Communism In America

By CDR Breck Henderson, US Navy veteran

Communism should be dead and buried. It’s been 33 years since the USSR officially dissolved in 1991 after 74 years of dismal economic failure and unspeakable terror against its citizens.

In his book The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purges of the Thirties, published in 1968, Robert Conquest estimated that Stalin murdered through starvation or direct execution more than 20 million people.

None of the promises of Communism were delivered anywhere the USSR ruled, nor in other states that emulated it. Cuba, North Korea and China, among others, joined Russia in the Communist totalitarian experiment.

Only China relaxed its totalitarian grip and insistence on Marxist economics with the death of Mao in 1976. Today China enjoys a measure of economic success brought about by a capitalist approach. The others remain failed totalitarian states.

So I was gobsmacked recently when I clicked on a link in an article I was reading that took me to the Communist Party USA’s website. Check it out — you’ll be amazed by what you find.

CPUSA has an agenda for 2024, headlined as “The People’s Agenda.” As I read through the Agenda’s items, it was immediately apparent that today’s Democrat Party is perfectly aligned with today’s Communist Party.

Here’s a bullet list of CPUSA’s agenda for 2024:

Protect Reproductive Rights
Medicare for All
Green New Deal
A Peace Agenda — Defined as a ceasefire in Gaza and cuts to our defense budget
Community Control of the Police — A euphemism for “Defund the Police”
Voting Rights —Includes all the programs the Left is pursuing from Ranked Choice Voting to statehood for Washington D.C.
Comprehensive Immigration Reform — Another euphemism for an open border policy
A Worker’s Rights Agenda —Overturning “Right-to-Work” laws and national “living wage”
Housing for People, Not Profit — Basically, make housing a government paid entitlement
Childcare and Public Education — More entitlements paid for by government, including college

In separate documents, CPUSA apparently leads the charge in slandering the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” framework. You know you’re on the right track when they go to so much trouble to shoot down what is clearly a plan to roll back unconstitutional progressive programs in government.

In a book published in 2003, In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage by John Earl Hynes and Harvey Klehr, the authors describe in detail how historians, meaning university history professors, continue to deny the atrocities and failures of Communism.

“Communism as a pleasant figment of the “progressive” worldview lives on, giving a phantom life to the illusions and historical distortions that sustained that murderous and oppressive ideology.

The intellectual Cold War, alas, is not over.

Academic revisionists who color the history of American communism in benign hues see their teaching and writing as the preparation of a new crop of radicals for the task of overthrowing American capitalism and its democratic constitutional order in name of social justice and peace.”

That effort is still underway 20 years later, as these academics have succeeded in “preparing a new crop of radicals.” We’re seeing them in the streets today supporting terrorist organizations in the Middle East, and we saw them in action during the George Floyd riots of 2020.

We know from many years of her statements and policy preferences that Kamala Harris is extreme Left. What we don’t know is how intertwined with CPUSA she and her advisors are. It’s hard to know which came first, the Democrat Party agenda or the CPUSA agenda. Obviously there is a great deal of synergy between them, so it probably doesn’t much matter who’s driving the bus.

Radicals long ago dropped their plans for a Bolshevik-style revolution of the proletariat in the United States. They have instead opted for a slower, less violent, step-by-step approach to implementing communist rule modeled after the Fabian Socialist program in Britain in the 20th century.

I think it would be safe to assume that CPUSA has softened it’s programs to conform more closely with the Democrats, but as each step unfolds — and electing Kamala Harris President would be a big step — the more radical Communist agenda will be revived.

One more thing. In the October issue of Commentary, the cover stories are “Israel and Ukraine: Why Won’t We Let Them Win?” The authors point out all the ways the Biden – Harris administration has hindered the Ukrainians during their war against Russia and the Israelis during their battle with Iranian terrorist proxies that surround them.

As we know, President Biden has insisted on ceasefires and threatened to delay weapons shipments to Israel instead of encouraging them to fight the war in a way that will bring victory. It’s been the same with Ukraine — Biden sends them too little, too late with too many restrictions.

The answer is probably rooted in CPUSA dogma, which holds that the United States is an aggressive, imperialist power that must be constrained from spreading the evils of capitalism and corporate greed to the whole world.

The U.S. is thus the source of all evil and must be defeated and dismantled — Israel especially but also Ukraine are viewed as American proxies. I’m not saying that your average Democrat, or even Biden and Harris are completely bought in to this dogmatic view.

But we know Biden’s mind has long since faded away, and I’d bet the farm that there are advisors around him who are ardent progressives with a great deal of sympathy toward this communist-inspired worldview.

We’ll have to see how this election plays out. Just the fact that CPUSA is an enthusiastic supporter of Harris – Walz would have been enough to sink their hopes for gaining power 35 years ago, but today it’s not a factor.

That should tell us a lot about how far down a dangerous road we are.

First published on Breck Henderson’s Substack