Just weeks out from the November midterm elections, a socialist insurgency appears to be taking the Democrat Party by storm. But instead of honestly reporting on this shocking and newsworthy development, the liberal media is instead criticizing Republicans for noticing it.
That was the upshot of a New York Times story earlier this month titled “Seeking Jolt, G.O.P. Turns to a New Red Scare.” (Perhaps because of backlash, the Times changed the headline on the online version of the article). The piece cites the warnings of numerous prominent Republicans, such as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and No. 2 House Republican Steve Scalise (R-LA), that the rise of so-called “democratic socialist” candidates for Congress (along with local officials like New York Mayor Mamdani) threatens the United States with the adoption of communist policies.
“Next year the communists will be in Congress — that’s what’s so frightening,” Speaker Johnson said at the GOP midterm convention in Dallas, Texas, earlier this month. That sentiment was echoed by other Republicans who took the stage.
According to the Times, those charges have “little overlap with Democrats’ actual platforms,” yet “some Democrats… worry that the rise of democratic socialism in their party could play into Republican efforts to cast them as extremists.” But as the Times acknowledges in the very same article, “in some ways, far-left leaders have fed the argument.”
In 2020, for instance, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (who notably spent his “honeymoon” in the Soviet Union) “praised elements of the Communist Cuban revolution.” Meanwhile, “Darializa Avila Chevalier, a democratic socialist who unseated a Democratic congressman in a New York primary in June, once maintained a social-media account that circulated a post suggesting that public libraries should carry more Marxist literature.” (As some readers also will no doubt recall, 2024 Democrat vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, the current Governor of Minnesota, spent extensive time in China and praised its communist government.)
The Times column nonetheless cites a University of Virginia presidential scholar who takes Donald Trump to task “for speaking so frequently and forcefully about communism in a way that recalls the Cold War” – and even “the so-called Red Scare” of the 1950s, during which Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy led a series of investigations into domestic communism “that became notorious for their overreaches.”
Senator McCarthy was indeed a demagogue who persecuted often-innocent individuals through his hearings. But the “Red Scare” wasn’t merely an irrational case of “paranoia,” as the Times maintains.
The American government post-World War II had indeed been infiltrated by a limited number of highly placed individuals who served as communist agents – including the atomic spies the Rosenbergs (who were executed for treason), longtime State Department official Alger Hiss, and individuals who influenced American policy that aided Mao Tse-Tung’s rise to power.
When the Russians obtained the means of manufacturing nuclear weapons thanks to their spy network, Americans, not knowing how far the network extended, had good reason for worry. Initially, this concern was not strictly partisan. In the 1950s, journalist Irving Kristol, writing in the then moderate-liberal journal Commentary, wrote that American voters with some justification felt that prominent Democrats seemed less trustworthy than Republicans on the need to confront the communist threat.
The Times would now have readers believe that the “Red Scare” was totally baseless – thus justifying the paper’s claim that current Republican warnings about “communist policies” similarly have no merit. The Times – as well as the news and editorial pages of the more conservatively inclined Wall Street Journal and New York Post – have even played along with calling professed socialists by their preferred name – “democratic socialists” – blurring the actual threat that they pose.
As the policies initiated by Mayor Mamdani have demonstrated, there is nothing necessarily “democratic” in these socialists’ policies or stated goals – nor is there much distinguishing them from policies seen in communist regimes throughout history. In Mamdani’s case, this includes publicly financed groceries that will drive private competitors out of business, strict rent control policies that will similarly drive private landlords out of business, and so on.
Such policies show little regard for the principles of economic freedom – the opportunity to get ahead through one’s own efforts rather than political connections – that most Americans associate with democracy. This is to say nothing of the sympathy displayed by Mamdani and various other democratic socialists for Muslim terrorists abroad and violent lawbreakers at home, which seriously endanger our rights to freedom of speech and religion, as well as life itself.
Most alarmingly of all, the official Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) platform calls for abolishing the Electoral College, Senate, presidency, and Supreme Court, along with “public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries” and wealth taxation of the rich.
Moreover, it must be emphasized, as we see in Marx’s and Engels’s own writings, including The Communist Manifesto (see parts 3 and 4) and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, there is no clear line between socialist policies and communist policies; they used the terms almost interchangeably.
As they portrayed it, “communism” referred to the ultimate paradise, wherein all private property would have been abolished, along with social classes, religion, and government itself. This was to be obtained by means of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” that would first establish socialism.
Historically, communists have understood this progression. That is why the Evil Empire was the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” At the 1961 meeting of the Soviet Communist Party, it was proclaimed that the final stage of communism, including the abolition of government, would be attained within the next two decades. Needless to say, the “Party” – the real governing authority – would remain just to “administer” things. But of course, it was the communist state itself that would wither away, along with the Party, not long after the predicted date.
It has been commonplace, but is quite wrong, to identify the social-welfare states of Scandinavia as instances of “socialism,” when they aren’t so at all: major private corporations flourish there, despite relatively high tax rates. (And Sweden is now cutting back on those taxes, for the sake of leaving more money in people’s pockets.)
Since, as the Times observes, polls show that “most Americans have unfavorable views of socialism,” it isn’t surprising that most professed socialist candidates are intentionally vague about the extremes of the policies they may pursue (both domestic and foreign) once elected. But the media should stop cooperating with the socialists’ smoke-and-mirrors campaign by calling them “democratic” just because they run on the Democrat ticket and ascribe that label to themselves.
There is solid ground for Republicans and independent-minded journalists to expose these “democratic socialists” for the danger that they pose to our democracy and our liberty – particularly given their growing influence in that party.
Ultimately, Americans should look past the dubious labels and judge these candidates by the policies they actually support. As socialists gain influence within the Democrat Party, the debate over what those policies would mean for private enterprise, individual liberty, and the structure of American government is likely to become only more consequential.
David Lewis Schaefer, AMAC Newsline
