by Victor Davis Hanson
The farther today's Democratic Socialists advance, the less they resemble reformers—and the more they embrace policies long associated with communism.
It is not difficult, these days, to see the neo-communist flipside of “Democratic Socialists”—once they find power.
Indeed, the more the ossified Democratic Party claims that its growing cadre of socialist renegades are not really socialists, the more they act like—and even appear comfortable being called—communists.
With every new policy they propose, the socialists have been dropping the pretense that they are not Marxists.
How about declaring capitalism a failure?
All the socialists now do that—and even Democratic California governor Gavin Newsom has also started agreeing that “capitalism as we know it doesn’t work either.” Oddly, Newsom himself, a multimillionaire and a beneficiary of arch-capitalist Gordon Getty’s largesse, seems to have done quite well under capitalism.
Confiscating private property?
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani claims he will do just that if New York’s landlords, in his opinion, are poor custodians of their own property.
Dismantling the U.S. Constitution?
Almost all Democrats have long called for destroying the 238-year-old Electoral College. And now the socialists openly brag that, when they take over the Democratic Party and then the nation, they will, as good Bolsheviks, go much further: destroying the Senate, destroying the Pentagon, destroying prisons, destroying the police, and destroying our borders.
And they want to take over utilities, break up or absorb corporate agriculture, and own major industries. Apparently, socialists believe that with a snap of their fingers they can destroy key elements of the U.S. constitutional order. Would these “socialists” even resent their agenda being called “communist”?
They also seem to have taken their cue for such radical change from “mainstream” Democrats—for example, Kamala Harris. Now in her third vain bid for the presidency, she has adopted the doctrine of “if you can’t beat them, join them.” So Harris now promises that if she is elected, she will pack the court, admit two new blue states (to snag four liberal senators), end the filibuster, and junk the Electoral College. How she plans to amend the Constitution to that effect she never tells us.
Like all good Marxists, these “ends-justify-the-means” leftists show an utter lack of principle: if two new red states wished to join the U.S., they would lecture us on the sanctity of a 50-state union. If they were a permanent Senate minority, they would, as in the past, honor the filibuster. If they had lost the popular vote in two recent elections but won the Electoral College, they would praise the wisdom of the Founders. If they had their Earl Warren-era majority again, they would laud the continuity of the 157-year-old nine-justice Supreme Court.
How about making “enemies of the people” lists and forcing sales of private property?
Mamdani just sent out a public list of nearly one million New York homeowners. He sent official warnings to 17,000 of these property owners that, if within four weeks they cannot prove that they have lived full-time in their own properties, the city will levy a huge surtax on them to drive home the point that no one should own an additional high-value home. Are show trials next for those who decline to reply?
In other words, Mamdani has flipped the American tradition of “innocent until proven guilty.” Instead, almost 20,000 New Yorkers are now automatically presumed guilty of being house-hoarding, capitalist leeches who owe the exploited classes tens of thousands of dollars a year in reparations, unless they—the newly presumed guilty—can prove themselves innocent.
Welcome to Mamdani’s revolutionary court.
Mamdani’s new surtax could add from $40,000 to $350,000 a year to tens of thousands of homeowners’ taxes—in addition to already-existing steep property taxes that often range from $5,000 to $150,000.
Most owners will do the math and see that the new aggregate tax payouts in just a few years could be more than the value of the home itself.
Why is Mamdani doing this?
The socialist mayor’s aim here seems twofold:
First, he wants to flush out and dox anyone owning two homes as a purported enemy of the people.
And so, Mamdani created a list of his targets, including their addresses, and published it. To the extent that many properties really were second homes, Mamdani has now made sure that all New Yorkers, including envious rubberneckers, would-be squatters, and hardened criminals, know exactly where they might target a sometimes-vacant home.
Second, he wants to force a massive fire sale of second homes that would crash home values in general and so redistribute now “affordable” houses to those whom Mamdani considers, as victims of capitalism, to be more deserving of these properties.
Recently, on cable news, the national co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, Megan Romer, was asked a series of questions about her group’s published agenda. Far from denying its communist radicalism, she gleefully confirmed it all—from destroying the border to ending prisons, the military, and the police.
But it is in Spain, and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s corrupt and unpopular regime, where we see what one-eyed-jack socialists can do when they are finally in power, especially when they are hated and on their way out.
Sánchez has given amnesty to 600,000 illegal aliens. One result was that 60,000 Muslim men from North Africa in a single day recently swarmed Spain’s colonial outpost on the Moroccan coast at Ceuta, demanding amnesties and free subsidized passes into European Spain—while looting and vandalizing businesses and attacking Spaniards.
So why do European socialists and American leftists, once elected, destroy borders, create conditions of mass chaos, and welcome in millions of illegal aliens—poor, often angry, and unassimilated—from the Third World?
Aside from their belief that the capitalists and their bourgeois hirelings deserve chaos, violence, and upheaval, they hate the fact that capitalism is too class-fluid to furnish a permanent exploited proletarian underclass.
And so they import a huge victim class, and virtue signal their purported moral superiority. Then they spend lavish social largesse upon the influx, and, in quid pro quo fashion, thus bind their imported underclass with their welfare-state assurances.
Mail-in and early ballots, no-ID voting, same-day registration, ballot harvesting and curing, and no final verdicts on Election Day were all leftist projects, all designed to enroll as many illegal voters as possible.
The Left has also learned from experience that the time between immigrant parents fleeing third-world hellholes to find safety, freedom, and prosperity in the U.S. and their children hating the very generous host that welcomed them—and demanding that America be radically transformed to resemble the catastrophe from which they or their parents fled—is often only about 20 years.
So if one enjoys watching the careers of Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, AOC, or Zohran Mamdani, then one should certainly vote socialist to ensure that they are the new model for American elected officials.
It is the paradox of our age that anyone can flee Somalia, the West Bank, Puerto Rico, or Uganda and then win the global lottery by being accepted into America’s constitutional society and free-market economy—only to do their best to repay the generosity of their host by turning their new country into something unrecognizable to the prior 10 generations of Americans.
But then again, America might become quite similar to the mess they abandoned.
So far, the model holds true: socialist candidates (as opposed to registered socialist activists) hide their communist-adjacent agendas during elections. But once in office and drunk with power, they find socialism too wishy-washy and go full communist. So they destroy borders, institutions, names, dates, statues, norms, customs, and traditions to replicate the illiberalism and concomitant failures of a new Haiti, a West Bank, or a Morocco in the West.
In sum, to make a new socialist America, you must first destroy everything that made Americans and all that they hold dear.
Photo: Mayor Mamdani breaks ground on an affordable housing project in the Bronx NEW YORK, UNITED STATES - AUGUST 3: New York City Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani, joined by representatives from The Doe Fund and local community leaders, breaks ground on the Casanova Residence in the Bronx borough of New York City on Monday, Aug. 3, 2026. The new development will provide supportive and affordable housing for local residents. (Photo by Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the
Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover
Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former
classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a
visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004, and is the 2023
Giles O'Malley Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Public
Policy, Pepperdine University. Hanson was awarded the National
Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush, and the Bradley
Prize in 2008. Hanson is also a farmer (growing almonds on a family farm
in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming
and agrarianism.
He is the author of the just released New York Times best seller, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation, published by Basic Books on May 7, 2024, as well as the recent The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump, and The Dying Citizen.
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/08/04/is-communist-no-longer-a-slur/
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