Fish or Cut Red-Bait

No, Jonathan, Trump isn't a communist. And the communists aren't taking over.

Photo by Shuran Huang for The New York Times, June 2025.

peculiar bunch of statistics that has been making the rounds in the ongoing moral panic over the Democratic Socialists of America, whose successful endorsements in some recent elections and primaries have come as a shock to some writers, and led President Trump and colleagues to new flights of McCarthyism asserting that communists are "taking over" the Democratic party:

What Kraushaar could have found out by looking more closely at the Times link or preferably the survey itself is that he was reporting it completely wrong: :

The mistake is from typos in a report by Thomas Edsall of a 2024 survey of the organization’s Central New Jersey branch, covering six counties, which has been used to spread the story that “communists” have taken over the club. The Times corrected the error soon after publication, but Kraushaar apparently never checked. Anyway, it’s not 10.7% that identify as democratic socialists; that was the anarchists, as probably should have been obvious (an organization that calls itself “democratic socialists” should really have more democratic socialists in its membership, that’s what made me look it up myself). The democratic socialists are the 39.3%, and added together with the social democrats’ 8.9% (plus I think one cis man calling himself a “social liberal”) a bare majority of definitively non-communist members. The balance of 35.7 percent belong to an ice-cream parlor menu of “Marxists”, not necessarily “communists”.

Marxist members may or may not think of themselves as communists, but as far as I understand it the Orthodox Marxists, looking back to the prelapsarian era before the division between communists and social democrats, advocate the tactics practiced by Marx and Engels themselves, and then Karl Kautsky, the founder of social democracy, of building a democratic, broad-based workers’ movement to prepare for the inevitable moment when capitalism collapses from its own internal contradictions (which I have identified as having happened already, but not in a good way, in 1982, when John Gutfreund took the old Salomon Brothers firm public), while the Marxist-Leninists, sometimes known as “Tankies”, work in theory to create a proletarian vanguard that can catch the opportunity for revolution even in a country (like early 20th-century Russia or China) where capitalism has hardly developed. I’d say only the latter, just under 20% in the New Jersey survey, qualify as “communists” in the sense of the Cold War and its aftermath; the Orthodox Marxist 16% have much more in common with the socialists proper, democratic socialists and social democrats, for a total socialist majority of something like 66%. It’s not evidence of a communist takeover.

Another data point on the communist takeover narrative comes from Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic, now becoming a full-bore reds-under-the-bed theorist:

The DSA’s Red Star caucus [representing the Marxist-Leninist faction] was formed the year after the North Star caucus [seeking to revive the original Michael Harrington democratic socialism, in 2018], in an apparent rebuke. It writes [in a statement headlined, “Communists Belong in DSA”, suggesting that not everybody agrees] that nearly half of the members of the National Political Committee, the DSA’s highest leadership body, “openly identify as communists.”

And here’s our old friend David Brooks in his own new perch at The Atlantic, backing him up:

It’s not just a bunch of Michael Harrington types who want America to look more like Denmark. The hard-core left has taken over the organization. Apparently, almost half of the members of the DSA’s leadership body identifies as Communist.

But Red Star has an incentive to exaggerate, and a look at the ideological makeup of the body, the National Political Committee, after its 2025 election, suggests if it was true in 2024 it isn’t true any more: by my count, 17 of its 27 members belong to the traditional socialist/social democratic tendencies, from Orthodox Marxist on the “left” to reformist and ecosocialist factions on the “right”, leaving only the two Trotskyists (who most likely call themselves communists but deny that anybody else is one) and four anti-Zionist (one-issue) members as allies for the three Marxist-Leninists, and I doubt that they are really on the road to dominance. It’s the club of Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani now, services and sewer socialism instead of theory.

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Brooks’s argument that “Democrats Became Great By Fighting the Left”, focusing on the moment in 1946 when Hubert Humphrey and colleagues purged the communists from the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party seems to me to take an awfully narrow slice of time for its big moment. Brooks writes,

The Cold War liberals had opponents on both sides—the McCarthyite right and the Communist left. Fighting a two-front war is bad for an army but good for a political movement. Instead of settling for Manichaean us-versus-them categories, movements beset on both sides need to clearly define their own worldview, their own values, their own set of plans.

But that’s pretty much the opposite of what actually happened to regular liberalism in the Age of Anxiety: it made good dark comedy between Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, but it didn’t make plans (the best achievement of the period, the space program, was pure reaction to the Sputnik, not any thinking and defining at all, and the Interstate Highway System had been on General Eisenhower’s non-ideological mind since he was a lieutenant colonel in 1919).

I’d say the Democrats became great (after decades of decay in the reactionary South while the Republican North, West, and Northeast industrialized) in the mid-1930s, with the full-throated welcome of a leftist component after it decided to cooperate with Franklin Roosevelt’s efforts to combat the Great Depression and the fascist threat and successfully defeated both, setting the nation up (with a unionized working class) for its extraordinary prosperity after the war. The real achievement of the DFL in Humphrey’s Minneapolis wasn’t its turn against the communists but rather its embrace of another face of the left, the demand of people of color for civil rights, which inspired President Truman to the first vital move in civil rights in some 70 years, the integration of the US Armed Services, but it took a long time, and a lot of trauma (I’m thinking of the political assassinations of the 1960s) for that aspect of Democratic greatness to really get going though those anxious years Brooks wants us to glorify, and it was that anxiety, the constant fear of international communism on one side, and McCarthyite criticism on the other, that led to the Vietnam War and the consequent collapse of the civil rights movement.

The new rise of the DSA feels like another needed response to crises, those of the 2016 election, the COVID-19 pandemic, and consciousness of police brutality that exploded after the murder of George Floyd (from Ocasio-Cortez’s election in 2018 to Joe Biden’s in 2020). I wish I could get people to understand how socialist in a certain sense Biden’s Build Back Better program was, with the intensive industrial planning and attention to “good union jobs”, and how much better off we’d have been right now if we’d been able to carry it through.

Chait makes a trollish argument, also in The Atlantic, that President Donald Trump himself is a communist without knowing it:

Communism is a system of government in which the ruling party controls major investment decisions while hoarding wealth for itself and suppressing all opposition.

Nevertheless, Donald Trump professes to dislike it....

On closer inspection, however, Trump has more in common with Communists than his hostile rhetoric lets on. He has probably done more to expand public ownership of the means of production than any president in history.

Well, in my day, we learned in junior high (from ferociously anti-communist teachers, but they worked to get the definitions right) that communism is an economic system, not a political one, in some future world where everybody is equal and money has disappeared, and people work out of pure community spirit; and a communist party is one that works to bring about such a utopia, probably by working through a stage of socialism, another economic system in which the means of production would be owned by the people or the state, in such a way as to liberate the workers from exploitation by capital, not so the party could “hoard wealth for itself”.

Such a party could in principle be authoritarian or not. We American kids didn’t in those days know of any democratic communist governments, but there was no a priori reason that they couldn’t exist, and there have indeed been some, in the Indian states of Kerala and West Bengal, for instance, where instead of suppressing all opposition the governments held fair elections and quit when they lost, or the oldest of them all, in the Republic of San Marino, where a Communist-led coalition held power from 1945 until 1959, without nationalizing anything but three drugstores, and peacefully surrendering power when it was voted out. Remind me to tell you about it sometime.

Singapore, a somewhat authoritarian country with a well-earned reputation for being very friendly to capitalists, crazy rich Asians and others, owns around 90% of the country’s housing and healthcare industries, runs the food shopping and mass transit, controlling the prices of these essential needs. Italy, a very free country, developed its current riches with state ownership too, though it has been dumping it in recent years. State ownership is socialism, but it’s also a tool for achieving goals you might want to achieve, and its history isn’t all Russia (have you been to Communist Shanghai recently? Or even Ho Chi Minh City? These are fabulously well off places, though also cruelly unequal.)

Trump’s reasons for wanting to put American enterprises under state ownership have not been disclosed, but I can assure you that it’s not in the hope of bringing about an earthly paradise. He doesn’t have any designs on Intel or whatever, unlike Biden, whose programs in the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS and Science Act were intended for centralized industrial planning policy like the extremely successful policy in France in the 1950s and 60s. The Trump deals don’t give the state any power to to control anything. They are merely ten-percent passive ownership shares that Secretary Bessent could presumably sell if he thought America needed the money.

It’s really more like a government-run protection racket than anything that’s ever been identified as socialism or Scandinavian-style social democracy (which uses union power instead of state ownership to achieve its social aims); Trump does some favor the CEO wants (approving a bailout or a merger, for instance) and Bessent gets ten percent of its shares. I think I do know, in fact, what it’s for; like the tariffs, an initiative for eliminating progressive income tax and financing government through regressive means, import taxes and playing the market. I think it may have been his father’s dream (as the old man watched activist government interfere with his vicious and often criminal plans from the New Deal onwards), for which the arithmetic will never add up, of course.

Mayor Mamdani and President Ocasio-Cortez are never going to establish a secret police force or a gulag to hold their critics in. Trump is never going to make groceries affordable or give people access to good healthcare. (Nor will Putin, because, as I’ve been trying to show for year, he’s no socialist either. While the Soviet Union actually did provide excellent health care and education, if pretty awful food and housing and not a lot of freedom—now, Russians have lost their freedom and their healthcare both.) They come from totally different worlds and have totally different intentions. Learn the difference! Don’t confuse them like Chait.