None of them compared hearing the news. Berlin was still divided by a wall that always looked incongruously small when you bumped up to it. With a U.S. passport, I could take the train behind the Iron Curtain for the price of dinner. Back in my West Berlin apartment, I practiced German by listening to the news from both East and West, toggling between them with the turn of a dial.
The experience sharpened my ear and tuned my attention to propaganda. It was seldom obvious or crude. Armies occupied both cities, so political authority was stalemated. What mattered was the constant struggle over what Germans call Deutungshoheit: who gets the last word on interpreting the world. With savvy listeners on each side of the border, the radio stations tried to avoid simple stereotypes. Only if you listened to both could you see what was left out.
East Berlin radio offered credible information about U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s covert war on Central America. West Berlin reported on resistance to Afghanistan’s Soviet-backed government, though without mentioning that most of it was provided by CIA-supported Islamic fundamentalists (who later became the Taliban). The ordinary people on your side of the Cold War were humanized with background stories and contexts; those on the other side were listed as numbers, if they were listed at all. If you listened to both, you’d be well informed. I wouldn’t have experienced the Western news as propaganda had it been the only source I heard; only repeated comparisons made that clear.
Can anything good be said about East Germany? On hearing the name, most people today think of the Stasi and other repressive political structures. By contrast, in much of the world, it’s still possible to make positive references to the United States without immediately being asked to justify the European genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Black people, or the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I’m hardly inclined to defend the Stasi or East German censorship. But given how much information and context have long been absent from U.S. media—even before it made concessions to the second Trump administration—I’m also disinclined to describe it as free. As Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky wrote in Manufacturing Consent, it’s “much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent.”
This is especially true when the media portray themselves as champions of free speech. Jason Stanley’s How Propaganda Works stresses the same point: “Part of the propaganda of states that consider themselves liberal democracies is that they do not allow propaganda.” As a Russian colleague told me, the main difference between educated Russians and educated Americans is that Russians know they’re listening to propaganda.
Then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan commemorates the 750th anniversary of Berlin on June 12, 1987.Mike Sargent/AFP via Getty Images
Manufacturing Consent described anti-communism as the national religion of the United States, as well as its control mechanism. This is even truer today than it was when published in 1988. In fact, anti-communism is more powerful now than it was during the McCarthy era. While that Red Scare ruined more lives (so far), it was less totalitarian when homegrown socialist movements existed.
Many Americans would have known a socialist or two as neighbors, making it harder to associate the word with demonized dogmatists. “The Ballad for Americans,” a patriotic paean composed by a communist, was played at both the Republican and the Communist Party conventions of 1940. It can only be heard as high kitsch today, but anyone wanting to understand the past century of U.S. history should hear it.
In the United States and elsewhere, enthusiasm for socialism has risen as the failures of capitalism become clearer, and its moral bankruptcy transparent. According to Gallup, in September 2025, 66 percent of U.S. Democrats had a favorable view of socialism; only 42 percent say the same about capitalism. Signs that the U.S. consensus is moving leftward are clear enough to provoke backlash among establishment politicians and their corporate sponsors.
The prospect that a man who would be considered a centrist social democrat in most of the world could become New York City’s mayor created a frenzy among the many Democrats who declined to endorse him, though the depiction of Zohran Mamdani as a savage communist couldn’t survive an hour in the White House.
U.S. President Donald Trump shakes hands with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani during a meeting at the White House on Nov. 21, 2025. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
For more than a century, anti-communist propaganda has been crucial in creating a particular picture of evil and erasing another one. The moral vacancy that I argue is the root of evil was elided, and moral responsibility was redefined. Social responsibility was cast as an obstacle to individual responsibility instead of an extension of it. And any attempt to balance social and individual rights was viewed as the first step down the road to Stalinist tyranny.
Until we are aware of the ways that propaganda threatens our ability to make sound moral judgments, we will not be able to construct a politics that meets this moment.
Few Americans have the vocabulary to describe what’s making them miserable. What needs spelling out, both for Americans and those who would like to understand them: In the United States, fear of losing your job is connected to the fear of losing your home and your health insurance. Americans know this in their bones. What they don’t know is that it isn’t normal.
But what if healthcare, parental and sick leave, paid vacations, and a host of other things were considered social rights, as they are in Europe and many other countries? The 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights listed fair labor practices, education, housing, healthcare, and access to culture as rights along with political rights to speak, travel, and worship. It was hashed out in a two-year process, and compromises were inevitable. The Saudis were opposed to the insistence on equal rights for women, the Soviet Union objected to the right to travel, and the United States didn’t want to include social rights.
The fact that the commission was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt may have played a role in passing the declaration. Four years earlier, in his State of the Union address, her husband, then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt, had proposed a second U.S. Bill of Rights, arguing that the political rights guaranteed by the first one were “inadequate to insure equality in the pursuit of happiness.” His proposal included the right to useful employment that earned enough to provide “adequate food, clothing, and recreation,” a decent home, adequate medical care, and good education.
The Roosevelts’ blessing, and the fact that the U.N. declaration is unenforceable, led most of the member states to ratify it. It remains aspirational everywhere. Yet many countries, from Brazil to South Africa, recognize social rights in their constitutions, even if the means to realize those aspirations have been delayed. In the United States, the very idea of social rights is anathema, and many people consider them to conflict with sacrosanct individual rights.
A social right is neither a benefit nor a safety net. A benefit is something extra, to be granted or denied by the grace of someone more powerful than you are. A safety net presupposes something out of the ordinary: Your highwire act got out of hand, you slipped and fell, but thankfully, there was something to catch you. Both terms imply a sense of humiliation—the sign, wrote philosopher Avishai Margalit, of an indecent society. A decent one does not expect gratitude for social rights that allow you to realize your political rights, any more than you ought to be grateful for freedom of speech—though you may be relieved that it’s still there.
Social rights embody the expectation that no one in a free society should die for want of food, shelter, or medical care. These are not expectations the U.S. government wants to create.
In the United States, even members of the middle class may struggle. With two jobs needed to support a small family, without public transportation, adequate daycare, sick leave or vacation, everyday panic is part of life. When you know that a small, unexpected expense—a broken boiler, a child’s class trip—could unsettle all your forethought, it’s no wonder that the level of anger in the United States can be visible. Anyone visiting the country will notice the undercurrent of rage in the airport, on the road, in the supermarket.
A suburban neighborhood is seen through the window of an Amtrak train near Denver, Colorado, on March 24, 2017. Joe Raedle/Getty Images
These conditions are particularly galling when politicians repeat the legend that the United States is the best of all possible countries. It’s an extraordinary claim to make for a country whose infant mortality rate is higher than that of Belarus or Cuba. Though we spend more per student than most developed countries, U.S. students perform below the OECD average in math and only around the average in reading and science.
All countries restructured their economies at the end of the Cold War, but as historian Greg Grandin writes, “No other comparable nation … presided over such an enormous redistribution of wealth upwards, creating a superclass of billionaires immune to democratic control.”
In earlier eras, barring an occasional peasant rebellion, the rage was usually muffled. That was easier when the 1 percent lived at a distance. Now social media may bring millionaires into your bedroom. Conspicuous consumption is no longer a term of critique. When asked about their dream profession, 57 percent of U.S. teenagers name “influencer.” Little in the culture encourages other aspirations. Earnings aren’t enough to support the average single influencer, much less one with a family, but particularly cute toddlers or sexy young women can earn millions by displaying their treasures before a camera.
Sicily Rose, Jamie Adler, Hannah Colin, Aly Jade, and Samantha Eve pose during an influencer event in Glendale, California, on April 3, 2021. Frazer Harrison/Getty Images
Those who watch this sort of thing regularly see daily reminders of the toys they don’t have. The difference between the followers’ lot and the lives they see onscreen can be excruciating. Having no better word with which to name the complex of forces—the absence of social rights coupled with the triumph of conspicuous consumption, the resulting periodic eruptions of anger that may derail a simple trip to the supermarket—voters call their unhappiness a lack of “affordability” or “inflation.”
Social justice, in the contemporary United States, usually refers to “equal rights, equal opportunity, and equal treatment … regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, ability or socioeconomic status”—to use one crisp summary from the San Diego Foundation. These are worthy goals, particularly for a country whose current government has attacked every attempt to equalize rights of communities of color, women, LGBTQ persons, and those of different abilities.
But what use are those goals for rights that no one in the country enjoys—merely privileges the wealthy can buy? Americans lack most social rights, and what’s worse, they don’t even have the concept of them. If you live in a place that asserts your right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it’s reasonable to assume you have the right to realize them. You may hope to get healthcare if you’re told it is a benefit, but you will not expect it.
Americans are often incredulous about the scope of European healthcare. Germans have had state health insurance since 1883, not because Chancellor Otto von Bismarck was a progressive politician, but because he thought health insurance might stop the rising tide of socialism, which demanded much more. Along with the later introduction of a state pension system, healthcare offered workers relief, but they were not misled by Bismarck’s purposes. The carrot wasn’t enough to reconcile them to the injustices of the system, so the chancellor introduced further repressive laws to suppress the socialists and send their leaders into exile.
After World War II and the division of the country in 1947, communist East Germany provided a more inclusive conception of social rights, along with more restricted political rights like freedom of travel and uncensored speech. Since it collapsed in 1990, when Germany was reunited, there has been no competing system to put pressure on neoliberalism. Like other European countries, Germany has cut back on some social rights. As historian Gary Gerstle recently said, the threat of communism provided a reason for capitalist countries to improve workers’ lives.
Thousands of East Berliners flock to one of the new openings in the Berlin Wall on Nov. 11, 1989. Patrick Hertzog/AFP via Getty Images
Nevertheless, among many other services, Germany covers the complete cost of hospitalizations including testing, surgery, and rehabilitation, with one exception: The patient, or her guardian, must pay about $11 per day for the cost of her hospital meals. But the charge for meals lasts only for 28 days. Anyone who stays in the hospital longer is exempted.
I doubt those who wrote the health insurance policy read John Rawls, who knew we are vulnerable to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. A just society, he believed, works to make amends for the arrows it cannot prevent. Presumably the bureaucrats who constructed the policy assumed that anyone stuck in hospital for more than 28 days had more than her share of outrageous fortune; she needn’t pay for meals on top of it. My German colleagues are too used to this system to comment on it. My U.S. colleagues find it impossible to imagine.
In 2022, 115,000 U.S. railway workers threatened to strike over working conditions. Fearing that a strike would disrupt interstate commerce before midterm elections, then-President Joe Biden—who called himself the most pro-union president in U.S. history—got involved. Thanks to his mediation, the workers were promised a 14 percent pay increase and called off the strike.
The workers accepted the offer because they couldn’t achieve their real goal. To cut costs, railway companies had reduced the workforce by 30 percent, leaving the remaining workers with little control over their lives. Even when not working, they were required to be available, day and night, so they could appear within 90 minutes if called. This left them no room to plan for a doctor’s appointment, much less to be sick.
In 2022, the pandemic was still canceling events all over the globe, but the workers responsible for transporting goods and people were not allowed to be ill. Biden did try to bargain for seven days of annual sick leave, though not the 14 days the unions had demanded. The U.S. Senate rejected Biden’s proposal but offered to grant the workers one day—per year.
When I told Europeans the story, I had to explain the concept of sick leave. They found it hard to grasp: “But what if you’re sick for longer?” In many European countries, there is no fixed number of days in which workers are allowed to be sick. Employers must defer to a doctor’s note.
Disparities like these are contributing to a radical change in U.S. political culture, as recent victories by democratic socialists demonstrate. Voters feel a sense of injustice that Hannah Arendt described well: “Rage is by no means an automatic reaction to misery and suffering as such. Only where there is reason to suspect that conditions could be changed and are not does rage arise.”
Even Americans who once dismissed socialism as dysfunctional have begun to ask how well U.S. capitalism is actually working. The more voters are aware of the propaganda telling them that alternative systems are impossible, the better we will be able to realize them.
