The fortunes of America’s self-described socialists are clearly on the rise, as DSA-backed candidates gain more media attention and come closer to being elected to office. The DSA really could rename itself the DCA without much pushback, as communism has lost a lot of its massive historical baggage in the minds of average American voters.
Photo via Rob Henderson’s Newsletter
Communism is on the rise in America. More than that: It is being celebrated.
With the midterm elections just over one month away, at least eight congressional candidates with avowedly socialist perspectives are poised to take office, polling well ahead of their opponents in states from New York to Colorado.
Think there’s no connection between socialism and communism? Think again. Nearly half of the members of the Democratic Socialists of America‘s (DSA) leadership body identify as communists. As Stu Smith reported earlier this summer, “Members with Communist political tendencies now significantly shape the DSA’s leadership”. In their December 2025 newsletter, members of the DSA’s Red Star Caucus celebrated Mao Zedong’s 132nd birthday.
All of which raises some natural questions: Where is this revolutionary romance coming from? And as it steadily seeps into our leadership class, where will it lead?
The best guide to understanding these questions is a book published more than 50 years ago under a pseudonym — because the author feared what pro-Maoist intellectuals would do to him if they discovered who wrote it.
Simon Leys, whose real name was Pierre Ryckmans, was a Belgian-Australian scholar of Chinese art and literature. In 1974, he published Chinese Shadows, a record of the cultural and political destruction he saw in China in the years just after the Cultural Revolution. The book is full of eerily relevant observations. One of them, which I will get to, is the most haunting thing I’ve read about what political terror does to the human soul. And nearly all of them describe habits of mind that didn’t die with Mao. In fact, they are now alive in America.
First, some background. In The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962-1976, the historian Frank Dikötter explains how it began. Mao Zedong wanted to purge rivals at the top of the Communist Party. So he turned to radical students, giving them permission to denounce every authority except his own. Party officials egged on these young militants as they raided the homes of “class enemies” and turned them into social outcasts. What followed was violence, looting, the legitimization of hatred, and the denunciation of family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers.
When the resulting catastrophe became impossible to deny, Mao and the regime’s officials disavowed their own shock troops, claiming that an “extreme left” had been responsible for the atrocities.
Sound familiar? Americans witnessed a milder version of this in the summer of 2020. Rioting and looting that year caused between $1 billion and $2 billion in damages. As this transpired, prominent voices in politics and media minimized the destruction. And some leading officials quickly insisted that the destruction was not the work of their own residents. Minnesota governor Tim Walz, later the 2024 Democratic nominee for vice president, estimated that 80 percent of those causing damage came from out of state, while Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey declared that “the people that are doing this are not Minneapolis residents”. Jail records showed the opposite.
If the scale is different, the pattern is the same: indulgence first, followed by disingenuous disavowal after the damage is done.
