The Marxist revolution, symbolized by the hammer and sickle and animated by the cry “Workers of the World, Unite!”, killed at least 50 million people through mass murder and gross economic mismanagement in the 20th century. The United States rightly saw it as an existential threat. Patriots fought hot and cold wars to reverse its advance, and the pushback was largely effective. Communists never gained a foothold in American politics.
Until now.
Communism is on our shores. Its political home is the Democratic Socialists of America. DSA political operatives are advancing Marxist ideas, including in New York City, where DSA member Zohran Mamdani holds the mayor’s office. Mamdani has favorably quoted Karl Marx on X, posting the infamous dictum, “Each according to their ability, each according to their need.” He also openly embraced Marxist principles at a 2021 DSA conference, stating that “the end goal [is] seizing the means of production.”
These are not empty eruptions from a wannabe revolutionary. They define Mamdani’s governing priorities: he plans to open five government-owned grocery stores and has laid the groundwork for confiscating private property under the guise of “protecting tenants.” This latter initiative is overseen by Cea Weaver, Mamdani’s director of the Office to Protect Tenants, who once posted on X, “Seize private property!”
DSA members are also surging outside of New York City. They hold the mayorship of Seattle and have won elections in Washington, D.C., Detroit, Denver, and the greater Philadelphia area. The Democratic candidate for governor of Wisconsin is also a DSA member. And though he claims no formal affiliation with the DSA, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed just won the Senate primary in Michigan while campaigning with Hasan Piker, an admirer of the communist mass murderer Mao Zedong.
The DSA is no longer a fringe movement. Its members feel confident enough to publicly identify their agenda: disbanding the Senate, abolishing the Electoral College, emptying prisons, taking over the free market, outlawing immigration enforcement, and extending voting rights to noncitizens.
It gets worse.
Compounding these disastrous policies is the DSA’s embrace of gender ideology, including taxpayer-funded sex-change surgeries for children, drag shows in public libraries, and permitting men to take over women’s sports leagues and change in their locker rooms.
This mutant fusion of Marxist and LGBTQ ideologies, a historical novelty, has created the most destructive variant of communism yet: a postmodern rejection of all objective truth, including scientific truth, combined with a vicious moralism that aims to deconstruct human nature, including the human body, and the institutions that make civil society possible.
These are not your grandparents’ commies. The old Red Guard was evil. But they could still put a man in space, build a wall cutting Germany in two, position nuclear weapons 90 miles from Florida, maintain a lethal army of 14 million soldiers, and coordinate deadly anti-American revolutions across the globe.
The new Red Guard, the rainbow reds, cannot tell you what a woman is.
Conservatives may scoff that this just proves how ridiculous the DSA is. True — but it also means that contemporary communism is more dangerous, not less. The reason is that the old communism still had roots in reality. It emerged from the widespread abuses of workers during the Industrial Revolution. That’s why its origin symbols were tools, not a garish pastiche of shapes and colors.
The factories in Soviet Russia were grossly inefficient, but they still produced physical products. Farming was equally inefficient, and people had to wait in line for their state-approved allotment, but there was at least something to eat at the end. The state-constructed apartment blocks were oppressively spare, but they still had lights and toilets.
That touchpoint with the physical realities of human existence, however tenuous it was under old communism, is now gone. Pampered professional activists who live online and have never built anything that benefits anyone but themselves now hold the party’s reins. And they don’t know how to do anything but posture.
This is the most dangerous form of Marxism — Marxism detached from even the pretense of being able to meet human beings’ basic needs.
WHY ARE SOCIALISTS UNFAZED BY THEIR ABYSMAL HISTORICAL RECORD
The old communists ruled through real fear. The new Communists rule through fake compassion. The old Communists believed you belonged to the state. The new communists believe you belong to them. The old communists didn’t believe in God, but they did believe in science. The new communists believe in neither science nor God.
They only believe in themselves.
Delusional pride defines their entire platform. If left unchecked, however, it will be all they need to continue gaining power. Their personal fantasies will become our collective nightmare unless a new class of patriots commits to stopping them from playing make-believe with our nation’s lives and livelihoods.
Matthew R. Petrusek, PhD, is the senior director of the Word on Fire Institute