Introduction
For the past several years, I have watched the loudest voices against the socialist drift in this country lose the argument before they ever made it.
I have watched senators, governors, television hosts, and online commentators reach for “communist,” “Marxist,” “radical,” “jihadist,” and “socialist” as if the words themselves were the argument, interchangeable insults thrown at whoever is standing closest to a microphone. And I have watched those same words get used so often, so loosely, and so far outside their actual definitions that they have started to mean nothing at all.
That should worry everyone who actually understands what those words mean and what the ideologies behind them have done. I wrote an earlier piece for this publication, “Born Free, Voting Red,” documenting the rise of communist and socialist sympathy among young Americans and the historical body count behind the ideology they are increasingly willing to consider.[1] That piece was written for a general audience trying to understand why the drift is happening. This one is written for a specific audience: the people who already oppose that drift, who already sense that something is wrong, and who are, with striking consistency, failing to make the case.
I am not writing this to defend the people being labeled. Some of what is said about them is accurate. Some of it is not. That distinction is the entire point of this piece. When a member of Congress calls someone a “communist” without ever explaining what that person has proposed, when a cable news guest reaches for “jihadist” as a synonym for “socialist” because the two words rhyme rhetorically even though they describe nothing in common, when a senator uses “Marxist” in the same sentence as “Islamist” as though the ideologies were interchangeable, something worse than sloppy rhetoric is happening. The words are being drained of meaning in real time, by the very people who should have the strongest interest in keeping them sharp.
There is a concept in linguistics called semantic bleaching. It describes what happens when a word is used so frequently, so loosely, and with so little precision that it loses its original force. “Literally” no longer means literally. “Awesome” no longer inspires awe. The same thing is happening to “communist” and “socialist” in American political discourse, except the stakes here are not casual conversation. The stakes are whether this country’s young people, many of whom did not live through the Cold War and have no inherited memory of what these ideologies actually produced, take the warnings seriously at all. George Orwell wrote about this exact danger in 1946, warning that political language which is imprecise, that substitutes venom for argument, ends up protecting the very things it claims to oppose by making the opposition sound unserious.[2] Eighty years later, the American right is proving him right in real time, and the cost is not rhetorical. The cost is a generation that hears “communist” thrown at a city council candidate with the same weight it is thrown at the architects of the Great Leap Forward, and reasonably concludes the word means nothing.
This piece is an attempt to fix that. It is not going to defend socialism or communism. The historical record, which I documented at length in “Born Free, Voting Red” and will draw on again here, does not need defending against. It needs to be stated plainly, specifically, and repeatedly, by people who have actually done the work of understanding what they are arguing against. What follows is the arsenal that name calling has replaced: the precise definitions, the documented historical pattern, the structural argument for why the ideology fails every time it captures real power, and the honest accounting of where the American right’s own arguments have gotten lazy, unearned, and counterproductive.
Gen Z is not being won over by communism because they are stupid. They are being won over because the people best positioned to explain why the ideology fails have too often chosen to yell a label instead of making a case. That is fixable. This piece is the fix.
What the Words Still Mean
Before anyone can accuse another person of being a socialist, a communist, or a Marxist with any credibility, they have to know what those words actually describe. I laid this groundwork in detail in “Born Free, Voting Red,” and I am not going to repeat the full definitional discussion here.[3] But this piece cannot function without a baseline, so here is the short version, stated plainly enough that nobody reading this has an excuse to get it wrong again.
Socialism is an economic system in which the means of production are owned or regulated collectively, typically by the state, rather than by private individuals. It is not one thing. It exists on a spectrum that runs from the mixed market welfare states of Scandinavia, which retain robust private enterprise alongside expansive public programs, to the fully centralized command economies of the Eastern Bloc, which eliminated private industry almost entirely. Treating every point on that spectrum as identical is the first and most common error made by people trying to sound tough on this subject.
Democratic socialism is a specific position within that spectrum. It holds that socialist economic goals, meaning public investment in healthcare, education, and housing, along with stronger labor protections, should be pursued through existing democratic institutions rather than through revolution or the abolition of private property outright. It is a real, documented political tradition with adherents in Congress today. It is not, by definition, a call to seize private industry or dissolve markets.
Communism is a different and more radical ideology entirely. In its theoretical form, it calls for the abolition of private property altogether and the collective ownership of all means of production, with the state itself eventually dissolving into a classless society. In every documented instance of communism actually being implemented, from the Soviet Union to Maoist China to Castro’s Cuba to the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia, that theoretical dissolution of the state never happened. Instead, single party rule, elimination of political opposition, and state control of the economy and the press became permanent features, not transitional ones. I documented the death toll of that pattern at length in my earlier piece: a figure that, by the most serious academic accounting available, approaches 100 million people.[4]
Here is why this distinction matters for the specific argument this piece is making. When a public figure uses “communist” to describe a policy proposal for a public option in healthcare, or “Marxist” to describe a call for higher marginal tax rates, they are not describing communism or Marxism. They are describing democratic socialism at most, and often simply describing standard progressive economic policy that exists comfortably within a market economy. Calling it communism does not make the underlying policy more dangerous. It makes the word “communism” less meaningful, and it hands anyone who actually wants to defend the historical record of the Soviet Union or Maoist China a free pass to say “that is not what we are proposing,” which is frequently true.
This is not a defense of the policies in question. Some of what gets proposed under the banner of democratic socialism deserves serious scrutiny, and I will provide that scrutiny later in this piece.[5] It is a defense of precision, because precision is the only thing that makes an argument persuasive to someone who has not already made up their mind. A generation of young Americans who have grown up watching “socialist” applied to everything from single payer healthcare to a public grocery store pilot program has no reason to believe the word describes anything specific at all. That is not their failure. That is the failure of the people who used the word.
If this piece is going to hand its intended audience an actual arsenal instead of a louder version of the same noise, it has to start here: with the discipline to call things what they actually are, so that when the word “communist” gets used later in this piece, and it will, it carries the full weight of everything documented in Section Four.
The Rhetorical Collapse: Semantic Bleaching in Real Time
The concept introduced in Section One, semantic bleaching, is not an abstract linguistic curiosity. It is happening in real time, documented in the public statements of sitting members of Congress, and it is worth walking through specific, verified examples rather than describing the pattern in the abstract, because the pattern is only persuasive when it is shown rather than asserted.
Start with Senator Ted Cruz. In a November 2025 appearance on Sean Hannity’s program, reacting to Mamdani’s mayoral win and that month’s broader election results in New Jersey and Virginia, Cruz called Mamdani “not a socialist” but “a full on communist,” then stacked “Marxist” and “an actual communist jihadist” on top of it in the same segment, along with his now habitual “Comrade Mamdani.”[6] None of those labels was tied to a specific vote, proposal, or documented position. They were escalations, one on top of the next, delivered in the same breath Cruz used to call the night’s results “a disaster” for Republicans. That is not an argument. It is the exact behavior described in Section One: reaching for whichever word carries the most heat and moving on to the next one.
The senator’s pattern on social media does not contrast with that television appearance. It matches it. Elected officials, Cruz among them, have repeatedly posted single line characterizations, “Marxist,” “communist,” “Comrade,” attached to a name with no supporting claim at all.[7] The senator stacking three separate labels on live television without connecting any of them to Mamdani’s actual record is the same senator posting bare labels with no argument attached on his own account, within the same election cycle. That consistency is worth sitting with. It suggests the labels are not a conclusion reached through analysis in either setting. They are a reflex, dressed up with a sentence or two when there is a camera running and stripped down to a single word when there is not.
Representative Elise Stefanik’s use of “jihadist” against Mamdani is the clearest documented example of a label detached entirely from its actual definition. In an October 2025 statement to a New York Times reporter, later reposted on her own account, Stefanik wrote: “I call Zohran Mamdani a jihadist because he is. Zohran Mamdani is a raging antisemite. Mamdani is the definition of a jihadist.”[8] A jihadist, by any accepted definition, is someone engaged in or advocating armed religious struggle, typically in the name of establishing or defending an Islamic state or territory through violence. Mamdani, whatever the merits or flaws of his policy platform, has not been documented advocating armed religious conflict. He has been criticized, including by members of his own party, for his rhetoric regarding Israel and Hamas. That is a legitimate subject of scrutiny. It is not the same thing as jihad, and calling it that does not strengthen the criticism. It empties a word that describes something specific and genuinely dangerous, and applies it to something else entirely.
What makes this example particularly instructive is what happened next. When President Trump was directly asked by a reporter, in Mamdani’s own presence, whether he agreed with Stefanik’s characterization of Mamdani as a jihadist, Trump said no.[9] The standard bearer of the same party, at the moment the label was put in front of him directly, declined to defend it. Stefanik doubled down anyway, posting days later that Mamdani “walks like a jihadist” and “talks like a jihadist.” When the leader of one’s own party will not back the framing when asked to his face directly, that framing was never an argument. It was a label chosen for its rhetorical heat, not its accuracy.
Laura Loomer has been the most explicit about this strategy, to her credit for honesty if nothing else. In posts responding to Republican officials who described Mamdani, Omar, and other figures as merely socialists, Loomer argued directly that the party should abandon “socialist” in favor of “jihadist” as the preferred term of attack, regardless of whether the underlying accusation had anything to do with religious violence.[10] This is not a case of a word losing precision through careless overuse. This is a case of a word being selected deliberately because it carries more emotional weight than an accurate one, which is the exact mechanism Orwell warned about: language chosen to generate a reaction rather than to describe reality.
Media figures outside of elected office follow the identical pattern. Charlie Kirk, in a series of posts throughout 2025, applied “Marxist,” “old school Communist,” and variations combining religious and ideological labels to a range of targets with no consistent standard for what any of those terms required.[11] The through line across all of these examples, elected officials and commentators alike, is not that the underlying criticism is always wrong. Some of it, examined on the merits, may hold up. The through line is that the label is doing work the argument should be doing, and every time that substitution happens, the word loses a little more of its capacity to describe something real the next time it is actually needed.
That is the cost this piece is concerned with. If “communist” can mean anything from a Politburo official responsible for a forced famine to a New York City mayoral candidate proposing a municipal grocery store pilot, the word has stopped functioning as a warning. It has become noise. And noise does not stop a sixty two percent favorability rating for socialism among eighteen to twenty nine year olds.[12] Only an argument does that. The rest of this piece is that argument.
The Historical Pattern: The Utopian Pitch, Every Time
There is a reason the labels covered in Section Three land as effectively as they do, even when they are used with no precision at all. Underneath the sloppy rhetoric is a real, documented, and genuinely alarming historical pattern. It deserves to be stated with the same rigor Section Two demanded of the definitions, because a true and specific claim about history is far more persuasive than an inaccurate label will ever be.
Every communist regime in the historical record arrived in power on the strength of a moral promise, not a technocratic one. Lenin did not campaign on five year plans and grain requisition quotas. He campaigned on “land, bread, and peace,” a direct appeal to a starving, war exhausted population’s most basic needs, and within years that promise gave way to the Gulag system and a famine driven by forced collectivization that killed millions.[13] Mao did not tell the Chinese peasantry that the Great Leap Forward would require the deaths of tens of millions of their neighbors. He told them it would vault China past Britain in industrial output within fifteen years, a vision of national dignity and modernity, and the result was a famine that scholarly estimates place at fifteen to forty five million deaths, the largest episode of man made mass death in recorded history.[14] Castro did not promise the Cuban people a one party state with executed political prisoners. He promised land reform, literacy, and dignity for a population exhausted by the corruption of the Batista government, and delivered the former alongside decades of political imprisonment.[15] Chavez did not tell Venezuelans that his revolution would end in hyperinflation exceeding one million percent and the flight of a quarter of the country’s population. He told them Venezuela’s oil wealth would finally reach the poor instead of the elite, a genuinely resonant promise in a country with real and documented inequality, and the country’s economy contracted by more than seventy five percent from its peak.[16]
The pattern holds across every culture, every continent, and every decade in which it has been tried. The sales pitch is always moral. It is always aspirational. It always names a real and often legitimate grievance, poverty, inequality, corruption, foreign exploitation, and promises that grievance will be resolved once the old system is torn down. And the mechanism by which that promise gets delivered is, without a single documented exception, the concentration of total economic and political power into the hands of a single party accountable to no one. That concentration is not an unfortunate side effect of otherwise sound policy. It is the load bearing structure of the entire system, and I documented in “Born Free, Voting Red” why it cannot be otherwise: a state that controls both the economy and the political apparatus has no independent mechanism left to correct course when its central planning inevitably produces shortages and failure, because acknowledging that failure is itself a threat to the party’s legitimacy.[17] Dissent stops being merely unwelcome. It becomes existential to the people in power, and history shows with total consistency how governments in that position choose to handle an existential threat.
I want to be precise about what this pattern does and does not prove, because precision is the entire argument of this piece and I am not going to abandon it the moment it becomes useful to make a broader claim than the evidence supports. This pattern describes what happens when a revolutionary movement achieves full, unchecked control of a state’s economy and political institutions. It does not describe every politician who uses the word socialist, and it does not describe every policy proposal that expands the public sector. A member of Congress who supports a public healthcare option operating within a democracy, a free press, and regular elections is not Lenin in 1917 or Mao in 1958, and treating the two as equivalent is exactly the kind of imprecision that Section Three spent its entire length criticizing. If this piece claimed otherwise, it would hand every person named in Section Three’s examples a legitimate rebuttal, and it would deserve to lose that argument.
What this pattern does prove, with a historical record so consistent it should be treated as close to a settled empirical fact as political history offers, is this: every time this ideology has actually captured the full instruments of state power, the utopian promise and the delivered reality have diverged in exactly the same direction, toward less freedom, less prosperity, and more concentrated, unaccountable power, not more. There is no counterexample. Not one. Not a single nation in the historical record where a communist party achieved total control of the state and economy and produced the classless, stateless, egalitarian outcome the ideology promises. That is not an accident of bad leadership repeated coincidentally across Russia, China, Cambodia, Cuba, and Venezuela’s socialist turn under Chavez. It is what the structure produces every time, because the structure itself, not the individual leader, is what eliminates the checks that would otherwise force a correction.
This is the argument the people described in Section Three should be making. Not “communist” thrown at a mayoral candidate with a grocery store proposal. This: the ideology has a one hundred percent failure rate at delivering the world it promises, every single time it has been given the full power it says it needs to deliver that world, and the mechanism of that failure is structural, not incidental. That is a claim with actual force behind it. It does not need a slur attached to land.
This is not a pattern confined to history books. It is showing up, in writing, in the platform of the largest socialist organization currently operating in the United States. The Democratic Socialists of America’s national platform, published in 2026 and drafted by committee through their own internal process, states its goal plainly: “We are workers fighting to transform society: to win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic.”[18] The platform is specific about what that new constitution would do. It calls to abolish the Electoral College and the Senate, to replace the two party system, and to “replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.”[19] It also calls for public ownership of “the largest corporations and essential industries.”[20]
I want to be exact about what this does and does not show, for the same reason I was exact about the historical pattern earlier in this section. This is not a claim that any specific sitting member of Congress endorses this platform in full, and it is not a claim that every young person drawn to democratic socialism has read it or agrees with it. It is a claim that the organized movement whose growth this piece and “Born Free, Voting Red” have both documented among young Americans has stated, in its own words, published this year, that its actual goal is the elimination of the constitutional checks, an independent judiciary, a bicameral legislature, a separately elected executive, that have prevented power from concentrating in the hands of any single faction in this country for over two centuries. That is precisely the mechanism documented in every regime above. It does not require a slur to describe. It requires reading what they wrote.
The Arsenal: Why It Doesn’t Work
Section Four established that centrally planned economies fail every time they are tried at scale. This section is about why. Not because socialism attracts uniquely incompetent leaders, and not because of bad luck across five separate continents and a century of attempts. It fails because of a structural problem baked into the model itself, one that no amount of good intentions or capable administration can engineer around.
The economist Friedrich Hayek identified the core of it in 1945, in an essay that remains among the most important pieces of writing on why central planning cannot work. Hayek’s argument was not moral. It was informational. The knowledge required to efficiently allocate resources across an entire economy, what to produce, how much, where, for whom, does not exist anywhere as a complete set of facts available to any central authority.[21] It exists only in fragments, scattered across millions of individual producers and consumers, each possessing local knowledge of their own circumstances, preferences, and constraints that no planning committee could ever collect or process in time to act on it. A price system, whatever its flaws, solves this problem by letting that dispersed knowledge aggregate itself automatically: when a resource becomes scarce, its price rises, and millions of independent actors adjust their behavior without anyone needing to understand the full picture. Remove the price mechanism and replace it with central planning, and the information problem does not disappear. The only mechanism ever capable of solving it disappears instead.
This is not an abstract theory. It shows up in the data every time it has been tested. Poland and Venezuela make the comparison unusually clean, because both nations sit on substantial natural resource wealth and both experienced dramatic economic turns within a single generation, in opposite directions. Poland, after 1989, moved from a Soviet aligned command economy to a market system and saw its GDP per capita grow substantially in the years that followed, becoming one of the fastest growing economies in Europe.[22] Venezuela, holding the largest proven oil reserves on Earth, moved further toward state control of its economy under Chavez and Maduro and saw its economy contract by more than 75 percent from its 2013 peak, with inflation exceeding one million percent and roughly a quarter of the population fleeing the country.[23] The resource endowment was not the deciding variable. The economic system was.
The same comparison holds on the Korean peninsula, where a single population, a single culture, and a single starting point in 1945 were split into two systems by a border rather than by any difference in the people themselves. South Korea, operating a market economy, has a GDP per capita many times higher than North Korea’s today, along with measurable, dramatic gaps in life expectancy, height, and access to food.[24] There is no other variable left to explain that gap. The people are the same people. The systems are not.
Opinion I think the honest answer to how a socialist government would actually strip private ownership from people who are not willing to give it up voluntarily is a question its advocates rarely answer directly, and the answer, historically, has always been some form of state coercion, because there is no other mechanism by which it could happen. Property does not transfer itself. If a policy requires the seizure of privately held assets, whether land, businesses, or firearms, and the current owners decline to hand them over, the only tool remaining to the state is force, backed by the legal and physical apparatus that force requires. This is not a prediction that any specific American movement intends violence. It is a structural observation about what elimination of private ownership requires as a mechanical fact, regardless of who is proposing it or how peacefully they describe their intentions.
None of this means every policy discussed under the socialist or democratic socialist banner requires this level of scrutiny equally. A public healthcare option is not a call to seize the means of production, and treating it as such is the same imprecision Section Three already spent its length criticizing. But the ideology’s most ambitious version, the one DSA’s own current platform describes when it calls for public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries, does require exactly this question to be asked and answered honestly, and it rarely is.[25]
The productivity to pay gap is the argument’s other half, and it is the one most often used to justify the more radical proposals, so it deserves to be engaged rather than dismissed. Since 1979, American worker productivity has grown substantially faster than typical worker compensation, a real and well documented divergence that has fueled much of the current appetite for radical economic restructuring.[26] I am not disputing that gap. I am disputing the conclusion that the only remedy for it is the abolition of private industry. Every economy in Section Four’s comparison that attempted that remedy produced worse outcomes for workers, not better ones, because eliminating private capital does not redistribute productivity gains to labor, it eliminates the price signals and investment incentives that produced the gains in the first place. The gap is real. The proposed cure has a worse track record than the disease.
This is the actual arsenal. Not a label. An information problem that has never been solved by central planning, a resource rich country that collapsed while a resource poor one thrived, a single people split by a border with a dramatic difference in outcome, and an honest reckoning with what seizing the means of production actually requires in practice. Anyone using this section instead of “communist” is going to win more arguments, with better people, more often.
Why We Need to Think This Through
I am not going to pretend the anxiety driving this shift is irrational. It is not. I graduated into an economy carrying student debt, into a housing market where the median home price has outpaced wage growth so severely that homeownership has become a generational rarity rather than a milestone, and into a labor market where the productivity gains documented in Section Five have not translated into the standard of living my parents or grandparents could reasonably expect at my age.[27] I documented this same set of pressures in “Born Free, Voting Red,” and I am not going to relitigate the full data set here.[28] I will say plainly what I think that data means: if someone is eighteen to twenty nine years old in America right now and feels like the deal has changed, that feeling is not wrong. Something has changed, and the people telling my generation that this anxiety is imaginary, or that we simply need to work harder, are not making an argument either. They are doing their own version of the name calling this piece has spent five sections criticizing.
Here is where I need to slow down and actually sit with the rest of this argument, because the conclusion a lot of people my age are reaching from that accurate diagnosis is, I believe, the wrong one. The reasoning goes something like this: capitalism produced this outcome, therefore the alternative to capitalism must be the fix. That reasoning treats “not capitalism” as if it names a single, coherent, untested alternative. It does not. Section Four walked through what happens, every single time, when a movement promising to fix exactly this kind of inequality actually gets the full power it says it needs to fix it. The promise is always the grievance I am describing right now: people working hard and falling behind while a small class gets richer. The delivered result is never the correction of that gap. It is Poland versus Venezuela. It is South Korea versus North Korea. It is a productivity gap that gets worse, not better, once the price signals and investment incentives that produced any productivity at all are removed.[29]
Opinion I think the specific reason this argument lands with my generation, and I say this as someone who feels the same economic pressure I am describing, not as someone lecturing from outside it, is that we are the first generation making this decision with almost no living memory of what the twentieth century actually cost to learn this lesson. Our grandparents or great grandparents fought, literally, to contain and roll back an ideology that killed more of its own citizens than any other in recorded history.[30] That is not ancient history to them. It was the defining conflict of their lives. For us, it is a chapter in a textbook, if it is taught at all, competing for attention against an economy that genuinely is failing to deliver what it promised us. I understand why the appeal of a different system grows when the current one feels broken. But different is not the same as better, and the historical record on this specific different system is not ambiguous. It is one of the most thoroughly documented failures in human history, precisely because it was tried so many times, in so many places, by so many people who sincerely believed their attempt would be the one that worked.
The honest case I want to make is not that things are fine and complaints should stop. Things are not fine, and Section Five already laid out the real, structural reasons why the productivity we generate is not translating into the security our grandparents had. The honest case is that the debt crisis, the housing crisis, and the wage stagnation crisis are genuine problems with genuine, achievable solutions inside the existing system, tax policy, antitrust enforcement, deregulating housing supply, reforming how student lending works, that do not require dismantling the constitutional structure Section Four documented DSA’s own platform calling to replace.[31]
I am allowed to be angry about my economic situation. So is anyone else my age. What I am asking is that the anger get directed at solutions with an actual track record of working, rather than at a system whose only track record, everywhere it has been tried in full, is making the exact problems we are angry about permanently, catastrophically worse.
Where the Right’s Own Arguments Fall Short
If this piece is going to hold the socialist and democratic socialist movement to a real evidentiary standard, and Sections Four through Six have tried to do exactly that, it has to apply the same standard to the people making the opposing case. I am not interested in a one sided piece, and I do not think a one sided piece would actually accomplish what I am trying to accomplish, which is arming people with arguments strong enough to survive contact with someone who has actually read the DSA platform. Weak arguments do not survive that contact. They collapse, and they take the credible parts of the case down with them.
The clearest example of this collapse involves President Trump’s own claim that Zohran Mamdani is a communist. When PolitiFact fact checked that claim in June 2025 and rated it False, the White House was given the opportunity to submit supporting evidence. What they produced was a single remark from 2021, four years earlier, in which Mamdani, then newly elected to the state assembly, referenced “seizing the means of production” during a livestreamed conference for the Young Democratic Socialists of America.[32] PolitiFact went back, reviewed the tape, and reinterviewed experts rather than simply standing on its first rating, which is exactly the kind of rigor I want applied to every claim in this piece as well. Harvey Klehr, an Emory University historian specializing in the history of American communism, told the fact checkers that the phrase does carry real weight, it is drawn directly from Marxist theory and historically marks the line between communists and democratic socialists, but that democratic socialists have long eschewed that specific language, and that even historical socialist governments in Britain and France that took power in 1945 and the 1980s nationalized industries with compensation to owners rather than seizing them outright.[33] After that review, PolitiFact left its False rating unchanged.
This matters for the argument this piece is trying to make, not because Mamdani’s platform is beyond scrutiny, it is not, and I am not defending it here, but because the President of the United States made a specific factual claim, was asked to support it, and could not produce evidence that held up to a fact checker’s second look. That is not a failure of messaging discipline. That is a failure of the underlying argument. And it matters more, not less, because the phrase itself is real and was genuinely said. The mistake was not fabrication. The mistake was stretching a four year old remark, made by a state assembly candidate at a youth conference, into a present tense governing platform, when Section Two of this piece already established that the correct response to sloppy language is precision, not escalation to a bigger, less defensible claim.
The New York State Republican Party’s own messaging shows the same pattern at an institutional level. Their public campaign material against Mamdani lists his “seizing the means of production” remark alongside accusations involving his positions on Israel, policing, and a disputed historical comparison, all folded into a single, undifferentiated case for “extremism.”[34] Some of those criticisms may be entirely fair on their own terms. But bundling a resurfaced 2021 conference remark, a disputed historical analogy, and a policing position into one flattened accusation of extremism does the same thing Section Three already documented Elise Stefanik doing with “jihadist”: it substitutes volume for distinction. A reader who actually checks any single claim in that bundle and finds it thinner than advertised, as PolitiFact found with the communism claim, has a ready made reason to dismiss the entire list, including the parts that may have been legitimate.
Laura Loomer’s public argument that Republicans should abandon “socialist” in favor of “jihadist” as their preferred term of attack is the most explicit version of this failure, because it is not even a stretched fact, it is a stated strategy.[35] Loomer has argued directly that the word choice should shift toward whichever term generates a stronger reaction, independent of whether the underlying accusation, religious extremism, has any documented relationship to the person’s actual platform. That is not an argument. It is the abandonment of argument in favor of the exact rhetorical strategy Orwell warned about in Section One: language selected for its emotional charge rather than its accuracy. It also, I want to say plainly, edges toward something worse than imprecision. Applying “jihadist” to a Muslim public figure specifically because of his religion, absent any documented connection to religious violence, is not a tougher version of legitimate criticism. It is prejudice wearing the vocabulary of a real and serious threat, and it cheapens that vocabulary for the moments when it might describe something actually dangerous.
Senator Ted Cruz’s own record shows the pattern holding steady across both settings, television and social media alike, rather than showing a contrast between them. On Sean Hannity’s program in November 2025, reacting to that month’s election results, Cruz called Mamdani “not a socialist” but “a full on communist,” stacked “Marxist” and “an actual communist jihadist” on top of it in the same segment, and connected none of those labels to a specific vote, proposal, or documented position of Mamdani’s.[36] That was not a reasoned television performance sitting alongside an unreasoned social media habit. It was the same habit in a different format, dressed up with a few extra words because there was a camera running. The same senator’s social media posts during the same election cycle dropped the labels down further still, to a single word, “Marxist,” “Comrade,” attached to a name with nothing supporting it.[37] Whether the label arrives with three escalating words or just one, the mechanism is identical: reach for whichever term generates the strongest reaction and skip the case entirely.
None of this means the underlying concern is imaginary. Section Four documented, in DSA’s own published words, a stated goal of replacing the constitutional structure of the United States government. That is real, verified, and worth being alarmed about. But an alarm that reaches for the loudest available word instead of the most accurate one, that stretches a four year old conference remark into a governing platform, that bundles unrelated accusations into a single flattened charge, or that substitutes a person’s religion for their actual political program, is an alarm that a fact checker can dismantle in an afternoon. The people who actually want to stop this ideology from gaining more ground need arguments built the way Sections Four through Six of this piece were built: specific, sourced, and precise enough that dismantling them requires dismantling the facts themselves, not just the rhetoric they were wrapped in.
Opinion Close: What America Was Supposed to Be
Opinion This entire closing section reflects my own views.
I believe the United States was meant to be the greatest experiment in self government ever attempted, and I believe we have drifted from it. I want to be precise about what I mean by that, because this exact kind of statement gets weaponized by people who assume it is coded language for something it is not. When I say I want this country to return to what it was supposed to be, I am not talking about the eras of slavery or exclusion that stained our founding and that we have spent, and continue to spend, real effort correcting. Our understanding of who counts as a full citizen has rightly broadened since 1789, and I would not trade that progress for anything. What I am talking about is the economic and political philosophy underneath the founding: genuinely free markets, a deep skepticism of taxation as the default tool of government, a federal government funded primarily through tariffs and trade rather than through an ever expanding claim on individual income, and a government sized to serve its citizens rather than one that has grown into something citizens spend their lives serving. That is the return I am arguing for, and conflating it with any defense of this country’s worst historical chapters is exactly the kind of imprecision the rest of this piece has spent seven sections arguing against.
The idea of America as a place where a person’s outcome was determined by their effort rather than their birth was genuinely unprecedented in human history, and I do not think we talk about how remarkable that was nearly enough. That is what makes it so alarming to me that an ideology my great grandparents’ and grandparents’ generations spent their lives helping to contain, at real cost, in real wars, is finding a foothold here, in the country that was supposed to be its clearest rebuttal. I made the case in Section Four of this piece that every communist regime in the historical record sold a moral utopia and delivered concentrated, unaccountable power instead. I want to add one thing to that record here, because I think it strengthens the point rather than complicating it: China’s economic rise, the example most often invoked as socialism’s success story, did not happen because of Maoist central planning. It happened after Deng Xiaoping moved the country away from it, reintroducing markets and private enterprise in the years following Mao’s death. The prosperity came from the retreat from communism, not from communism itself. The deaths, by contrast, tens of millions of them during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, came from the period of full ideological commitment. I think that is worth sitting with. We are fortunate to be watching that experiment from the outside, with the benefit of not having had to pay its price ourselves, and I would like to keep it that way.
I want to be honest about the mechanical question I raised in Section Five, because I think it deserves to close this piece rather than sit buried in the middle of it: if this country ever did attempt to fully strip private ownership from citizens who were not willing to give it up voluntarily, I do not know what mechanism accomplishes that other than the state’s monopoly on force. I am not predicting that outcome as an inevitability, and I said as much in Section Five. But I do not think it is alarmist to say that a movement whose own current platform calls for eliminating the Senate, the Electoral College, and an independent judiciary, the very checks that have made this kind of unaccountable seizure of power structurally difficult in this country for over two centuries, is a movement worth taking at its word rather than assuming it will stop short of its stated goals once it gains real power. History, documented at length in this piece, does not give me much reason for that assumption.
I am twenty five years old. I am in the generation Section Six of this piece is about, not observing it from outside. I carry the same economic pressure I described there, and I understand exactly why someone my age looks at their student debt, their rent, and their retirement prospects and concludes that the current system has failed them. It has, in real and specific ways, and pretending otherwise would make this piece dishonest. But I do not believe the answer to a legitimate grievance is an ideology with a one hundred percent failure rate at fixing exactly that grievance, everywhere and every time it has been given the full power it claims to need. I believe the actual answer is harder and less satisfying than a revolution: fixing the debt, reforming the tax code, building more housing, and holding both parties, not just one, accountable for the decades of decisions that got us here. That is the entire premise of this publication, and it is why I am not willing to let the right off the hook simply because I disagree with the left’s proposed cure. Calling someone a jihadist because he is Muslim is not an argument. Calling someone a communist because he referenced a phrase from a college conference four years ago is not an argument either. Both failures, name calling on one side and ideological wish casting on the other, come from the same root cause: an unwillingness to do the harder work of building a real case.
I think if my generation were sat down and shown, honestly and without the name calling, what socialism and communism have actually produced everywhere they have been tried in full, and were offered a real, credible plan for fixing the debt and the affordability crisis instead, most of us would take that deal. I know I would. The problem has never been that the case against this ideology is weak. The case is overwhelming. The problem is that too many of the people making it have not bothered to make it at all.