The Democratic Socialists of America have been growing in power within the Democratic Party, most notably by capturing a number of Democrat nominations in the 2026 primaries, though it’s important to remember that they already hold plenty of seats in public office. They aren’t a new phenomenon in 2026, it’s just that they are now receiving substantial public notice in 2026. A very different thing.
In fact, the Democratic Socialists of America – essentially the borderless movement of global communism – have been making inroads in the Democratic Party for generations, but only recently have they felt comfortable dropping the mask, and saying, point blank, that they are indeed proud marxists.
So many forms of self-identification that people would never have dared to admit, a generation ago, are happily and proudly broadcast today. It’s shocking.
Some Democrat politicians cheer the DSA’s advance – why not, they agree on virtually every issue; the only difference is packaging anyway.
Other Democrat politicians are horrified at their advance, as they believe the DSA’s open advocacy of communism will cause them to blow an opportune midterm cycle this fall.
And Republicans, horrified that communism has been embraced by so many voters, don’t know what to do, other than to remind people that “Communism Doesn’t Work.”
It has become commonplace – for a century now – for non-communists to try to find common ground with socialism-supporters. “Of course we understand,” the argument goes. “It’s a nice idea. Communism sounds good. It just doesn’t work. It has never worked. It never can work. We understand you like it on its face, but every time it’s been tried, it fails. It doesn’t work, because it can’t work.”
There are two problems with this approach.
First, communism really isn’t a nice idea at all, so there’s no reason to grant them that premise. Communism is a thoroughly autocratic, top-down dictatorship with zero respect for the rights of any individual, by definition. We should focus on educating people about this truth, not dismiss it in an effort to seem nice.
But the second problem may be an even more important one:
We must stop saying it doesn’t work, because it does.
Yes. Of course, communism works. People wouldn’t keep pushing for its implementation if it didn’t work. People wouldn’t keep it going – for decade after decade of utter misery, in Cuba and Venezuela and China and North Korea and more – if it didn’t work for somebody.
The challenge here is that we Westerners have a narrow understanding of what it means for a system to “work.”
Our system – the American system – was designed with a commitment to securing the liberty of individual citizens, to providing a level playing field for the business community so that people could have a chance at success, to providing religious freedom so that Catholics and Lutherans and Jews and Presbyterians and Greek Orthodox could get along as neighbors, to ensuring the rule of law so that all decent, law-abiding people would be reasonably safe from attack by criminals, foreign invaders, or an abusive government.
And we assume that all systems would share these goals, so if a country doesn’t deliver them, we define that country’s system as having “failed.”
But this is wrong. Our goals are not the same as the goals of communist countries, so they don’t judge themselves as having failed.
Communist countries’ publicly stated goals are irrelevant. The reality is that, as dictatorships, their goals are the subjugation of their people, the export of marxist revolution, the complete control of their economy through central planning, and the absolute power of the elitists who run their governments.
Viewed this way – through the lens of reality – it’s a very different picture, isn’t it?
Communism succeeds… for the tiny elite cadre that runs the show.
Soviet Russia enabled Lenin, Stalin, Malenkov, Kruschev, and the rest of them to exert total control over the Russian people. North Korea has enabled the Kim dynasty to exert total control over the North Korean people. Venezuela enabled Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro to exert total control over the Venezuelan people.
China enabled Chairman Mao and his successor Chairman Xi to wipe out tens of millions of their people, by everything from artificial famine to mass killings, from forcing parents to kill their own daughters during the years of the One-Child policy, to forcing apartment building managers to seal up buildings until residents starved to death during the months of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Yes, eventually these leaders die – either of natural causes or of gunshot wounds – but until that day, they have absolute power. As do their aides-de-camp, their lieutenants, their sadistic enforcers, from Berea to Guevara.
Because that’s what communism is really about, at its essence: absolute power.
What words have been championed in our schools, our politics, and our pop culture for generations now? The importance of “empowerment.” Students are told their goal is to “feel empowered” in their jobs, in their communities, in their relationships. They are raised to be “in control” of their situations, their marriages, their destinies.
To the citizen of Western civilization, using these words as positive ones should feel foreign, even shocking. As products of the Scottish Enlightenment, we should value words like freedom and liberty, not power and control. This change in the language, and in the zeitgeist, didn’t happen overnight; it has been building for a century.
This is what we need to teach our children, and our neighbors, and our voters: that the difference, between our system and the many statist foreign systems we broke away from, is what our Founding Fathers expected to be taught to Americans, ever since our nation was born. We should champion liberty, not control. Freedom, not power.
Socialism, communism, marxism, statism – whichever you choose to call it; they are all synonyms – is not “just another option, just another system to give it a chance, and see how it goes.”
Statism is tyranny – the absolute domination of individuals by the entitled, corrupt, ever-more-dictatorial party in power.
The people who support socialism inevitably learn to regret their support, when it’s much too late to undo the damage. As the old saying goes, “you can vote yourself into socialism, but you’ll have to shoot your way out.”
And that’s pretty hard to do when you’ve let them take your guns away.
As long as we allow the naive, uneducated masses to believe that communism is well-intentioned and sweet, their optimism will convince them that even if it went wrong in the past, the good people they trust to implement it here will make sure it goes well this time. We need them to understand that communism itself is indeed evil, that its very goal from the outset is the complete domination of the masses.
And as long as we tell them communism doesn’t work, we are lying to them, as well as to ourselves.
Because it does work.
Just not for them.
Communism works. For the most malicious, the most sadistic, the most vicious of the people, communism is the perfect method of empowerment, the absolute guarantor of control. Communism works for the villains in power.
And we have to be as nice as possible, but also as clear and firm as possible, when we explain to these confused, gullible, utopian children, that communism really does work – better than they can imagine – but only for society’s monsters, not for them.
Copyright 2026 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer, speaker, and consultant. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” and his brand new collection of stories about the heroes of the American Founding, “The Founding Generation: The Patriots Who Built America,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon. His trade compliance training practice is available either in person or by webinar.
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