Communism is back in the news with the rise of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidates in Democrat Party primaries and local elections across the country.
As someone who is interested in the Russian Revolution, I’m happy that the DSA threat is being treated with the gravity it deserves. There is no such thing as a moderate socialist. In victory, at best these people will meekly stand aside as all the horrors of historical communism are inflicted on Americans, though they are more likely to join in on these horrors from the get-go. However, as someone who has also been subjected to decades of not very convincing arguments against communism from conservatives, I’m worried that many still fundamentally misunderstand the threat and how to respond to it.
Below you’ll find a few principles for how to make the argument against communism and its avatars in the surging DSA.
1. Avoid theoretical arguments, talk about quality of life
The #1 mistake I see people make is trying to rehash ineffective theoretical arguments against communism from previous decades. People think they have to say these things because that’s how it’s been done for so long. These slogans are played out at this point. The public (and especially young people) has learned to just roll its eyes. It’s correctly perceived as part of a bit.
Conservatives are simply not trusted on issues like inequality or health care or whatever: Commie this, commie that, it doesn’t land anymore. That’s the reason that leftwingers always try to push these issues to the center stage. It doesn’t matter that leftwingers do not offer real solutions to these problems and usually only make them far worse.
If you’re in charge, people expect you to fix their problems. Republicans are nominally in charge, but they have not yet fixed all of Americans’ problems. There’s a lot of fair and unfair criticism to go around about who is truly to blame for this, but the reality at the end of the day is that the people are going to hold you responsible. Rehashing old arguments about free markets and private property and the failures of socialized medicine only serves to antagonize those who feel the system as-is doesn’t work for them. Vice President JD Vance gave a really good statement on this phenomenon:
When you’re engaged in anticommunism in 2026 America, you should resist the urge to get into a big argument about whatever leftwingers are talking about. Republicans are going to have to fix the things that trouble Americans through public policy in the real world, not through debates with leftwingers online. I can’t tell you how stupid it is that anyone, on any faction of the Right, is arguing about the price of burritos. You are dumping gasoline on the fire and making it more likely that we will lose and then be unable to actually solve these problems. Stop talking.
Affordability seems to be getting better in some ways. The systemic dysfunction and decline that the American economy has experienced are slowly being reversed and replaced with something more sustainable. Still, there are a lot of issues remaining that are going to take a long time to fix. That’s why leftwingers are making these things the topic of public discussion: These are not problems that can be solved, at least in meaningful or noticeable ways, in the next 70ish days before the election.
If you make these problems the main topic of discussion, you are implying that you can fix them in that amount of time, and when you inevitably fail or underdeliver voters will come to dislike and distrust you. Worse, when right-wingers talk about these issues, they often begin minimizing them or denying that the problems even exist, making themselves and everyone even tangentially associated with their views widely hated. I know that a lot of my sympathy towards leftism as a younger person was motivated by the obnoxious behavior and pigheadedness of many conservative figures.
There are lots of things that leftwingers don’t want to talk about. You should ONLY talk about these things. Fight where you’re strongest.
The one good development to come out of the Biden administration is that in recent memory everyone got to see what rule by the Far Left actually looked like. No one thought that President Biden was in charge of his government. The adults were not in the room; that was never an option. It was radical young leftwing staffers given free rein. These people have only gotten crazier since losing much of their power.
What did they do with their limited time at the wheel? They let criminals out of jail, they openly discriminated against the majority population, they corrupted the system and used institutions that were designed to make Americans’ lives better to make them worse. I don’t think that we’ve ever experienced more immediate and visible quality of life decline than in the Biden years. Everyone felt it. It was impossible not to notice when you went outside.
This is not unusual or unprecedented. It is perfectly in line with the historical behavior of communists. The Russian Revolution was followed by the mass release of street criminals and the effective legalization of robbery. The early Soviet Union implemented a system of minority empowerment that was an obvious precursor of modern affirmative action policies: The everyday well-to-do Russian was regarded as the true enemy of society, the criminals and government officials victimizing him were seen as merely correcting social injustice. This is how these people have always conceptualized these things; it’s not a modern quirk of out-of-touch blue haired college students. The City of St. Petersburg, former capital of the Russian Empire, did not have garbage collection for 3 years after the Bolsheviks took power in Russia. It was not a priority. Between unlivable conditions, crime, and starvation the city lost nearly 70% of its population after the Bolshevik seizure of power.
The good news is that the Trump administration has made its biggest gains in the areas where leftwingers are weakest. Socialist candidates like Abdul El-Sayed are on video saying that they want to defund the police. Virtually every socialist candidate with a public profile around 2020 is on record supporting this policy. This is not a popular view; people know that it means making their lives worse in immediate and tangible ways. In 2025 “defund the police” only had support from 18% of Americans, that number is probably even lower now.
Reversing “defund the police” has worked: The murder rate in America is at its lowest in recorded history. Violent crime had its biggest annual drop in 90 years. Republicans’ policies have successfully made people’s lives better. Thousands of lives were saved. Democrats are on record saying they want to undo all of this progress.
Hammering this real-world issue is going to be a lot more effective than debating about socialized medicine or whatever. In fact, it’s far easier for Democrats to argue in favor of a theoretically more responsive healthcare system or more fair tax regime that no one in America 2026 has lived under than it is for them to argue in favor of the liberal criminal justice policies which they all support that everyone just experienced and knows they don’t like. Do not let these people escape into theory.
Television star Spencer Pratt attracted national attention with his longshot bid in the Los Angeles mayoral primary. Pratt ran as an Independent and often used overt anti-communist rhetoric because incumbent mayor Karen Bass was a member of a communist youth group. Pratt did a very good job drilling down on communism not as an unjust economic system that goes against humanity’s natural tendencies, but as one that stole public funds in order to make a major quality of life problem, Los Angeles’s out of control homeless population, worse. That’s what people should associate with communism. It’s not an unfair criticism. That’s their economic system in a nutshell: A homeless guy who should be in jail taking a shit in front of your house and then shooting up with drug needles that you overpaid for with your tax dollars, with the police devoting more attention to your Twitter posts than this obvious problem.
It’s easier for normal people to engage with the idea of communism as quality of life decline because the concept seems new. When you approach problems from a novel perspective, people feel like they’re learning something. Although Pratt ultimately wasn’t successful in winning in Los Angeles (likely due to fraud or political machine behavior indistinguishable from fraud), this approach is going to reach a lot more voters across the country than performative rehashes of rhetoric from previous Red Scares.
Lean into identity issues
Another positive development of the mass hysteria that America experienced in and around 2020 is that most high-profile liberals are on record saying that they hate America and white people, America’s majority population. This is the consensus position of the people steering the modern communist movement. The official DSA platform today, right now, calls for abolishing the Senate, prisons, and America’s constitutional order. Abdul El-Sayed openly campaigned in his Senate primary with Hasan Piker, a Far-Left streamer who endorsed “impoverishing the white middle class.” Everyone knows that leftwing politics today translate to attacking America and white people.
The Trump administration has made enormous progress towards ending anti-white discrimination in government, schools, and the workplace. This is a winning issue that Republicans should do more to highlight, it makes people’s lives better in a tangible and immediate way. Above all else, Americans want their system to be fair and work well. I strongly suspect that even most non-white Americans would object to anti-white policies if confronted solely with the real-world outcomes of them: Less qualified emergency responders, endemic fraud, general public dysfunction. At the very least, I think a significant factor in widespread anti-white sentiment over the last few years was the belief that white people were weak, declining, and refused to even take their own side. The Trump administration is changing this perception through public policy, which makes it a lot easier for everyone to start being reasonable again.
America is the ultimate meritocratic nation. It still stands for things that people generally admire and think are good. There are reasons that billions of people want to come here: They want to benefit from the American system and to live and work around Americans.
As various failed Far-Right movements have discovered: It is difficult to convince Americans, particularly the Americans who vote the most, to hate America. If you make push come to shove, most white people will choose not to hate themselves. If there are realistic and socially acceptable options to do something different, they’ll pick them. These stances are not viable in normal politics and people who openly hold them have inherently limited shelf-lives.
The DSA is running on an anti-white and anti-American platform. Its figureheads dress up as foreign communist leaders. They talk about how America deserves terrorism and wealth redistribution. Some of their relatives actually directly facilitate terrorism. Pretty much every socialist candidate who we need to beat is on record saying they plan to fuck up your neighborhood, that they hate white people, and that they want to in effect destroy America. If they aren’t on record saying some variation of these things, they are certain to have close ties to people who are.
This is easy to run against if you actually bother to run against it directly rather than try to engage with it in a dialogue. If someone were trying to burn down your house, if they hate you for who you are, would you argue with them about their political views? No. Would you hand it to them whenever they made a good point? No, of course not. DSA candidates have enormous vulnerabilities when you simply refuse to engage in a bad faith debate with someone who ultimately wants to destroy you.
Republicans aren’t trusted on a bunch of important issues. The Trump administration and Republicans are going to have to solve these problems no matter what, but they’re never going to actually solve them by arguing with the DSA. The overtly anti-white and anti-American stance of the DSA offers a convenient excuse to end the debate: Why would you discuss internal problems with someone who should be branded an external enemy? That’s the case that you should be trying to make, and these people have already made it for you.
Always, forever, attack from a position of strength and legitimacy
Power is charismatic. I think the claims of hypocrisy that conservatives often level against DSA candidates, many of whom are children of wealth and privilege, are not very effective. If you point out that someone is rich and well-educated, it makes them seem powerful. Everyone wants that life for themselves and their children. Furthermore, if you are showing people an even mildly attractive young woman and say: “Look at this spoiled brat!” Don’t be surprised when her approval doesn’t decline and a bunch of people just end up wanting to have sex with her instead. All that attention will make her seem more important and therefore powerful.
The DSA is achieving relative popularity today, especially among young people, for the same reasons that the Alt Right did in 2015: People keep claiming that it’s very dangerous and taking over, the theoretical arguments against it from establishment types usually aren’t very persuasive, strong personalities and resolute postures naturally dominate discourse no matter what is actually being said, there is a seemingly unending stream of young-ish internet sluts tied to the movement. Although people constantly underestimate how limited the utility of the incentive structures and outcomes that these kinds of movements produce ends up being for real world politics, in short windows these things can be forces to be reckoned with.
As Scott Greer laid out in his recent book Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America many of the good ideas from the Alt Right eventually found their way into mainstream Republican politics while many of the bad ideas and noxious personalities associated with them were flushed.
The relative sophistication of the DSA as an actual political entity when compared to the Alt Right makes the DSA both more dangerous and more vulnerable: They can directly influence real world politics in a way the Alt Right never could have, but this influence also magnifies the problems that made the Alt Right unpopular with the public and easy to snuff out into cataclysmic proportions. They can’t flush.
Conservatives often mishandle this kind of threat/opportunity movement by adopting a victim mindset: The main argument quickly becomes that if the scary and strong communists take power then they will kill us, and that would be bad.
Although if communists took power they would no doubt kill a lot of us and in at least a few cases that would be bad, this is not a compelling argument. For starters, many people are naturally going to sympathize with the strong and important person doing the killing in this kind of hypothetical. Also, telling people that the enemy is all powerful and the world is about to end usually does not motivate them to fight harder, it makes them depressed and passive.
We need to make people enthusiastic and active: The problem has to be big enough to merit attention but not so big that it appears impossible to solve. In fact, this conflict is not a setback or last stand, it’s an opportunity for you to do big things.
For something like the Michigan Senate race, the line should not be that candidates like Abdul El-Sayed are unusually charismatic, uniquely dangerous, represent the opening stages of the 2nd American Civil War or an Islamist takeover or whatever. The line should be that Abdul El-Sayed is an unusually vulnerable candidate: People aren’t buying what he’s selling. He’s a ridiculous figure. He’s like 4’11. He might have killed a bunch of dogs. Many of his family members directly or indirectly support terrorism. He has to issue weak condemnations of people who he just embraced. He still does the trans kid meme.
Radical DSA candidates obtaining remarkable success in primaries is not a sign the Democrat Party is rejuvenating itself after being soundly rejected by Americans in 2024, it’s a sign that the Democrat Party is collapsing and liberals have maybe a decade of internal disputes to (perhaps literally) kill each other over before they can coalesce into something that might win national elections again.
The Michigan Senate race is a chance to pick up a Senate seat in a swing state, which would allow Republicans to better implement policies that voters want to see. A lot of people online complain about “the judges” blocking Trump’s agenda, and the Senate approves new judges. People complain about do-nothing Republicans all the time. Razor-thin legislative margins mean that what they’re usually complaining about is not anything that Trump is or is not doing, but rather two or three holdouts blocking some important measure. Bigger margins for Republicans mean less power for obstructionists.
American politics have been at a deadlock for a long time. Every election is the most important in history. Every defeat seems like it could be permanent. The constant stress is not healthy. The rise of the DSA and collapse of the Democratic Party offers the unique opportunity to create a 60-40 situation, which could easily transform into a larger preference cascade.
Have any of the mainstream Democrat candidates who beat or were beaten by their DSA challengers in the recent brutal primary campaigns felt the need to actually separate themselves from their opponents afterwards? No, they feel like they have to embrace the people who bitterly were attacking them just the day before. Haley Stevens, a mainstream Democrat far more representative of the average Democrat voter than her primary opponent El-Sayed, was having to cancel events due to DSA hecklers for safety reasons and then comes out in support of the DSA candidate the next day. That crazy Wong woman in Wisconsin who narrowly lost her race? Her mainstream opponent is having a “unity breakfast” with her the very next day.
These guys aren’t willing to get rid of their internal enemies, who are openly running on destroying and replacing them. Maybe they just can’t get rid of them. In other words, Democrats are surrendering to socialism. Is someone who surrenders powerful? Is their party worthy of support in an election? I don’t think so.
You need square-jawed former FBI Agent Mike Rogers to deal with the Abduls of the world, not mainstream Democrats like Haley Stevens who will meekly vote for him after months of bitter attacks. If you can’t represent yourself as the strong horse, don’t expect anyone else to support you.
The ascendency of the DSA in the Democratic Party offers Republicans an opportunity to truly seize the mantle of legitimacy in American politics. There’s this external force, communism, that is openly threatening to radically restructure our society. They want to steal your stuff and kill you. The people behind it often even have foreign names and backgrounds. Only we can stop them. If we play our cards right, we might be able to politically cripple our enemies for decades and give our country time to actually heal itself.
Of course, we have to actually play our cards in order for this to work. Nothing happens unless people make it happen. I strongly recommend Sean McMeekin’s pop-history To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism. Although the lifespan of modern communism was only a historical flash in the pan, less than 100 years, it caused billions in deaths and radically restructured the world for the worse. It’s remarkable how much of the spread of this cancer was fueled by the passivity of the overwhelming majority who would be harmed by these policies but found an excuse to do nothing instead of fighting back. Jack Posobiec is coming out with a new edition of Unhumans his history of socialist revolutions, with additional chapters on how to actually stop this spread. More people are waking up to the threat than ever before.
There are a lot of dumb ideas circulating rightwing discourse that might have seemed interesting a decade ago that now obviously lead people to harmful conclusions. There is no need or room for more debate. It’s not going to be destroying democracy or the Constitution that gets us out of this mess. We’re not going to save our country by breaking it into a bunch of smaller failed states. Getting angry at your phone, voting for Democrats, or shooting up the grocery store are not going to improve the situation for you or anyone else.
Victory was always going to be a grinding process. Problems decades in the making are going to take years to solve. In my Election Night 2024 essay, I predicted that America would experience a systemic challenge in 2035 with a real chance of overturning our system. I still think that’s the case. The question is, when opportunities present themselves, will our people see them clearly enough, will our people have the resources and infrastructure prepared, and will our people have the wherewithal to actually seize them?
I am, as always, optimistic. I think our victory is necessary and good and that this is something we can and will bring into existence. This necessarily means leaving behind strategies and rhetoric that have run their course for better things. I hope this piece helps you do that in some way.
A big attack I’ve seen thrown at Abdul is that he has a very Muslim name. It’s true, and it sucks that we live in a time where he is taken seriously, but he should be taken seriously for the things he says, not for his Muslim name. It’s a good point to hold him accountable to what he says he will do, it’s all on tape, it’s right there. His name is already a turn off for many voters, there’s no need to make it a front and center issue.
The first thought I had when I saw the notification for this article was “Spencer Pratt” so it’s good to see him included