Self-described Democratic Socialists are celebrating another wave of primary victories, including the upset defeat of 15-term Colorado Democratic Rep. Diana DeGette by Democratic Socialist Melat Kiros. President Donald Trump calls the movement “godless communists.” Critics dismiss that language as hyperbole.
They are arguing over labels while missing the more important question. Do Americans understand the ideas they are increasingly being asked to embrace?
My stepmother never had to debate whether communism worked. As a young girl, she escaped Soviet-dominated Poland with her parents and brother in search of something Americans have long taken for granted: freedom. Her family was not fleeing high taxes or a recession. They were escaping a system that had steadily stripped away liberty, opportunity, and hope.
That memory returned as I watched today’s Democratic Socialist movement gain momentum inside one of America’s two major parties. Whether voters embrace or reject it is their choice. But they should choose with a clear understanding of history, not political slogans.
I learned about communism through life experience, not just in a classroom. For years I served as a U.S. Army officer on NATO’s front line in West Germany, standing watch along the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. From that line I watched East German border guards patrol with weapons aimed inward, at their own people, not outward at NATO. I saw firsthand the treachery communist regimes inflict on their own citizens, governments that made war on the very people they claimed to serve, the same choice my stepmother’s family had faced years earlier in Poland.
Later, as an analyst, I traveled deeper into that world and saw another chapter of it unfold inside the Soviet Union itself.
What I Saw Behind the Iron Curtain
I remember standing outside government-run markets in Moscow where people waited in long lines for necessities Americans scarcely think about. The stores were quiet, not because people had everything they needed, but because there was so little to buy. No billboard celebrated the triumph of communism more convincingly than those empty shelves. What remains most vivid, though, is the quiet resignation on people’s faces, a sense that tomorrow would look like yesterday because the state had become the author of ordinary life. Governments can ration food. They can ration hope too.
Years later, I visited Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Political independence had arrived, but decades of communist rule had left fragile institutions and a public trust that concentrated power had steadily worn away. Political systems can collapse quickly. Recovering from the habits they leave behind takes generations.
Those experiences reinforced something history repeatedly teaches. Ideas shape societies before they shape governments. They first change how people think, then how people vote, and eventually they reshape institutions that once seemed permanent. That is why today’s debate over “democratic socialism” troubles me.
Not Sweden or Denmark
Some readers will point to Scandinavia. I have visited those countries. They are not Soviet-style command economies. They are constitutional democracies built on private enterprise, secure property rights, and strong civic institutions. Their generous welfare systems exist because prosperous capitalist economies generate wealth to sustain them. Citing Scandinavia as proof that socialism works misunderstands both Scandinavia and the tradition shaping today’s Democratic Socialist movement.
The central question is not whether government should provide public benefits. America has debated that for generations. The harder question is whether we are embracing a worldview that divides Americans into oppressors and victims, trusts centralized government to solve every social problem, and treats family, faith, and free enterprise as obstacles to be dismantled rather than pillars of a free society.
Ideas Have Consequences
In Progressive Evil (2019), I argued that modern progressivism was adopting assumptions rooted in class conflict rather than America’s constitutional tradition. In Give Me Liberty, Not Marxism, I warned that socialism rarely arrives waving a hammer and sickle. More often it speaks the language of compassion and equity while steadily expanding political authority over institutions once beyond government’s reach. Movements like this develop quietly, until classroom assumptions become campaign platforms, then policy.
Madison Versus Marx
The contest America faces is not simply Republicans against Democrats. It is between two understandings of freedom. James Madison believed power was dangerous because human beings are imperfect, a conviction that shaped the Constitution he helped write. As Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Power, he argued, must be divided and checked rather than concentrated.
Karl Marx began from a different premise: society’s greatest problem was class conflict, and government could become the instrument to overcome it by concentrating power. Madison dispersed power to protect liberty; Marx concentrated it to pursue equality. One philosophy accepts that inequality will always exist in a fallen world. The other entrusts government with the authority to eliminate it. Those are not policy preferences. They are competing visions of civilization.
When leaders teach Americans to see one another as members of competing groups rather than equal citizens, something significant changes. When government becomes the first answer rather than the last resort, civil society weakens, and families, churches, and private enterprise gradually surrender responsibilities they once carried. Liberty is seldom lost in a single dramatic moment. It erodes one law, one regulation, one generation at a time.
That does not mean America is destined to become another Soviet Union. History never repeats with perfect symmetry, but it reveals patterns. The twentieth century’s great assaults on liberty did not begin with prison camps or walls. Those came later. They began with ideas that sounded compassionate, promising that government could eliminate injustice if given a little more authority over the economy, education, and religion. Only later did citizens discover how much freedom they had traded away.
Most Americans voting for Democratic Socialist candidates are not revolutionaries. They are our neighbors, wanting affordable homes, better schools, safer communities, and hope for their children. I do not question their motives. I question whether they know the history.
A Nation That Forgets
My stepmother’s family risked everything to escape communist Poland. I stood watch against that same system on NATO’s front line during the Cold War, then later witnessed its human consequences inside the Soviet Union itself.
Freedom is not inherited. Every generation must be taught why it matters, or it will eventually vote it away.
History rarely returns wearing the same uniform. More often it returns dressed in the language of compassion, fairness, and progress. My stepmother never forgot why her family fled. Neither did I.
Scripture warns that where there is no vision, the people perish (Proverbs 29:18). A nation that forgets why millions risked everything to escape oppression is not far behind. America must not forget either.
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