Authored by William Brooks via The Epoch Times,
Early this month, U.S. President Donald Trump delivered increasingly forceful warnings about what he sees as a growing communist threat within the United States.
During what will be his final years in office, Trump appears more determined than ever to defend the principles of American liberty against the influence of Marxist ideas. Employing rhetoric reminiscent of the Cold War, he declared on July 3: “There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land.”
On Independence Day, the president reinforced his message, stating:
“The communist system is the opposite of the American system, and the communist system has never worked.
“Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world, only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America. We’re not going to let it happen. It’s like a cancer—you’ve got to cut it out, you’ve got to cut it out fast.”
Predictably, Trump’s remarks were greeted with widespread cynicism by political opponents and media pundits. For decades, establishment intellectuals have dismissed concerns about communism as misguided rhetoric designed only to gin up a public reaction. Some implied that Trump was stoking ideological division and indiscriminately branding progressives, social democrats and advocates of government intervention as communists. Others argued that there is no significant communist movement in America and that the real threat to democracy is the president himself.
Yet dismissing Trump’s warnings would compel us to ignore some of the most important lessons in modern history.
First, communism has the worst human rights record of any political ideology in the world. From the Soviet Union to the Republic of China, Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba, and elsewhere, communist regimes have imprisoned, tortured, and executed millions of their own citizens.
Repression of political opponents was not just an unfortunate side effect of the transition to communism; it became an essential feature of regimes that concentrated absolute power in a single party. Recent episodes of political violence in the United States should remind us that revolutionary transformation is not necessarily a peaceful process.
Second, socialist economic systems have consistently failed to produce prosperity. Karl Marx envisioned a society in which the abolition of private ownership would eliminate exploitation and create abundance.
The historical record tells a very different story. Central planning repeatedly produced shortages, inefficiency, and stagnation. The Soviet Union eventually collapsed under the weight of its own economic contradictions. Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward contributed to one of history’s worst famines. Even today, North Korea remains among the poorest and most isolated countries on Earth.
Third, Marxist ideology is fundamentally incompatible with the liberties guaranteed by the American Constitution. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, private property, an independent judiciary, and a free press all place limits on state power.
Classical communist theory, by contrast, envisions a society in which the state ultimately controls the major institutions of economic and social life. History demonstrates that governments seeking such control rarely tolerate independent churches, schools, universities, newsrooms, enterprises, or political opposition.
Fourth, failed communist ideas are constantly reintroduced wearing attractive new clothes. Few progressives openly advocate establishing a Soviet-style state. But fashionable concepts, such as capitalist exploitation, class struggle, revolutionary transformation, and the unfair division of society between oppressors and oppressed, have enormous influence in American schools and universities.
Marxist critical theory should shape intellectual debates in ways that require careful examination rather than automatic assent.
Fifth, experience shows that free societies become most vulnerable when they forget history. As the generation that experienced the Cold War dies away, younger Americans have little knowledge of communist repression. To many students, communism appears to be an interesting philosophical theory rather than a tyranny that governed one-third of humanity throughout the twentieth century.
Surveys have suggested that younger people often express favorable attitudes toward socialist ideas with almost no knowledge of the record of communist governments. A society that fails to gain insight through history always risks repeating it.
Finally, strong warnings against communism have seldom come from play-it-safe Western politicians. More often, it is people who lived under communist rule who have been willing to speak out. Soviet and Eastern European dissidents, Cuban refugees, survivors of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and victims of the Chinese Communist Party’s takeover of Hong Kong have all described similar experiences: censorship, fear, corruption, economic hardship, and the destruction of civil society.
Perhaps better than anyone, the late Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn understood the essential paradox of communism. Reflecting on its horrors, he observed, “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good.” The architects of communist regimes never thought of themselves as villains. They believed history was on their side, and that any sacrifice—including the lives of ordinary people—was justified in pursuit of a utopian future.
History has taught us that destructive ideas must be exposed, explained, understood, and confronted. Trump has been one of the few Western leaders willing to take on this task.
Communists promise equality, fairness, and liberation, but they have always delivered power into the hands of a political elite. The 20th century demonstrated that communist systems consistently produce political repression, economic failure, and immense human suffering. These lessons should not be forgotten simply because they are coming from a man who is particularly unpopular in progressive media and academic circles.
The U.S. president has often employed provocative language, and reasonable people might disagree with his style or some of his policies. But common sense requires us to separate the message from the messenger. As ideas rooted in Marxist ideology gain increasing influence in Western cultural and political life, Americans would be wise to examine the well-documented horrors of communism with open minds.
The resurgence of what the late American scholar Lionel Trilling once called an “adversary culture” warrants more serious attention than Trump’s critics are willing to admit.