At a 2005 party for American Prometheus, Kai Bird’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, discussion about the great man, father of the atom bomb, turned toward his suffering during the Red Scare of the late 1940s and 1950s. He had come under official suspicion and was hounded for his communist sympathies and friends, some of whom were Soviet spies.
At a point in this conversation more than 20 years ago, an English journalist said he did not understand why Americans won’t or can’t see socialism simply as one among many possible forms of government to choose from, but regard it instead as wholly incompatible with the idea of America.
As uncomprehending as this statement was of this country, it also hit a truth: Few Americans at that time, and until recently, have seen socialism in the same way that most other places in the world see it. It has not been merely disliked more here than elsewhere, although that is the case, but recognized as poisonous to the air of American freedom we breathe. Socialism is toxic, and has long been understood to be toxic, to the political culture in which Americans have been formed for 250 years.
This is not simply a hangover from the epoch of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and any excesses that may have been committed in the name of anti-communism three-quarters of a century ago. Indeed, those excesses, if they can properly be called that after the Red Scare was vindicated by evidence that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union, have left a lingering cultural disquiet among many of our compatriots at the notion that any ideas can be “un-American.” To propose such a thing is to risk being condemned as a hateful reactionary or a fascist. Bluntly expressed, anti-communism has long been thought to be in poor taste.
America has also moved a long way leftward since the middle of the 20th century, and ideas that were shocking then and were understood by many to be antithetical to our interests and values are now often accepted as normal and reasonable. Democrats and other radicals have poured them so copiously into mainstream politics that we’ve become used to them.
But that doesn’t mean the nature of those ideas has changed or that the question of whether they are compatible with American principles and ways has become redundant. It has, rather, become more pressing. In the wake of primary wins by candidates belonging to the Democratic Socialists of America, which will be followed by their inevitable entry as explicit Marxists into Congress next year, the question has become more pressing than ever. It is past time to ask again: Is socialism un-American?
It is a question that should not be put merely rhetorically or deployed as a crude insult. It is a real and vital issue, and it should be asked in a serious way. Is it possible for the ideas, assumptions, and prerequisites of socialism to coexist with America? Could America survive them? America would still be here as a huge land mass and a nation (though without borders) under socialism. But would it still be recognizably America?
No, it would not. Let it be stated unequivocally that socialism is indeed un-American. Socialism constrains and controls individuals to a high degree for the ostensible common and collective good. This is the inverse of the indispensable idea of America, which is individual freedom. Socialism and America are not merely immiscible, like oil and water, but mutually exclusive like heat and cold.
The late Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn used this idea in a 1976 BBC radio address when he said that the term “democratic socialism” is “about as meaningful as talking about ‘ice-cold heat.’” The word “democratic” applied to “socialism” creates an oxymoron. It is sugar coating on a cyanide pill. It is used by American socialists, wittingly or not, to tell a lie — in the same deceptive way that it was once used by the German Democratic Republic before that Warsaw Pact tyranny collapsed, and is still used by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to mislabel a system of state mass murder and incarceration. If you have socialism, you cannot have freedom and a genuine self-governing democracy. They cannot, in logic, coexist.
The Declaration of Independence makes clear that the preeminent American idea is that each person has rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Life comes first, for without it, all other rights are meaningless. Then comes liberty — liberty within life, the freedom of each individual to choose how he or she will live. This does not mean anarchy or the absence of all legal restraint, for that would result in no liberty at all; it means liberty within the law.
Then comes the pursuit of happiness. There is no right to possess happiness itself, only to pursue it. The right to pursue happiness is, indeed, another way of describing liberty. The American idea is not that people should be guaranteed happiness, which is an obvious impossibility. Even if, for the sake of discussion, one accepted the hypothesis that happiness could be guaranteed, the only earthly power with the authority to guarantee it would be the government. An attempt by the government to do so would, as is proven by the examples of foreign tyrannies, take so much power away from individuals that it would mean an end to freedom. Solzhenitsyn, in his famous 1978 Harvard commencement address, noted that “not by coincidence, all of communism’s meaningless pledges and oaths are about man… and his earthly happiness.” Socialism is a system that promises goodies but requires that you pay for them with obedience to the state and to sacrifice your freedom.
Which brings us to the manifesto published this month by the DSA. It promises among other things presumably essential to government-guaranteed happiness, a “32-hour work week with no reduction in pay or benefits,” “Medicare for all with no premiums or copays,” “higher education tuition-free with no out-of-pocket cost for room and board,” the cancellation of “all student loan debt,” “expansive paid family leave for all workers,” “free public universal childcare and pre-K,” and “universal rent-control.”
This list of free stuff is childish and would be economically ruinous and corrosive of human dignity. But let us set aside for the moment such fairy tales and the detailed discussion and data required to demonstrate their useless fatuity. Let us turn instead to the socialists’ constitutional prescriptions, for they are what make explicit and undeniable the fact that socialism is incompatible with the continued existence of America as America. They are mutually hostile.
The DSA manifesto calls for open borders and full voting rights for criminals and noncitizens, statehood for the District of Columbia (which is about to elect a Marxist mayor), abolition of the Senate filibuster, abolition of the Electoral College, and an end to the Supreme Court’s ability to declare laws passed by Congress unconstitutional.
These prescriptions would end the Senate’s role of ensuring that a majority of states, not merely an overriding mass of people in a few big states, must approve new laws. It also would mean that when new laws are passed by the House of Representatives and rammed through the powerless Senate, they could not be meaningfully reviewed or blocked by the Supreme Court. When the Constitution is pitted against the latest House of Representatives demands, the Constitution must give way.
The subordination of the presidency, the Senate, and the Supreme Court to the House of Representatives would require the Constitution to be rewritten wholesale. The document is the framework or architecture of America. It mandates checks and balances to ensure that majoritarian tyranny can never be established within our borders. It defines what the nation is and the way it must operate. By demanding that the Constitution be rewritten, the socialist forces now gathering momentum are declaring as explicitly as they can that they oppose what America actually is.
It is said that America is a credal nation. That is, it is a nation not founded upon ethnicity but upon certain ideas and values. It is possible to debate this at the margins, and I, for one, do not wholly accept it. But, again, set that aside for the sake of argument and let us accept that America is defined solely by acceptance of certain propositions. Those propositions, it can be further asserted, are embodied in the Declaration of Independence and given working structure and force by the Constitution that founded the United States of America.
Socialists are now here and saying plainly that they will rewrite it. That is, they do not accept the propositions. They make it as plain as possible that they want America to be something other than it is. This isn’t a matter of them introducing marginal improvements but, rather, that they demand to shred what we have and what we hold. It means starting from year zero, as other revolutionaries have done, which illuminates their relentless efforts to rewrite history.
The socialists are telling us explicitly that their own creed is incompatible with America’s. They cannot allow this nation to continue as it was founded. It is often remarked about terrorists who proclaim their enmity to America that we should take them at their word. When they tell us who they are and what they intend to do, we should believe them. When they tell us they hate us and intend to kill us when the chance to do so arises, don’t assume they are exaggerating.
So, too, we should believe socialists when they tell us in their manifesto and their rhetoric that America as described and established in its foundational documents must be changed wholesale. The DSA manifesto is helpful in making these anti-American intentions clear. But in truth, we should never have doubted it. The socialists have been telling us this at the top of their voices for a very long time. Darializa Avila Chevalier, for example, who will enter Congress from a deep blue Democratic district in New York City in January and who is backed by socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani, calls America “a f***ing disgrace” and was part of a student group that endorsed “death to America.”
In this rhetoric and in other statements, the socialists go further than they do even in their official documents. They reveal a malignancy and hatred of this country. They want to bring in alien ideas hostile to those under which America has thrived. Which makes it unsurprising that so many socialists are themselves either foreign or the children of foreigners. They do not have an acculturated and assimilated instinct for what this country is. They are part of a generation that has been induced to believe that assimilation to America and its ways is wrong. They want America to assimilate to the foreign ideas that they and their parents brought with them from elsewhere.
Gustavo Gordillo, whose family left Peru to escape the communist horrors of that country’s Maoist Shining Path guerrilla movement, is now co-chairman of the New York City branch of the Democratic Socialists of America. He appeared on Martha MacCallum’s Fox News show, The Story, recently and told viewers that American imperialism and capitalism were to blame for Peru’s woes, and therefore his family came to America. MacCallum chuckled in disbelief and commented, “That doesn’t make sense.”
AS AMERICA CELEBRATES 250 YEARS, THE LEFT SENDS ITS REGRETS
No, it doesn’t. Socialists want unfettered immigration and voting not confined to American citizens. They want to bring in foreign people and foreign ideas. They want American wealth, order, and success, but they completely reject the American ideas, values, and methods of government which make them possible.
They don’t realize that you don’t get the benefits without the methods and beliefs. But just because they don’t know, or don’t care, doesn’t mean the rest of us shouldn’t know and care. Socialism is un-American and it will wreck America — if we let it.
Hugo Gurdon (@hgurdon) is editorial director of the Washington Examiner.