To hear Republican South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint tell it, socialism lurks in America, spreading cavities through the mouth of American Freedom — I’ve learned from the Tea Party movement that Freedom is always a proper noun — with its illusory rights like health care or education.

Chief among the lurkers DeMint alerts us to is Alan Maass, editor of SocialistWorker.org and author of “The Case for Socialism.” Maass, DeMint believes, is leading America to ruin with his “siren song of socialism” — but happily, DeMint’s book “Saving Freedom: We Can Stop America’s Slide into Socialism” will give us an “action plan to save freedom.”

As a member of the International Socialist Organization, which is bringing Alan Maass to speak on our campus this Wednesday night to mark the second edition of his book, I’m looking forward to the chance to discuss a real action plan for freedom. The hundreds of thousands of people nationwide who marched for immigrant rights this Saturday — including the 65,000 marchers in Milwaukee and including the protesters whose civil disobedience in front of the White House got them arrested — are the ones whose action is defending freedom. They are expressing solidarity with the most vulnerable members of our society — those whose lack of papers make them vulnerable to arrest at any time.

Likewise, the thousands of workers who marched against bank profiteering in New York last Thursday — and the hundred or so who marched into the bank offices beforehand demanding accountability against “financial terrorists” who profited from bets against subprime loans, got bailed out by the government and have returned to the business of kicking people out of their homes. These protests represent the beginnings of a real action plan because they show recognition that if we want freedom — whether from racial profiling or corporate profiteering — we’re going to have to organize ourselves to demand it.

Americans have heard a lot about socialism from the right wing lately. Most of our generation’s reaction to this seems to be bemusement; where the Tea Party movement sees the Iron Curtain everywhere through its 1988-colored glasses, people our age are more likely to wonder whether their college loans will ever be paid off.

To some, the idea of an alternative to capitalism’s economic, ecological and military catastrophes looks better and better. But few have had the opportunity to have their sense that there’s got to be a better system than this one matched with an explicit, coherent alternative. That’s where Wednesday’s discussion with Alan Maass comes in.

And to DeMint, I’ll make a pledge: we socialists will promise not to lurk in the shadows. You’ll know exactly what our plan is, because you’re going to see it in action.

Alan Maass speaks Wednesday at 7 p.m. Check TITU for “The Case for Socialism.”

Elizabeth Wrigley-Field is a graduate student in Sociology and a member of the International Socialist Organization.