Red Scare

“Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity.”

-Joseph McCarthy

The establishment media is increasingly atwitter about the ascendency of the Democratic Socialists within the Democratic Party.

That's the mayor of my favorite city, Zohran Mamdani, flanked by Mao and Lenin. Those two were responsible for the deaths of in excess of 50 million human beings. Zohran just wants to make groceries affordable and universal daycare available in a city filled with young mothers trying to scratch out a living. The Marxist Mount Rushmore image seems, then, a little over the top.

And yet this morning Axios, which provides a daily feed to my email, featured yet another of its "Big Ideas" essays on the dangers posed by the rise of the DSA movement. The notion is that they're every bit as toxic as MAGA at its worst, so something has to be done to keep them out of power.

https://www.axios.com/2026/07/28/trump-socialism-stages-of-political-surrender

Really? Just like MAGA, you say?

Let's explore that a little.

To be sure, some of the DSA leadership has articulated some pretty detestable views, mostly directed at Israel. There is no justifying October 7th. Full stop. For anyone to say that the systematic murder and rape of innocent civilians by Hamas, an act that showed zero regard for the consequences that would follow for their own people, was somehow justified by Israel's policies toward the Palestinians, is simply beyond the pale. But a lot of DSA leaders, to their credit, immediately came out strongly against this bit of moral legerdemain. And calling the Israeli response genocidal, and suggesting Netanyahu should be arrested as a war criminal, are both positions well-supported by objective fact in Gaza and now on the West Bank.

So yes, the anti-Israel rhetoric has been at times shameful. But is this just a mirror-image of MAGA?

I don't hear any DSA candidates suggesting they cram their religion down our throats.

I don't hear any DSA candidates declaring in the public space that this nation was established for their race only.

I don't hear any DSA candidates calling for the murder of the press or their political opponents.

I don't hear any DSA candidates staking out a policy position that women should be stripped of the right to do much of anything besides breed and vacuum.

I don't hear any DSA candidates saying in the same space that they want to abandon our international commitments, while at the same time using the power of the U.S. military to murder our international adversaries.

I don't find in the DSA policy statements anything about sending armed goons into our cities to round up the poor and the brown.

I don't hear anything about the DSA wanting to subvert our electoral laws to disenfranchise whole swaths of the population based on race or gender.

So no, I don't think we're dealing with some sort of left-wing MAGA movement.

If that's the case, why is the political establishment, on both sides, so afraid of these people?

For starters, I'm not convinced they're afraid at all. Yelling "commie" in the American political space has been a time-honored political scare tactic for over a century now. No one ever truly believes that there's a realistic prospect of a Leninist takeover of the means of production (although DJT has done a pretty fine job at that, in the name of capitalism, or more accurately corporatist fascism, in the government's takeover of some pretty big industrial players in this country). The average American citizen was educated in the average American school, which means he or she has no idea what a communist believes, but grandpappy told 'em commies are bad, and that's good enough to hate.

To the extent there is fear, or at least discomfort, over the rise of the DSA, it's more likely the realization that the nearly fifty years of bad policy begun with Reagan has finally come home to roost. You don't have to travel too far forward from my generation to find younger adults who can't afford college, can't afford to buy a house, are stuck in a labor force with shrinking rights and shrinking prospects for ever getting ahead. By all accounts, it sucks right now to be 25 or 35 or even 45. MAGA tapped into that with relatively undereducated white men, tapped into their sense of grievance that the racial and gender entitlement their fathers enjoyed had been stolen from them. As we baby boomers start increasingly going over the rainbow bridge, blowing that inheritance the kids were counting on in our final health crises, it's not unrealistic to sense that the generations behind us aren't going to be satisfied with a life spent creating shareholder value for some corporate behemoth so grandpa can spend the dividends down at the golf course.

Also, let's face it, we've been a socialist country for nearly a century now, just not a very good one of late. We have a rather tattered social safety net, from retirement and disability income to basic health care. Or at least we had all that until recently. The fundamental difference between the socialist vision and the dystopia the current regime has created is how to pay for it--the socialists make no bones about their plan to aggressively and progressively tax income and wealth (two different concepts), while the bipartisan do-nothing squad currently in charge has relied on a combination of debt and steady economic growth to shield those most able from paying the cost of our crappy socialist structure. But most of that economic growth comes, as most economists will tell you, from a rising population, and we've done away with that through ICE raids and families failing to coalesce, in no small measure because the economic prospects of those would-be couples are so very bad.

So now that borrowing our way to social stability by providing just enough of a safety net to stave off a revolution isn't working, the Rs want to dismantle what's left and go back to the pre-New Deal arrangement, while the DSA crowd wants to boldly re-think the social compact and turn to the Musks and Bezos's (and, let's face it, to people like P and me) to pay for it.

Perhaps there's good reason for the folks at Axios and the WSJ to be afraid, if those are the choices.