Communism Is Sneaking Up on Us Americans; In Fact, It’s Nipping at Our Heels

“The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism,” goes the apocryphal saying generally attributed to six-time presidential candidate Norman Thomas. “But, under the name of ‘liberalism,’ they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”

While this line’s origin is dubious, the prediction has been shown to be prescient, say many. And one of these observers, media analyst and law professor James Hirsen, has sounded an alarm.

“Our crawl to communism has us practically there,” he warns.

The signs are everywhere. A 2025 poll found that 62 percent of Gen Z’ers (ages 19-30) like socialism — and 34 percent have a positive view of communism. Whereas comic books once portrayed socialists and communists as villains, they’re now often presented sympathetically. Avowed socialist Hasan Piker, who has said “I like communism,” is currently a top left-wing political streamer and commentator. Reflecting this electorate indicator, there are now approximately 260-270 avowed socialists in office coast to coast, according to an AI analysis. And reading this dark room, the Democratic Party has begun openly embracing socialism.

Of course, this state of affairs would have been unthinkable in 1950s America. And what has happened since then to take us from McCarthy to Mao (or, at least, Mini-Mao)?

Anatomy of a Social Illness

Addressing this, Professor Hirsen first laments that as with Nazism, murderous communism should have been relegated to history’s dustbin. Instead, the ideological monster just took a different form. As he writes at Newsmax:

Just about the time when the 1970s counterculture appeared to be fading away, a quiet yet insidious revolution was set in motion here in the United States.

There was no red flag waving in the air bearing a hammer and sickle.

Rather, a long march through American universities began to take place.

New left radicals weren’t storming barricades.

Instead, they were earning PhDs.

Humanities and social science departments became ideological echo chambers.

Drawing from Antonio Gramsci’s theory on how the ruling class maintains power, and also the Frankfurt School’s critical theory that derided capitalism and promised social liberation, communist principles became the blueprint for how to deconstruct a societal framework, with the ultimate goal of supplanting it with a Marxist one.

From there, Hirsen proceeds to outline what most New American readers already know. Using techniques such as race-oriented divide-and-conquer tactics and masquerading under different names (e.g., progressivism), the left-wing moral/ideological rot infected other institutions. Yet these standard analyses miss much.

First, widespread “counterculture” movements may fade away, but their effects don’t. It’s as with a young woman living a dissolute lifestyle, sleeping around (maybe having an abortion), doing drugs, and drinking. She can later try to right the ship, marry, embrace the white-picket-fence ideal, and pursue respectability. But she still will almost assuredly experience deep and often irreversible psychological consequences resulting from her past. We may call this “having baggage.”

It’s similar with the extremely large group of people called a civilization. When the counterculture party is over, you don’t suddenly revert to, let’s say, an Ozzie and Harriet norm. You have baggage — sometimes Bolshevik-like.

Second, did this “revolution” really begin in the ’70s? Well, ponder the following passage:

Whether the future excellence lies in more law or less law, in more liberty or less liberty; whether property will be finally concentrated or finally cut up; whether sexual passion will reach its sanest in an almost virgin intellectualism or in a full animal freedom; whether we should love everybody with Tolstoy, or spare nobody with Nietzsche; — these are the things about which we are actually fighting most.

“Concentrated” or “cut up” property references the battle between socialist collectivism and the property-rights standard, of course. Yet, note:

The above excerpt is from G.K. Chesterton’s book Heretics — published in 1905.

The reality: Our “communism” issues, if you want to call them that, began on the heels of the Enlightenment (1685-1815). Why, socialism was born not long after that.

When the Inner Child Goes Untamed

Next, as per Hirsen, it’s common to blame our woes on ideologically corruptive academia. Schooling is significant, too. Something else also is, however, though it generally goes unmentioned. It’s something that begins molding character long before a child sets foot in a school: entertainment.

I explained this phenomenon in-depth in February, labeling the products of our corruptive popular culture low-virtue people (LVPs). This phenomenon is significant because people generally gravitate toward ideologies corresponding to their emotional foundations. Thus do individuals with corrupted emotional foundations usually glom onto corrupt ideologies.

Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke warned of this hundreds of years ago. “It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free,” he wrote. “Their passions forge their fetters.” As to the details, what follows are a couple of socialism-enabling examples from an essay I penned in 2008:

Consider, for instance, the strategy of playing one group against another. Why does such a callow ploy work? Well, let’s take the race card; if both majority and minority populations are just and view members of other races and ethnicities as children of God, they will be united by that ultimate brotherhood. If prejudice occupies a large place in man’s heart, however, there will always be the perception of real or imagined persecution, either because the minority is actually being oppressed or because it views the majority through colored glasses. It is likewise with the class-warfare card. If greed and envy find no home in our souls, it’s to no avail. If it’s otherwise, though, the rich will use their power to trample the modest, thereby abusing the system. Or the modest, in the grip of the green-eyed monster called avarice, will imagine they are being trampled. In any case, there is a division that can and will be exploited by demagogues.

The bottom line: It’s a mistake viewing “communism” as the ultimate threat. Something more foundational is, something that’s a category under which communism falls: evil. As long as sin is in the world, man will be susceptible to it. And when vice doesn’t just exist in a society but characterizes it, the Devil will reign — often under the guise of some oh-so-seductive ism.