Commentary by Rich Corbett

In the decades since the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, too many younger Americans have come to view Marxist ideas not as a cautionary tale but as a fashionable alternative worth considering. From college campuses to city halls — where even some mayors have flirted openly with socialist rhetoric — the under-30 generation often sees “equity” and state-directed economics as compassionate solutions to inequality. They know little of the gulags, the engineered famines that killed millions of Ukrainian kulaks, Mao’s Cultural Revolution or the drab, hopeless lines for bread in communist capitals. Raised in a post-Cold War world of smartphones and social media, they mistake the sanitized slogans of “democratic socialism” for something new and humane. This historical amnesia is dangerous. It erodes the hard-won understanding that communism is not a noble experiment gone wrong, but a proven destroyer of human freedom.

Liberty and free-market democracy have delivered the very prosperity and opportunity that critics now take for granted. Private property, individual rights and limited government, rooted in America’s founding principles and reinforced by Judeo-Christian morality, created the most dynamic economy and generous society in history. Contrast that with the communist record: State control of production led to chronic shortages, innovation stalled by bureaucrats and personal initiative crushed under the weight of the collective. Even China’s much-touted “market reforms” under Deng Xiaoping succeeded only where the Communist Party loosened its grip — yet Beijing still maintains one-party rule, surveillance and the power to dictate every citizen’s future. Sustainability, population control and utilitarian “greatest good” rhetoric may sound enlightened to academic elites, but they inevitably subordinate the individual to the state. History shows where that road leads: Not to utopia, but to tyranny.

Democracy without liberty is merely mob rule dressed up in nice slogans. America’s genius has always been the constitutional republic that protects the rights of the minority — even the single citizen — against the whims of the majority or the dictates of self-appointed experts. Communism, by design, rejects this. It replaces God-given rights with government-granted privileges, private enterprise with central planning and personal conscience with state-approved morality. The left’s long march through our institutions has normalized these ideas in one major party and much of the media. But the American people have rejected them before, and we must do so again — through education, honest debate and an unapologetic defense of the principles that made this republic exceptional.

The fight is not merely partisan, it is existential. Younger Americans deserve to hear the unvarnished truth about life under communism — not from dusty textbooks, but from the clear voices of those who remember the Iron Curtain and the boat people fleeing Castro’s paradise. We cannot afford complacency. Private property, individual liberty and faith in the Creator — not the state — remain the only proven path to human flourishing.

Resistance to the collectivist tide is not nostalgia; it is patriotism. Our heritage of freedom must be reclaimed, defended, and passed on, before another generation learns these lessons the hard way.

Corbett is contributing pundit for The Hustings. He writes on a variety of subjects at My Desultory Blog.