“Government,” the late Rep. Barney Frank once said, “is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.”

This memorable quotation was uttered before socialists made their long march through the Democratic institutions, when government was something of a dirty word that Frank needed to clean up and render innocuous. 

Though containing a kernel of truth, it was always a bit nonsensical, even if it helped put a positive spin on the leviathan.

For family, friendship, church, private civic associations, and community are also things we choose to do together. Only one of those involves government at all, and not intrinsically so.

The nation is also a thing we do together—partially by choice, partially by our neighbors’ and ancestors’ choices—and that, too, is at least somewhat distinct from whichever political authorities happen to be in charge.

There are other less positive spins you can put on what government entails, depending on the motivation of those ruling authorities and their allied elites.

One was recently offered by Vice President J.D. Vance in response to a question about socialism: “I think in reality, what it actually means in the American context, is that you want to replace American workers with foreign workers, and you want boys to play in girls’ sports.”

That may not be the technical definition of socialism, but it is a pretty apt description of what the government might do to you if the modern adherents of this ideology ever attain political power.

Naturally, Vance’s online detractors were dismayed. They hurled their dictionaries and economic textbooks in the vice president’s general direction, seeing it as further confirmation that his idea of Infrastructure Week is leading us down the road to serfdom. (No wonder Vance is no fan of the dismal science.)

An internet hatedom and seizing the means of production are just things we can choose to do together, with the former involving more choice for everyone than the latter. 

But Vance is raising an interesting question, even if those who insist he be kept away from the 2028 Republican presidential nomination don’t want to hear it: As an alternative to socialism, is it better to offer libertarianism—or rather, the faux-libertarianism of big deficits and repeated Mideast wars long practiced by the GOP establishment—or a defense of the mixed economic system that we actually have?

There are times when the sharper contrast is certainly the way to go, no pale pastels and all that, and libertarians are an indispensable part of any antisocialist coalition. Justin Amash would have been a much more interesting candidate to debate Abdul el-Sayed than Mike Rogers, even if Michigan Republican primary voters were unlikely to see it that way. My own preference is that government be small enough that we—see, another thing we can simply choose to do together!—can drown it in a bathtub. 

But the American electorate by and large seems to have other ideas, and socialists appeal to these by retreating to Barney Frank–style repackagings of their underlying ideology. What, you don’t like government? What do you have against roads? Or the fire department? Do you prefer poverty, illiteracy, and meowing cats stuck in trees?

Notice that this list does not include liquidating the kulaks, imprisoning Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, forcing people into breadlines while wearing two left shoes, or invading Taiwan. Just nice little things that we do together. 

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is very good at trying to rehabilitate Ronald Reagan’s nine most terrifying words in the English language: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” And while the “the warmth of collectivism” might not keep you from freezing in the breadlines, Mamdani is playing on the need for community that others—less radical than he—believe goes unmet by the “frigidity of rugged individualism.”

Among the main vulnerabilities of the new socialists are the government functions they want to do away with: defunding the police, abolishing ICE, forcing the Pentagon to hold a bake sale (what is it with these people and bread?) while Angela Davis Junior High School is fully funded.

To paraphrase the left-wing writer Ryan Grim, socialists will eventually need to abandon police abolition because the means of production won’t seize themselves, nor will the bank and healthcare CEOs put themselves in handcuffs.

But today’s left just isn’t that economically motivated—the DSA’s reemergence notwithstanding—and it certainly isn’t interested in genuine solidarity with the people Vance grew up with. 

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Vance gets this, even if his critics do not.

That doesn’t mean that the current administration has gotten the size of government right, or that we couldn’t use a more robust answer to the country’s looming fiscal catastrophe than anything the GOP has managed to offer since Calvin Coolidge was president.

But it does convey the madness—to be perfectly Frank about it—of allowing your political opponents to call you whatever names they like, while accepting their own dishonest self-definitions as gospel truth.