There are days in American politics when the country seems to wake up inside a fevered dream, and lately the voices of President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have taken on a nightmarish quality.
They are insisting, with the confidence of men who have never doubted their own hallucinations, that “Communists” have seized the Democratic Party. The universities fell first, according to them, then the unions and civil rights groups, and now the final rampart—the federal government itself—is about to be stormed and seized by insurgent communist-led voters and protestors with red banners flying in November.
I listen to these claims with the weary amusement of someone who has lived long enough to know the difference between a ghostly shadow and a human being. If I were a twenty-first-century Rip Van Winkle, just roused from decades of sleep, perhaps I would blink and rub my eyes, then joyfully gasp at the news and imagine that the old dreams had finally come true in 2026: Seize the Congress and White House! All power to the workers’ councils!
But I have not been asleep. I have been here the whole time. I have called myself a communist and a socialist since 1968, joined the groups, attended the meetings, and watched several tides rise and fall. I know the strengths and weaknesses of every faction, and I know where the bodies are buried—partly because I helped dig a few of the holes myself, or tried to stop others from doing so.
If there were a communist takeover underway this year, I would be the first to know. And if it were true, I would be the first to celebrate. But it is not true. It is not even close.
We’re being presented with another ‘Big Lie.’ To understand the scale of this perverse fiction, one must begin with the simple arithmetic of American governance. In our country, there are nearly 20,000 elected officials at the federal and state levels. Add in the city councils, county boards, school districts, and the small bureaucracies that keep the lights on in every town from Bangor to Bakersfield, and the number swells to roughly half a million. This vast machinery rolls along quietly from sea to shining sea, grinding out the daily management of a capitalist empire.
Of these half-million potential seats, the Democratic Socialists of America have recently won about 250 of them, including a dozen in Congress. It is a dramatic increase from the handful they held twenty years ago, but it remains only a fraction of 1% of the nation’s overall apparatus of elected officials.
DSA now has about 220,000 members, but seen another way, less than 500 of them comprise the paid staff of their electeds, and less than 50 staffers work for DSA proper. The Democrats, with 45 million registered members, have far more paid personnel than the DSA has members, and the Dems unique members who make contributions each year are around 15 million.
As for the Communist Party USA, it has no more than 5000 active members, and holds exactly three elected seats, all in small, nonpartisan local districts—the city council in Bangor, Maine, a school committee seat in Cambridge, Mass, and a Cornell student on the Ithaca, NY, common council. Still, we wish them well, going forward.
Seek truth from facts. To consider this a pending takeover is to look at a glass of water and declare that the tide has swallowed the continent from coast to coast.
A deeper truth is more mundane and more human. Our species, in all their variety, are creatures of bread, even if they don't live by bread alone. As Marx reminds us, when the bread grows scarce, we begin to question the system that promised bread to us. The 2008 financial crisis and a series of unjust wars, moreover, shattered the old faith in markets and ‘common sense’ moralisms. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns widened the fissure. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory made it impossible to pretend the shift was a passing fad. Socialism, once a forbidden word, became a new, small but viable option on the American political terrain.
But viability is not a strategic victory. And DSA, praising their energy as a new critical force, the supposed vanguard of this red revolution, is less a party leading a united front and more an overcrowded parliament. Its National Political Committee is divided into eight or so internal caucuses, each fighting a mostly quiet and ongoing war for the organization's soul. Four or five of these factions practice what might be generously called "politics as self-expression." For them, the movement is a stage for moral performance, a place to issue maximalist declarations that satisfy the conscience, to make challenge and and refine ends, but accomplish little else, at least in this moment. There are other moments where they can be vital. They hold a precarious NPC majority when drafting national statements—statements that the rank-and-file organizers will often readily ignore, even as the right-wing press seizes upon them with glee.
The remaining two or three larger caucuses practice "politics as strategy." They count votes, knock on doors, get subscribers, recruit new members, and most of all, build coalitions with people who think differently on many points. They are the ones who elect real legislators and mayors like Zohran Mamdani in New York and other pragmatic socialists across the country. While the loudest voices on the DSA's NPC write press releases that vanish into the aether, save for the New York Post's right-wing tabloid headlines, the strategic militant minority does the face-to-face, slow, unglamorous but productive work of building local power clusters that can turn out voters.
So why the panic on top? Why does the specter of Karl Marx haunt Mar-a-Lago and the corridors of Congress and the State Department? Because reality is always changing, and something has shifted in the nation's soil. Recent polling shows that roughly 30% of young Americans view socialism or communism favorably. Among registered Democrats, about two-thirds express a positive view of socialism, while less than half say the same of capitalism. The youth look out at a world of high rents, endless wars, and corporate consolidation, and they no longer believe the old hymns of the free market and ‘leaders of the free world.’
Even more unsettling for the Democratic establishment is the shift in attitudes toward Israel and Palestine. The younger generation sees the violence on their screens and refuses to accept the cold calculus of geopolitical pragmatism. This moral friction—this crack in the imperial consensus—frightens the managers of the status quo far more than any card-carrying communist today.
To counter this shift, our political class is now manufacturing foreign enemies as bogeymen. JD Vance warns of European socialist influence, as though Denmark were plotting to overthrow Ohio. Marco Rubio speaks of Cuba as if the small, blockaded island were the command center of a deep-rooted clandestine communist network operating within the United States. He describes it as an existential threat to faith and freedom, as though Havana possessed the power to subvert the largest military empire in human history through sheer ideological will.
The irony is almost too rich. These same men insist that communism and socialism have never worked anywhere. Yet Trump blames China for America’s economic anxieties, even though China’s system is working rather well these days. One cannot claim an economic model is a failure while simultaneously warning that its success threatens to eclipse your own.
We could quarrel about definitions. I am orthodox on this point. In the Marxist tradition, communism is a classless, stateless society that emerges only after a long transition through a cybernated socialism. It is a North Star for guidance, not a location on any modern map. It has never existed anywhere on earth, save for the primitive variety in the prehistories of our species.
What we do have are varieties of socialism. Some projects collapsed under Cold War pressures, as well as their own deep mistakes and bureaucratic weight, like the Soviet Union. Others—Vietnam and China—are currently thriving and adapting to global markets. And then there are the social-democratic countries with labor or socialist parties in power, such as Denmark and Norway, which are reformist in nature. Russia today is neither socialist nor communist; it is an anti-Leninist, imperialist, nuclear-armed, and increasingly fascist power, though lacking the economic clout of its neighbor in Beijing.
In this sense, communism hardly exists in the United States, at least not for a good while. It’s used as a scarecrow stuffed with straw, waved about by politicians seeking an easy diversionary enemy. The social democrats—Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and their allies—are a growing minority within the Democratic Party, but a minority nonetheless. They are not preparing a revolution. For 2026 and 2028, they have already pledged their votes to center- or center-right candidates, as needed, to block the MAGA movement's advance. They have chosen compromise over the purity of the wilderness in the face of a clear and present danger.
There are two bottom lines to MAGA's Red Scare 3.0 performances, the first two being the Palmer raids of the 1920s and the McCarthy hearings and jailings of the lates 194s and early 1950s.
First, Trump and his allies use red-baiting because they fear a potential Blue Wave in November. When a political faction is bankrupt on material and moral issues—healthcare, wages, ongoing unjust wars, the decay of industrial towns—it must stoke fear. It must tell the better-off worker, the shopkeeper, and the suburban voter that the barbarians are at the gate, and that those barbarians wear red stars. It is an old trick, performed by actors who know the lines but lack the conviction of the original cast.
Second, the corporate Democrats are equally afraid. They fear that their internal power will erode under pressure from groups like the Justice Democrats. To protect their donors and their grip on the party apparatus, they will join in the red-baiting. They will condemn the left to prove their loyalty to the markets and war makers, sacrificing their own youth base to maintain the favor of corporate boardrooms.
The system’s engines are chugging along at the moment. The offices are filled with men and women in suits. The communists have taken over nothing important. To say otherwise is to lie, and to lie poorly. But when a third of the country fears its own shadow, a poor lie can cause the machinery to sputter. Stand up to it all. Don’t concede a bit. Better, throw a monkey wrench into the works.
[All LeftLinks editorials, unless otherwise designated, express the views of our stalwart editor, Carl Davidson, and not necessarily any organizations he is connected with. Everyone, of course, is welcome to steal them and shamelessly pass them around, far and wide, with or without permission. A thank you note would be welcome, though!]