Born Free, Voting Red

Paul Harvey saw it coming in 1965. The polling data of 2026 suggests he was right. This piece examines the documented rise of communist sympathy among young Americans, the economic conditions driving it, the historical record of what communism has actually produced, and the bipartisan failure of American institutions to address either problem with the seriousness it demands.

On April 3, 1965, ABC Radio commentator Paul Harvey sat down at a microphone and delivered a monologue that would outlive him by decades. The piece was called "If I Were the Devil." In it, Harvey described, step by step, what a deliberate campaign to hollow out the United States from the inside might look like. He described the targeting of the young, the softening of education, the silencing of hard history, the rewarding of dependence, and the slow normalization of ideas that previous generations had paid in blood to resist. Harvey was not describing a foreign invasion. He was describing a cultural drift, patient and quiet and entirely domestic in its mechanism.¹

Harvey first aired that broadcast more than sixty years ago. He updated and re-delivered it periodically over the following four decades until his death in 2009. He never suggested he was writing prophecy. He was writing a warning. The question worth asking in 2026 is a simple one: how much of what he described has come true?

The polling data suggests the answer is uncomfortable.

A March 2025 survey conducted by the Cato Institute and YouGov sampled 2,000 American adults and found that 62 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 held a favorable view of socialism. In that same age cohort, 34 percent held a favorable view of communism itself -- not democratic socialism, not Scandinavian-style welfare policy, but communism.² A Gallup poll published in August 2025 found that American support for capitalism had fallen to 54 percent, its lowest recorded level since Gallup began tracking the question in 2010.³ A December 2025 YouGov and Economist survey found that among Americans aged 18 to 29, socialism had pulled even with capitalism as the preferred economic system, with 46 percent of respondents in that age group uncertain about either.⁴ The Buckley Institute surveyed 820 four-year college students in September 2025 and found that 46 percent agreed that socialist models offered a better framework than capitalism.⁵

These are not fringe results from ideologically motivated pollsters. They are consistent findings across multiple independent surveys conducted over multiple years. The directional movement among the young is documented, it is significant, and it deserves an honest examination -- not a partisan one.

What the polling record actually shows, across more than a decade of Gallup surveys, is that young adult favorability toward capitalism has collapsed -- from 68 percent among 18-to-29-year-olds in 2010 to roughly 43 percent by 2025. Over that same period, the 2025 Cato Institute and YouGov survey found 62 percent of that cohort now express a favorable view of socialism. The movement is not a polling anomaly. It is a documented generational shift in how young Americans view the economic system they have inherited.⁶

It is worth noting, before going any further, what the same polling also shows. A Rasmussen Reports and Heartland Institute survey conducted in April and May of 2025 found that 71 percent of likely voters still reject socialism.⁷ A YouGov poll from October 2024 found that 81 percent of Americans overall hold an unfavorable view of communism.⁸ The majority of the country has not embraced these ideologies. But the directional movement among the young is documented, it is significant, and it deserves an honest examination -- not a partisan one.

That examination requires asking two questions at once. The first is what communism actually is and what it has actually produced everywhere it has been implemented. The second is what conditions inside the United States have made a generation of young Americans receptive to an ideology their grandparents fought wars to contain. Both questions have answers. Neither answer is comfortable for either political party. And Paul Harvey, sixty years ago, saw most of it coming.

Before any honest examination of rising communist sentiment in the United States can take place, the terminology requires definition. The polling data driving this conversation is complicated by a fundamental problem: a significant portion of the Americans expressing favorable views of socialism and communism cannot define either term with precision. The Cato Institute noted this explicitly in its analysis of the March 2025 survey results, observing that the poll did not define socialism for respondents, leaving the interpretation entirely to the individual.⁹ Jon Sanders of the John Locke Foundation made the same observation about the broader body of youth polling, suggesting that many respondents may simply be expressing dissatisfaction with current economic conditions rather than endorsing a specific governing ideology. That distinction matters enormously, and conflating the two produces bad analysis.

Socialism, in its broadest definition, is an economic system in which the means of production -- factories, resources, major industries -- are owned or regulated collectively, typically by the state, rather than by private individuals. It exists on a wide spectrum. At its most moderate end, it describes mixed economies like those of Scandinavian countries, where robust private markets coexist with expansive government-funded social programs including universal healthcare, subsidized higher education, and strong labor protections. These countries consistently rank among the highest in the world on measures of both economic freedom and human development. They are not, by any serious definition, communist states.

Democratic socialism is a specific variant of socialist thought that holds that socialist economic goals -- public ownership of key industries, wealth redistribution, strong social safety nets -- can and should be achieved through democratic electoral processes rather than revolution. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is the most prominent American political figure associated with this label, though Sanders himself has consistently cited Scandinavian models rather than Soviet or Maoist ones when pressed for examples. Democratic socialism is a legitimate political position with a documented tradition in Western political thought. It is not communism.

Communism is a distinct and more radical ideology. In its theoretical form, as articulated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the 19th century, communism envisions the abolition of private property, the collective ownership of all means of production, and the eventual dissolution of the state itself into a classless society. In its applied historical form -- the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Cuba, North Korea, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and Vietnam -- communism has meant single-party rule, the elimination of political opposition, state control of the press and the economy, and the concentration of power in the hands of a governing apparatus accountable to no one. The gap between the theoretical promise and the documented reality of communism as actually implemented is not a minor discrepancy. It is the central fact of the ideology's history, and it is the subject this piece is most directly concerned with.

The reason this definitional groundwork matters is not academic. When a 2025 Cato poll finds that 34 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 hold a favorable view of communism, that result almost certainly includes young people who mean something closer to universal healthcare than to the Gulag. It also, however, includes a documented and growing number of organized Americans who mean exactly what they say. The Communist Party USA reported 5,000 members to The Guardian in 2024, with a claimed mailing list of 20,000.¹⁰ The Revolutionary Communists of America reported doubling their membership and receiving more than 6,000 online membership applications over a 16-month period ending in early 2025.¹¹ A new splinter organization, the American Communist Party, was founded in July of 2024.¹² These are not poll respondents who are confused about Scandinavia. They are people who have explicitly identified with the ideology by name and joined organizations dedicated to it.

Both phenomena -- the soft, definitionally confused sympathy and the hard, organized commitment -- are real. This piece is concerned with both, and it will treat them differently, because they require different responses.

The polling data establishing a rise in favorable attitudes toward socialism and communism among young Americans is not the product of a single survey or a single organization. It is a consistent pattern documented across multiple independent sources over more than a decade, and the trajectory in every one of them points in the same direction.

The most comprehensive recent snapshot comes from the Cato Institute and YouGov's March 2025 national survey of 2,000 American adults. Among respondents aged 18 to 29, 62 percent reported a favorable view of socialism and 34 percent reported a favorable view of communism. Those numbers drop significantly with age. Among respondents aged 30 to 44, socialism favorability falls to roughly 40 percent. Among those 45 and older, it falls further still. The pattern is consistent and generational -- the younger the respondent, the more likely they are to express sympathy for both ideologies.²

Gallup's August 2025 polling confirmed the directional trend from a different angle. Overall American favorability toward capitalism fell to 54 percent, its lowest recorded level since Gallup began tracking the question in 2010. Favorability toward socialism held steady at 39 percent nationally. The partisan breakdown in that same Gallup data is striking. Among Democrats, 66 percent held a positive view of socialism in 2025, up from 50 percent in 2010. Among Republicans, that number sat at 14 percent. Among independents, 38 percent held a favorable view. For the first time in the survey's history, fewer than half of Democrats -- 42 percent -- viewed capitalism positively. Republicans remained overwhelmingly pro-capitalism at 74 percent. Independents sat at 51 percent, a slim majority.³

The December 2025 YouGov and Economist poll of 1,530 American adults broke the generational divide down further. Among Americans aged 18 to 29, 28 percent chose socialism as the better economic system compared to 26 percent who chose capitalism -- with 46 percent uncertain. Among those aged 30 to 44, socialism and capitalism were essentially tied at 28 and 33 percent respectively. Among those aged 45 to 64, capitalism led decisively at 47 percent to 15 percent. The oldest age group was the most consistently and strongly pro-capitalist of any cohort surveyed.⁴

On college campuses specifically, the numbers are more pronounced. The Buckley Institute's September 2025 survey of 820 four-year college students found that 46 percent agreed that socialist economic models offered a better framework than capitalism, with only 39 percent disagreeing.⁵ That result is not an outlier. It is consistent with a decade of campus polling showing that the university environment correlates strongly with favorable attitudes toward left economic ideologies.

The geographic concentration of organized communist activity tracks predictably with population density and university presence. The Communist Party USA, founded in 1919 and headquartered in New York City, reported 5,000 active members to The Guardian in 2024 alongside a claimed mailing list of 20,000, with 30 chapters operating across the country.¹⁰ The Revolutionary Communists of America, a Trotskyist organization founded in 1998, reported 800 members as of 2024 and announced it had doubled its national membership while receiving more than 6,000 online membership applications over the preceding 16 months.¹¹ A new organization, the American Communist Party, was founded in July 2024 as a splinter from CPUSA, espousing Marxism-Leninism and, notably, Xi Jinping Thought, with a reported membership of between 300 and 1,000.¹²

The Harvard Youth Poll from Spring 2025 adds an important layer of context to all of these numbers. It found that only 15 percent of young Americans believed the country was heading in the right direction.¹³ That figure is not a measurement of ideological commitment. It is a measurement of disillusionment. And disillusionment, as the rest of this piece will document, is the soil in which every radical ideology throughout history has found its most fertile ground.

Dismissing the rise of communist and socialist sympathy among young Americans as simple ignorance or ideological brainwashing is intellectually dishonest, and it is also strategically counterproductive. Young people do not move toward radical ideologies in a vacuum. They move toward them when the system they were born into has visibly failed to deliver on its stated promises, and when no credible alternative explanation or solution is offered by the institutions responsible for governing that system. Understanding why communism is gaining appeal in the United States requires an honest accounting of the conditions that have made it appealing -- and that accounting implicates both political parties without exception.

The student debt crisis is the most immediate and personal of those conditions. The Education Data Initiative reported in 2025 that the average federal student loan debt per graduate stands at approximately $37,000. Total outstanding student loan debt in the United States exceeds $1.7 trillion, carried by approximately 43 million borrowers.¹⁴ This did not happen by accident, and it did not happen because of the free market. The federal government's decision to guarantee and expand student loans without corresponding accountability for tuition pricing created the conditions for decades of unchecked tuition inflation. Administrations of both parties expanded those programs. Congresses of both parties funded them. The result is a generation that followed the instructions they were given -- get a degree, enter the workforce, build a life -- and emerged on the other side with debt loads their parents never faced for credentials that do not guarantee the economic security they were promised.

Wage stagnation compounds that reality. The Economic Policy Institute has documented that while worker productivity in the United States increased by roughly 61 percent between 1979 and 2020, hourly compensation for non-supervisory workers grew by only 17.5 percent over the same period.¹⁵ The gains from decades of American economic growth have not been distributed evenly. They have concentrated at the top of the income distribution with a consistency and a scale that is not a matter of opinion but of documented federal data.

Wealth concentration reinforces that picture. The Federal Reserve's Distributional Financial Accounts data shows that as of 2024, the top one percent of American households held approximately 30 percent of all household wealth. The bottom 50 percent held approximately 2.5 percent.¹⁶ These are not numbers generated by left-leaning advocacy organizations. They are federal data compiled by the central bank of the United States. A young person looking at those figures and concluding that the system is rigged is not being irrational. They may be drawing the wrong conclusion about what to do about it, but the underlying observation is grounded in fact.

Housing costs have made the generational wealth gap structural in a way that previous generations did not face to the same degree. The National Association of Realtors reported that the median existing home price in the United States reached $407,200 in 2024.¹⁷ The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's Home Ownership Affordability Monitor tracked housing affordability falling to its lowest level in decades during the same period. For a generation already carrying significant student debt and facing stagnant real wages, homeownership -- historically the primary mechanism of middle-class wealth accumulation in America -- has moved beyond reach for a substantial portion of young Americans.

The threat of automation adds a forward-looking dimension to these existing pressures. The McKinsey Global Institute estimated in widely cited research that between 400 million and 800 million jobs globally could be displaced by automation by 2030 -- with the same report also projecting significant job creation, and net outcomes depending heavily on policy response and the pace of transition.¹⁸ The concern is independently substantiated by more recent evidence: research has documented that data centers -- the infrastructure backbone of AI deployment -- produce among the lowest permanent job totals per dollar of public investment of any subsidized sector in the economy, while simultaneously being designed to reduce labor costs through automation. Young Americans entering the workforce are not only contending with the economic conditions they inherited. They are contending with credible evidence that the job market they are entering may look substantially different within their working lifetimes.

None of these conditions were created by one party. The federal student loan architecture that inflated tuition costs was built and expanded across decades of both Republican and Democratic administrations and Congresses. The deregulatory policies that contributed to wealth concentration accelerated under Republican administrations but were not meaningfully reversed under Democratic ones. The housing supply crisis is the product of local zoning policies enacted by governments of both parties across hundreds of jurisdictions over decades. Wage stagnation has persisted through administrations of both parties without producing a legislative response commensurate with its scale. The bipartisan failure to address any of these conditions is not a minor footnote. It is the central political fact that explains why a generation of young Americans is looking outside the two-party system for answers.

The tragedy, which this piece will document in the sections that follow, is that the answer they are increasingly reaching for is the one with the worst documented track record in modern history. The grievances are legitimate. The proposed remedy is not.

The theoretical promise of communism has always been equality, collective prosperity, and the liberation of the working class from exploitation. The documented historical record of communism as actually implemented is something else entirely. It is the largest sustained campaign of state-directed murder in the history of organized human civilization, and its victims number in the tens of millions across multiple continents, multiple cultures, and multiple decades. This is not a Cold War talking point. It is the conclusion of serious academic scholarship, including scholarship produced in Europe by historians with no particular allegiance to American foreign policy interests.

The most comprehensive accounting of communist state violence in the 20th century is The Black Book of Communism, edited by French historian Stephane Courtois and published by Harvard University Press in 1999. Drawing on archival research conducted after the fall of the Soviet Union, Courtois and his contributors estimated the total death toll attributable to communist regimes at approximately 94 to 100 million people. That figure encompasses the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, Cambodia, North Korea, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Afghanistan. It includes deaths from deliberate execution, forced labor, engineered famine, and forced deportation. It does not include combat deaths from wars initiated by communist governments. It counts only the killing of a government's own people, or people under its direct control.¹⁹

The Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin represents the largest single contributor to that total. University of Hawaii political scientist R.J. Rummel, whose decades of democide research remain among the most cited in the field, estimated total Soviet democide at approximately 61 million people -- figures that represent the high end of a scholarly range spanning roughly 15 to 30 million in other serious estimates, with Rummel's methodology counting deaths attributable to regime policy broadly. Stalin alone is estimated to have been responsible for approximately 43 million of those deaths. The mechanisms were varied and systematic. The Great Purge of 1936 to 1938 involved mass arrests, show trials, torture, and executions targeting Communist Party members, military officers, and ordinary citizens deemed insufficiently loyal, with estimated execution totals ranging from 700,000 to 1.2 million in that period alone. The Gulag system of forced labor camps processed millions of prisoners under conditions calculated to extract maximum labor before death. The forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture in the early 1930s produced a man-made famine that killed an estimated 6 to 10 million people, with the Ukrainian famine -- the Holodomor -- now recognized by numerous governments and scholars as a deliberate act of genocide.²⁰

Communist China under Mao Zedong produced a death toll that rivals the Soviet record. Rummel's research estimated Chinese communist democide at approximately 38 million. The single largest episode within that total is the Great Leap Forward of 1958 to 1962, during which Mao's forced collectivization of agriculture and catastrophic central planning decisions produced a famine in which scholarly estimates place the death toll at between 15 and 45 million people, with mid-range estimates clustering around 30 to 45 million. Historian Frank Dikotter's archival research, published in his prize-winning 2010 work Mao's Great Famine, placed the figure at a minimum of 45 million -- the high end of a credible scholarly range, grounded in provincial archival evidence. This is the single largest episode of man-made mass death in recorded human history. The Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976 added further deaths through political persecution, forced labor, and targeted killings of intellectuals, religious figures, and designated class enemies.²¹

Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979 produced what historian Ben Kiernan described as one of the worst holocausts in modern history. In fewer than four years, the Khmer Rouge killed an estimated 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians out of a total population of approximately 7 million -- between one quarter and one third of the entire country. The remains of more than 1.3 million victims have been recovered from over 23,000 mass grave sites known as the Killing Fields. The Khmer Rouge targeted urban populations, ethnic minorities, religious practitioners, educated professionals, and anyone deemed insufficiently committed to the agrarian revolutionary program. R.J. Rummel calculated the annual rate of democide under the Khmer Rouge as exceeding 8 percent of the total population per year, making it by that measure the most lethal communist government relative to population size in history.²²

North Korea has maintained a system of political repression and forced labor camps since the 1940s that continues to operate as of this writing. An estimated 400,000 people are believed to have died in North Korean labor camps. The country has experienced multiple periods of mass famine, with an estimated 25 million people living under conditions of chronic food insecurity as a consequence of the state's central planning failures and its prioritization of military expenditure over agricultural production. Cuba under Fidel Castro oversaw the execution of an estimated 3,500 political prisoners following the 1959 revolution, with tens of thousands more imprisoned for political dissent over subsequent decades. Vietnam, Eastern Europe under Soviet-imposed communist governments, and communist-aligned governments in Ethiopia, Angola, and Mozambique all contributed further to the 20th century's communist death toll.²³

The total, by the most serious and widely cited scholarly accounting, approaches 100 million human beings. To put that figure in context: it exceeds the combined military death toll of both World War One and World War Two.

The body count documented in the preceding section is the most morally urgent indictment of communism as a governing system. But it is not the only one, and for the young Americans whose sympathy for the ideology is rooted primarily in economic grievance rather than political ideology, a separate argument is required. That argument is this: communism has never produced the economic outcomes it promises. Not once. Not anywhere. The record is not mixed. It is uniform.

The Soviet Union, the largest and longest-running communist state in history, collapsed in 1991 under the weight of its own economic contradictions. Central planning, which required state bureaucracies to make production decisions that functioning price systems make automatically and efficiently, produced chronic shortages of consumer goods, catastrophic agricultural failures, and a technological stagnation so severe that by the 1980s the Soviet economy was being quietly sustained in part by hard currency earned from oil exports. The standard of living for ordinary Soviet citizens, after seven decades of communist governance, was not the promised workers' paradise. It was a system in which basic goods required standing in line, political loyalty was a prerequisite for professional advancement, and the nomenklatura class of party officials lived in material comfort unavailable to the population they claimed to represent. When the Soviet Union dissolved, it left behind economies across Eastern Europe that required decades of painful reconstruction.²⁴

Cuba, sixty years after its revolution, remains one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere despite possessing a well-educated population, a favorable climate, and proximity to the largest consumer market in the world. The United States embargo is routinely cited by the Cuban government and its defenders as the explanation for Cuba's economic stagnation, and the embargo is a legitimate grievance worth acknowledging. But Cuba trades with the rest of the world. It has received substantial support from the Soviet Union, from Venezuela, and from other allied states over the decades. The embargo does not explain why a country with Cuba's human capital and geographic advantages has failed to develop a functioning consumer economy after six decades of communist governance. The economic model explains it.²⁵

Venezuela is the most recent and in some ways the most instructive case study, because it unfolded in real time and in a country that had no excuse for poverty. Venezuela possesses the largest proven oil reserves in the world. In 1970 it had one of the highest per capita incomes in Latin America. Hugo Chavez came to power in 1999 on a platform of socialist redistribution, nationalizing industries, implementing price controls, and directing oil revenues toward social programs rather than economic diversification or institutional development. His successor Nicolas Maduro continued and deepened those policies. By 2024 Venezuela's economy had contracted by more than 75 percent from its peak. Hyperinflation at various points exceeded one million percent annually. An estimated 7.7 million Venezuelans -- roughly a quarter of the population -- had fled the country as economic refugees by 2024, representing one of the largest displacement crises in the Western Hemisphere's history.²⁶

North Korea requires little elaboration beyond what has already been documented. It is the most isolated and most comprehensively communist economy in the world, and it is one of the poorest. An estimated 42 percent of its population is undernourished according to United Nations data. Its per capita GDP, on the limited estimates available, places it among the lowest in Asia.²⁷

Two Roads: Poland and Venezuela

Perhaps no comparison in the modern economic record makes the argument more cleanly than placing Poland and Venezuela side by side. They are not ancient history. Both transformations unfolded within the lifetimes of people alive today, and both are fully documented in World Bank and International Monetary Fund data available to anyone.

Poland spent four decades under Soviet-imposed communist governance following World War Two. Its economy was centrally planned, its political opposition was suppressed, and its citizens lived under the same structural constraints that defined life across the Eastern Bloc. In 1989, following the Solidarity movement's historic electoral victory, Poland began one of the most dramatic economic transitions in modern history. It implemented a rapid shift to market capitalism, opened its economy to foreign investment, rebuilt its legal and institutional frameworks around private property and contract law, and joined the European Union in 2004. The results are documented in World Bank data. Poland's GDP per capita grew from approximately $1,700 in 1990 to over $18,000 by 2023. It was the only European Union economy to avoid recession during the 2008 global financial crisis. It has lifted millions of its citizens out of poverty within a single generation.²⁸

Venezuela began that same era with genuine advantages. Oil wealth, an educated middle class, and established institutions gave it a foundation Poland could not match in 1990. It then chose the opposite path. By 2024 Poland's per capita GDP was approximately eight times that of Venezuela's. A country that emerged from communist devastation in 1989 had, within 35 years, built an economy that dwarfed one that had started with the largest proven oil reserves in the world and systematically destroyed them through socialist and communist economic policy.²⁸

That comparison is not cherry-picked. It is the general pattern. The countries that have produced the most dramatic and sustained reductions in poverty in the modern era -- South Korea, Taiwan, Chile, the former Eastern Bloc nations that transitioned to market economies -- did so by moving away from centralized state control of the economy, not toward it. China's own economic rise, frequently cited by communist sympathizers as evidence that the ideology can produce prosperity, is in fact evidence of the opposite. China's dramatic reduction in poverty since the 1980s began precisely when Deng Xiaoping began dismantling Mao's communist economic policies and introducing market mechanisms, private enterprise, and foreign investment. The Chinese Communist Party has retained its political monopoly. But the economic system that generated China's growth is not communism. It is state capitalism, and the distinction is not a minor one.²⁹

The evidence presented in the two preceding sections raises a question that deserves a direct answer. Communism has been implemented across dozens of countries, on every inhabited continent, in cultures as different from one another as Russia and Cambodia, Cuba and Ethiopia, China and East Germany. It has been led by figures with vastly different personalities, backgrounds, and stated intentions. And yet the outcomes -- mass political violence, economic stagnation, the concentration of power in an unaccountable governing class, and the suppression of the freedoms the ideology claimed to deliver -- have been consistent across all of them. That consistency is not coincidence. It is a structural consequence of what the ideology requires in practice.

Communism's central economic premise is the abolition of private property and the collective ownership of the means of production. In practice this means the state, acting in the name of the collective, controls what is produced, in what quantities, at what prices, and distributed to whom. This requires an administrative apparatus of extraordinary scale and complexity. It requires thousands or millions of bureaucratic decisions to substitute for the billions of decentralized decisions that price signals coordinate automatically in market economies. The information problem inherent in central planning -- identified theoretically by economist Friedrich Hayek as early as 1945 -- is not a correctable design flaw. It is intrinsic to the system.³⁰

When central planning produces shortages and failures, as it invariably does, the governing apparatus faces a choice. It can acknowledge the failure and reform the system, which requires tolerating the political opposition that honest accounting of failure tends to generate. Or it can suppress the reporting of failure, eliminate the critics, and maintain control by force. Every communist government in history has chosen the second path. The logic is not incidental. It is built into the structure of a system in which economic and political power are held by the same institution with no independent counterbalance. In a functioning democracy with a market economy, an opposition party can campaign on economic failure and win power. In a communist state, economic failure is by definition a political threat to the party's legitimacy, and the party controls the mechanisms of both the economy and the state. Dissent is therefore not merely unwelcome. It is existential. And it gets treated accordingly.

This is why the promised withering away of the state -- the theoretical endpoint of Marxist doctrine in which the coercive apparatus of government becomes unnecessary once class conflict is resolved -- has never occurred and cannot occur under the conditions communist governance creates. The state does not wither. It grows, because the suppression of the contradictions generated by central planning requires an ever-expanding apparatus of enforcement. The Gulag was not an aberration from Soviet communism. It was a structural requirement of it. The Killing Fields were not a deviation from the Khmer Rouge's program. They were its logical expression. The political prisoners in Cuban jails are not a regrettable side effect of the revolution. They are the mechanism by which the revolution sustains itself against the reality of its own failures.

Young Americans who are drawn to communist ideas because they are genuinely troubled by inequality, by debt, by the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small class of elites, deserve to have this structural argument made clearly and directly to them. Because the system they are considering as a remedy does not dissolve concentrated power. It concentrates it further, removes every institutional check on its exercise, and then eliminates the people who object to what follows. The elites do not disappear under communism. They get new titles.

There is a category of evidence on the reality of communist governance that no poll, no academic study, and no think tank report can replicate. It is the testimony of the people who lived under it, survived it, and in many cases crossed oceans and abandoned everything they owned to escape it. That testimony exists in the United States in extraordinary abundance, because the United States has been the primary destination for refugees fleeing communist regimes for more than seventy years. It is, with striking consistency, ignored in the campus discussions and social media communities where communist sympathy is currently gaining its strongest foothold.

The Cuban exile community in the United States is among the most documented and politically active refugee populations in American history. Following Fidel Castro's revolution in 1959, an estimated 1.4 million Cubans fled the island over subsequent decades, settling primarily in South Florida, New Jersey, and New York. They left behind confiscated properties, imprisoned family members, and in many cases executed relatives. Representative Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida, the daughter of Cuban exiles and the primary sponsor of the Crucial Communism Teaching Act, described her family's experience as the direct motivation for her legislative work. In a statement accompanying the bill's passage through the House in December 2024, she noted that the United States district she represents is home to exiles from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and other countries that have lived under the ideologies her legislation was designed to ensure American students understand.³¹

The Vietnamese American community tells a parallel story. Following the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the unification of Vietnam under communist governance, an estimated 800,000 to 1.2 million Vietnamese fled the country by sea between 1975 and 1995, a population that became known internationally as the boat people. The conditions they fled -- re-education camps, collectivization, political persecution, and economic collapse -- are documented in the records of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and in the testimonies of survivors collected by human rights organizations over subsequent decades. An estimated 200,000 to 400,000 people died at sea attempting the crossing, according to the UNHCR.³²

The Cambodian American community carries perhaps the heaviest testimony of all. The survivors of the Khmer Rouge genocide who resettled in the United States, concentrated heavily in communities in California, Massachusetts, and Minnesota, arrived having lost on average between a quarter and a half of their extended family members to execution, starvation, and forced labor in fewer than four years. The Documentation Center of Cambodia has spent decades collecting survivor testimony and forensic evidence from the Killing Fields. That testimony is available, published, and accessible. It is not consulted in the social media recruitment pipelines of the Revolutionary Communists of America.³³

The more recent wave of Venezuelan refugees adds a contemporary dimension to this record that cannot be attributed to Cold War politics or American imperial intervention. Venezuela's collapse has been documented in real time, by international journalists, by the United Nations, by the World Food Programme, and by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The approximately 7.7 million Venezuelans who had fled their country by 2024 did not leave because of American sanctions or media bias. They left because the shelves were empty, the hospitals had no medicine, the electrical grid had failed, and the government that promised them liberation from capitalist exploitation had delivered instead a level of deprivation that the country had never experienced even at its poorest.²⁶

What is striking about all of these communities -- Cuban, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Venezuelan -- is the consistency of their political response to the communist sympathy they encounter in their adopted country. It is not primarily anger, though anger would be understandable. It is incomprehension. The inability to reconcile what they know from lived experience with what they hear celebrated in university lecture halls and social media comment sections represents a cultural and epistemic gap that this country has not found a serious way to bridge. A 2020 survey by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found that only 57 percent of American millennials believed the Declaration of Independence better guaranteed freedom and equality than the Communist Manifesto.³⁴

The Crucial Communism Teaching Act, passed by the House of Representatives on December 6, 2024 by a vote of 327 to 62, was in part a legislative acknowledgment that this testimony is not reaching the Americans who most need to hear it. The bill tasked the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation with developing a high school curriculum that would include, among other things, oral history resources titled "Portraits in Patriotism" -- personal testimonies from survivors of communist regimes. It passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in the House. It stalled in the Senate. The testimony exists. The question is whether the institutions responsible for educating the next generation of Americans have any genuine interest in delivering it.³⁵

In April of 1965, Paul Harvey told his radio audience what it would look like if a deliberate campaign were waged to erode the foundations of American civic life from the inside. He described an effort that would target the young specifically, that would work through the institutions trusted to educate and inform them, and that would operate not through dramatic revolution but through the patient normalization of ideas that previous generations would have recognized and rejected immediately. He was not describing a communist conspiracy. He was describing a cultural and institutional drift, and he was asking his audience to consider how far along that drift had already traveled. Sixty years later, the polling data, the campus surveys, the membership figures of openly communist organizations, and the documented trajectory of American higher education suggest that the drift Harvey described has not reversed. It has accelerated.¹

The university system is the most significant institutional factor in the normalization of communist and socialist ideology among young Americans, and the evidence for that conclusion is not circumstantial. It is structural and documented. A 2022 study published in Econ Journal Watch examining the voter registration of faculty at 40 leading American universities found a Democrat to Republican ratio of approximately 9 to 1 across all departments, rising to ratios exceeding 30 to 1 in fields including sociology, anthropology, and communications.³⁶

The curriculum choices that flow from that ideological composition matter. The historical record of communist regimes -- the body counts, the famines, the labor camps, the systematic elimination of political opposition -- is not a required subject of study in the standard American university curriculum in the way that, for example, the Holocaust is. A student can complete a four-year degree at most American universities without ever encountering a serious academic treatment of the Gulag, the Great Leap Forward, or the Killing Fields in any required coursework. They are, however, very likely to encounter serious academic treatments of capitalism's historical failures, of colonialism, of systemic inequality, and of the exploitative dimensions of market economies. That asymmetry is not a neutral pedagogical choice. It produces graduates who have been equipped with a detailed critical framework for evaluating one economic system and almost no comparative framework for evaluating the alternative they are increasingly being asked to consider.

The Florida state legislature recognized this gap explicitly in 2024 when it passed a law mandating the teaching of communism's history in public schools. Texas revised its K-8 curriculum framework in 2025 to place greater emphasis on the principles of the American founding and the documented record of alternative systems.³⁷ These legislative responses have been criticized by educators and civil liberties organizations as politically motivated curriculum interference, and those criticisms deserve acknowledgment -- there are legitimate concerns about government-mandated ideological content in public education. But the underlying recognition that drove those legislative actions is accurate: American students are not, as a general matter, receiving a historically grounded education about what communism has produced, and the institutions that should be providing that education have demonstrated no particular urgency to do so on their own.

Social media has compounded the university's influence by providing a recruitment and normalization infrastructure that operates with no institutional accountability whatsoever. The Revolutionary Communists of America reported receiving more than 6,000 online membership applications over a 16-month period ending in early 2025, the overwhelming majority generated through social media outreach on platforms including TikTok, Instagram, and X.¹¹ The American Communist Party, founded in July 2024, recruited the bulk of its initial membership through social media, with its own internal critics noting that many members had no prior experience in political organizing and whose primary form of party participation was online activity rather than community engagement.¹²

The combination of a university environment that normalizes socialist and communist ideas as legitimate intellectual frameworks, a K-12 system that has historically provided little rigorous education about communist governance's documented record, and a social media ecosystem that packages the ideology's promises while omitting its consequences has produced precisely the conditions Paul Harvey described in 1965. He said he would work through the schools. He said he would work through the media. He said he would target the young specifically, because the young had not yet lived enough history to recognize what they were being offered. He said he would do it quietly, through normalization rather than confrontation, because confrontation generates resistance and normalization does not.

Harvey was a radio commentator, not a prophet. He was describing patterns he observed in his own time and extrapolating their trajectory. But the extrapolation has held. The institutions he identified as vectors of cultural erosion -- education and media -- are the same institutions that the polling data, the campus surveys, and the membership figures of openly communist organizations identify as the primary drivers of the trend this piece is documenting. He saw it coming in 1965. The evidence suggests that in the six decades since, the institutions responsible for ensuring it did not arrive have not done their job.

The United States government has not been entirely silent on the question of rising communist sympathy among its youngest citizens. There have been legislative responses, state-level curriculum mandates, and institutional acknowledgments that the trend documented in this piece represents a genuine civic concern. Those responses deserve examination -- both for what they get right and for what they conspicuously fail to address.

The most significant federal legislative action on this question in recent years was the Crucial Communism Teaching Act, introduced in the House of Representatives by Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida on September 5, 2023. The bill had a straightforward mandate. It tasked the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation with developing a high school curriculum that would ensure American students understood three specific things: that communism has led to the deaths of over 100 million people worldwide, that the ideology poses documented dangers to human freedom and dignity, and that approximately 1.5 billion people still live under communist governance as of the present day. The curriculum was to include oral history resources drawn from survivor testimony, comparative discussions of political ideologies, and materials compatible with existing social studies, history, government, and economics courses.³⁵

The bill passed the House of Representatives on December 6, 2024 by a vote of 327 to 62. That margin is worth pausing on. It was not a partisan vote. A bill passing the House of Representatives with 327 votes in the current political environment represents a level of bipartisan agreement that is genuinely rare. Representative Tim Walberg of Michigan, a Republican, spoke on the House floor and cited the polling data directly, noting that one in five millennials and one in three members of Gen Z hold a positive view of communism and describing that data as troubling.³⁵

The bill then went to the Senate, where it died without a vote.

That outcome is not a minor procedural footnote. It is a precise illustration of the gap between the recognition of a problem and the institutional will to address it. The Senate's failure to act on a bill that passed the House with 327 votes, with bipartisan support, with a narrow and clearly defined mandate, and at a moment when the polling data justifying its existence was being reported in newspapers across the country, is the kind of institutional failure that young Americans who are losing faith in the system point to as evidence that the system does not work. They are not wrong about the failure. They are drawing the wrong conclusion about the remedy.

At the state level, Florida enacted a law in 2024 mandating the teaching of communism's history in public schools. Texas revised its K-8 social studies curriculum framework in 2025 to place greater emphasis on the principles of the American founding and the documented record of alternative governing systems. Florida's Hamilton Center at the University of Florida and Florida International University's Adam Smith Center for Economic Freedom received a combined $25 million in state appropriations in the 2025-26 budget cycle to develop civic education programming rooted in constitutional principles and economic freedom.³⁷

These state-level responses reflect a genuine recognition of the problem. They also reflect its primary limitation: they are responses to the ideological symptom rather than the economic conditions producing it. A curriculum mandate that teaches the history of communist atrocities is a necessary and overdue intervention in American civic education. It is not, by itself, a response to $1.7 trillion in student debt. It is not a housing policy. It does not address the wage stagnation documented in Section 4 of this piece or the wealth concentration confirmed by Federal Reserve data. A young American who graduates from a school that has taught them about the Gulag and the Killing Fields but who still cannot afford a home, still carries $37,000 in student loan debt, and still watches productivity gains flow exclusively to the top of the income distribution has been given an accurate historical education. They have not been given a reason to believe the system they live under is capable of addressing their actual circumstances.

This is the central failure of the institutional response to rising communist sympathy in the United States, and it is a failure that implicates both parties equally. The Republicans who championed the Crucial Communism Teaching Act are, in the main, the same legislators who have opposed the student debt relief, housing policy interventions, and wage floor increases that would address the economic conditions making the ideology appealing in the first place. The Democrats who have rhetorically championed those economic interventions are, in the main, the same legislators whose Senate majority allowed the Crucial Communism Teaching Act to die without a vote while doing insufficient to deliver the economic relief they promised. Neither party has offered a coherent, sustained response that addresses both the ideological and the economic dimensions of the problem simultaneously.

The institutional response to date has treated rising communist sympathy primarily as an education problem. It is that. But it is also an economic problem, a policy failure problem, and a credibility problem -- a problem rooted in the documented inability of the governing institutions of the United States to deliver on the promises they have made to the generation now reaching political maturity. Fixing the curriculum is necessary. It is not sufficient.

Opinion

The evidence assembled in this piece points toward a conclusion that is neither comfortable for the left nor for the right, which is perhaps the surest sign that it is an honest one. Communist sympathy is rising among young Americans. It is rising because the conditions that make radical ideologies appealing -- economic insecurity, institutional failure, the perception that the system is structurally incapable of delivering on its promises -- have been allowed to develop and deepen over decades of bipartisan negligence. And it is rising toward an ideology that has produced, without a single exception in its entire documented history, political repression, economic devastation, and the mass killing of the people it claimed to liberate.

Both of those things are true simultaneously. Holding them both in view at once is the only intellectually honest position available, and it is the only position from which a genuinely effective response can be constructed.

The answer is not to tell young Americans that their grievances are fabricated. They are not fabricated. The student debt crisis is real. The wage stagnation is real. The housing affordability collapse is real. The concentration of wealth at the top of the income distribution is real and documented by the federal government's own data. A political response that dismisses those conditions as the complaints of a generation that simply needs to work harder will not persuade anyone who is living inside them, and it will drive more of them toward the people who are at least willing to acknowledge that something is genuinely wrong. The right's reflexive tendency to treat any acknowledgment of economic inequality as a concession to socialism is not a defense of capitalism. It is an abdication of the responsibility to make capitalism's actual case.

That case, made honestly, is a strong one. The evidence that market economies produce better outcomes for more people than centrally planned ones is not a matter of ideological opinion. It is documented in the economic trajectories of every country that has made the transition in either direction. Poland chose markets and built an economy that has lifted millions out of poverty within a single generation. Venezuela chose state control of a resource-rich economy and produced one of the largest humanitarian displacement crises in the Western Hemisphere's history. South Korea and North Korea began the postwar period as the same country, with the same culture, the same language, and the same starting conditions. One chose markets and became one of the most prosperous nations in Asia. The other chose communism and produced a population in which an estimated 42 percent are chronically undernourished. These are not talking points. They are documented outcomes, and they deserve to be stated plainly and repeatedly to every young American who is being told that the ideology responsible for North Korea's food crisis is the solution to their student debt.

The answer is also not to pretend that the American system as currently functioning is delivering on its founding promises. It is not, for a significant and growing portion of its population, and the people responsible for that failure sit in both parties. The Democratic Party has spent decades positioning itself as the champion of working Americans while presiding over the financialization of the economy, the expansion of a student loan architecture that enriched universities at the expense of graduates, and a housing policy vacuum that has made homeownership generationally inaccessible for millions. The Republican Party has spent decades positioning itself as the defender of American values while opposing the wage, debt, and housing interventions that would give the generation most susceptible to communist recruitment a concrete, material reason to believe in the system those values are meant to sustain. Both parties have failed the generation the polls are now identifying as lost.

The path forward requires action on both fronts at once, because the ideological and the economic problems are not separable. The Crucial Communism Teaching Act's mandate must be completed. The Senate that allowed that bill to die without a vote while the House passed it 327 to 62 owes its constituents an explanation for that failure. The survivor testimony documented in Section 6 of this piece needs to be in American classrooms, not because it serves a political agenda but because it is true, and because the young Americans being recruited into communist organizations on social media are encountering the ideology's promises with no historical counterweight.

At the same time, the economic conditions documented in Section 4 require a policy response that is serious, sustained, and bipartisan in its accountability. Student loan reform that addresses both existing debt burdens and the underlying tuition inflation architecture that created them. Housing policy that addresses supply constraints at the local and federal level. Labor policy that closes the documented gap between productivity growth and wage growth that has characterized the American economy for four decades. These are not socialist proposals. They are the kind of structural corrections that functioning market democracies make when their institutions drift too far from the conditions required to maintain broad public confidence in the system.

Paul Harvey ended his broadcast with a line that has stayed with listeners for sixty years. He said that if he were the devil, he would just keep right on doing what he is doing. The implication was clear. The erosion he described was not hypothetical. It was already underway. The question he left hanging was whether the people listening would do anything about it.

The polling data suggests the drift has continued. The historical record suggests the stakes of allowing it to continue are not abstract. And the political record of the last several decades suggests that neither party has yet found the will to address both dimensions of the problem with the seriousness it requires. That is not a reason for despair. It is a reason for demand -- a demand from the citizens of this country, particularly its youngest ones, that the institutions which have failed them on both fronts be made to reckon with that failure before the ideology that has never once delivered on its promises gets any further foothold in the country that has, for all its documented failures, done more to demonstrate the possibility of self-governance and broadly shared prosperity than any other in modern history.

The graves of communism's 100 million victims are the most eloquent argument against the ideology ever assembled. They deserve to be heard.