Under President Ronald Reagan, Americans understood communism for what it was. We knew it wasn’t an ambitious social program or a compassionate alternative to capitalism. Everyone knew—without question—that it crushed faith, confiscated property, silenced dissent, and turned citizens into subjects of the state.
Then the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. We defeated the communists so completely that following generations of Americans never witnessed their evils. They never saw the breadlines or watched families risk their lives to escape the regimes. They inherited freedom without learning what was required to preserve it.
Communism is not making a comeback because it was ever successful. It’s returning because Americans forgot why it failed. Now its advocates are walking down a red carpet rolled out by the Democratic Party.
They prefer to hide behind the label of “democratic socialism,” but their own agenda strips away the disguise. The Democratic Socialists of America openly declares that capitalism must be replaced. DSA wants to abolish the Senate and pack the Supreme Court. It wants to eliminate prisons and police, and it calls for nationalizing major industries and bringing the economy under bureaucratic control.
“Reasonable” Democrats can no longer dismiss this as a handful of college radicals passing out pamphlets. The DSA counted nearly 90 endorsed campaigns in 2026, including more than a dozen candidates for Congress. It trains campaign organizations and coordinates elected members through “Socialists in Office” networks. This is a political operation with a national objective.
The modern communist does not begin by demanding that Americans surrender every freedom at once. We’d never allow that. The movement advances one dependency at a time and hides totalitarian control behind promises of affordability.
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First come the rent freezes. When builders stop investing and landlords cannot maintain their properties, politicians blame the market and demand public housing. Government grocery stores follow rising food prices. Universal government programs place family life under political control. Each promise sounds limited, but socialists answer every human need with the same response: more government.
That’s the trap. Once the state becomes your landlord, grocer, insurer, employer, and source of transportation, disagreement becomes sedition. Political power is no longer confined to laws and taxes. It sinks its claws into the necessities of daily life.
America was founded on the opposite idea.
Our rights do not come from a legislature or bureaucratic agency. They come from God. Government exists to protect those rights, not manufacture them. That distinction is what separates a citizen from a subject.
A government that grants rights can place conditions on them. A government that supplies every necessity can ration access to it. A government powerful enough to promise everything is powerful enough to take anything.
That is why this fight is far more serious than another argument over tax rates or the size of a federal program. The question is whether America will remain a constitutional republic built around the dignity and rights of the individual or become a country where personal freedom survives only at the permission of the state.
During the Cold War, Republicans and Democrats understood the stakes. We disagreed at home, but both parties knew communism was the enemy of liberty. Today, Democratic candidates seek the backing of an organization that rejects capitalism and treats central pillars of the Constitution as obstacles.
The Democratic Party has no interest in stopping this movement. It is becoming its vehicle.
Americans should pay close attention to these socialist candidates who promise free services and insist that everything else is fearmongering. The promise is an advertisement. Beneath it sits a governing philosophy that sees private ownership as exploitation and individual rights as a hurdle to collective power.
We won the Cold War militarily and geopolitically, but we lost the battle to preserve its lessons. That failure has allowed an ideology marked by poverty, repression, and mass death to return wearing a campaign button and speaking the language of compassion.
The Cold War never ended. It just came home. This time, the battlefield is the ballot box.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.
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