INTERVIEW WITH MARIANNE THORNE: AMERICANS DON'T KNOW SH*T ABOUT SOCIALISM

FROM THE INSIDE OUT by BETH ARNOLD · Aug 20, 2026 · 54m · transcript

Interview with Danish Economist Marianne Thorn

Last week, I republished Marianne Thorn’s piece about what Americans get wrong when they call Denmark socialist. This conversation is a follow-up to that piece—and a chance to go deeper.

Americans throw the word socialism around without understanding what it means. For more than a century, socialism—and, after the Bolshevik Revolution, communism—have been used to scare Americans away from reforms that challenge concentrated wealth and corporate power. Republicans have made that fear a political weapon for generations, from attacks on the New Deal…