Victor Davis Hanson: Is ‘Communist’ No Longer a Slur?
Progressive policy ambitions meet practical realities as Americans weigh costs and consequences.
Twenty years ago a Democrat caught anywhere near the word "communist" would have spent a week issuing clarifications. Now some of them are wearing it like a badge. Hanson's piece is worth sitting with because the shift isn't rhetorical anymore, it's showing up in actual policy proposals: rent control that functions as property seizure by another name, government "ownership stakes" in private grocery stores, price-setting boards.
New Republican Times Editorial Board
It is not difficult, these days, to see the neo-communist flipside of “democratic socialists”—once they find power. Indeed, the more the ossified Democratic Party claims that its growing cadre of socialist renegades are not really socialists, the more they act like—and even appear comfortable being called—communists.
With every new policy they propose, the socialists have
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Twenty years ago a Democrat caught anywhere near the word "communist" would have spent a week issuing clarifications. Now some of them are wearing it like a badge. Hanson's piece is worth sitting with because the shift isn't rhetorical anymore, it's showing up in actual policy proposals: rent control that functions as property seizure by another name, government "ownership stakes" in private grocery stores, price-setting boards. These aren't fringe daydreams anymore. They're platform planks from people who won primaries in the country's biggest city and who other Democrats are now scrambling to either embrace or dodge.
What's striking is how little defending of the word itself is happening. Nobody's insisting communism is good, actually. They're just refusing to flinch when it's used to describe them, which is its own kind of tell. When a label loses its sting, it's usually because the people it describes have decided the label costs them nothing with the people they need to win.
The old Democratic Party spent decades building distance from that history for good reason. Cuba, Venezuela, the Soviet bloc, these aren't abstractions to the millions of immigrants who fled them and became reliably anti-socialist voters in South Florida and elsewhere. Every time a rising figure in the party shrugs off the "communist" tag instead of rejecting it outright, that history gets a little more theoretical to the people currently deciding how to run cities.
Words drift, sure. But this one used to carry a warning, and warnings only work while people still take them seriously.
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.