires at his inauguration. Since he took office, he’s been acting every day to further enrich those men, an effort that is obviously and intuitively connected to his efforts to chip away at basic liberal-democratic norms. Trump and his buddies want to rule over you like tyrants so they can more effectively fleece you. Anyone who’s serious about protecting democracy needs to lean hard into that message.

Newsom and Harris can’t do that, though. Their whole lives have been invested in a political project that aligns them with the moderate wing of capital, and they’ll stick to that project even if it means letting MAGA win. Hence, the gibberish about Trump — Trump — being a “socialist” or a “communist.” The rest of us are better off treating them as something like elderly relatives saying racist things at a Thanksgiving dinner. You can argue with them or you can ignore them. But you certainly shouldn’t take them seriously.