Few epithets are more heavily utilized among President Donald Trump and his supporters than “socialist” and “communist.” In MAGA’s deeply paranoid Bircher sensibility, “socialism” and even “communism” are defined as even the slightest expansion of governmental intervention in the economy—especially in favor of marginalized groups. In MAGA’s worldview, such interventions are a harbinger of the sort of massive societal disintegration seen in recent years in President Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela—if not the second coming of Stalinist totalitarianism.

As in so much else in the MAGA worldview, its views on economics have little relation to reality. For it is a fact that since at least World War II, the most dynamic sectors of the American economy (revolving around high tech) have been developed in large part by federal government planning and heavy financial investment. Since World War II, initially on the pretext of Cold War defense spending, technologies from computers and the internet to Google, lifesaving pharmaceuticals, and the components of cell phones have been developed by heavily government-subsidized researchers at universities and private companies. The government agencies providing the subsidies included the CIA, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health, and especially the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

This crucial role of government investment in economic success (in the United States as well as Western Europe and East Asia) is generally unknown in MAGA world and even among Americans of a more educated and civilized worldview. But a small group of scholars have explored this fact, ranging from Noam Chomsky to former Richard Nixon adviser Kevin Phillips in his 2003 book Wealth and Democracy. In more recent years, it has been explored by Professor Mariana Mazzucato of University College, London. Mazzucato has served as an adviser to Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom and US Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) in the United States.

As Bill Gates, a prime beneficiary of this government investment, explained in a 2015 interview with The Atlantic, “Since World War II, US government [funded] R&D has defined the state of the art” in almost every advanced sector of the American economy. Gates noted, for example, that it was the Pentagon’s DARPA which provided R&D investment in the 1960s and 70s which laid the foundation for the modern internet. DARPA’s investment was crucial, Gates noted, because as far as being a source of economic innovation, “the private sector is in general inept.” Because of a lack of guaranteed short-term profit, the private sector often refuses to invest in the early stages of development of technologies like the internet. By the 1980’s, the internet had developed to such an extent that many private companies saw its........

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