25 Million Communists in America

43% of ‘students’ rate Communism favorably

35 years after the fall of the USSR the first official Communist DSA member, who admired Stalin, will likely be headed to Congress for the next term, in defiance of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment and the Communist Control Act. But who is out there voting for Communists?

Despite the countless millions dead at the hands of the Communist regimes, a significant portion of the electorate has a positive view of Communism as a political movement.

A recent Cato poll shows that more members of Gen Z, those born between 1997 and 2012, have a positive view of Communism than those who have a negative view with around a third splitting each way. Some of this can be attributed to social media propaganda, the educational system and popular culture and helps explain the young activists flocking to the DSA.

43% of ‘students’ rate Communism favorably and only 29% rate it unfavorably making it clear that the higher educational system isn’t just broken, it’s actively recruiting the next generation into extremism, domestic terrorism and totalitarian ideologies of the most terrible kind. This tracks with other polls showing campus support for violence and suppression of free speech.

The ‘Very Favorable’ rating for Communism of 15% by Gen Z and 13% for millennials is in sharp contrast to the 7% rating for Gen X and 2% rating for Baby Boomers who were once seen as the most radical generation. The Communist Party in the 1950s had only 50,000 official members while the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) which is run by Marxist and Communist caucuses already has more than double that many members.

Edgar Hoover’s estimates of Communists and fellow travelers stood at under half a million. The level of “very positive” supporters for Communism among Gen Z is already projected to stand at 10 million, another 9 million or so for Gen Z, another 4.5 million for Gen X and another 1.3 million for the Baby Boomers for a combined projected total of over 25 million Communists.

And that’s only counting those who are “very favorable” to Communism, not the additional 35 million who are only “somewhat favorable” to the murderous totalitarian ideology making for a total of 60 million Americans who are positively disposed towards Communism.

Who are the Communists among us and who is most at risk of going Communist?

The youngest generation tends to have the most radical politics and produces the largest share of Communist, Nazi and Islamist recruits, but there are other indicators as well.

27% of those who define themselves as ‘liberals’ are also either very or somewhat favorably disposed towards Communism: making a further mockery of the term liberal. 29% of Democrat men, 21% of Democrat women and 22% of Kamala Harris voters are also favorable towards Communism.

Demonstrating once again that at least part of the problem is the extended educational system, postgrads are the educational group with the highest level of support for Communism. Their 16% “very favorable” rating for Communism exceeds that of even Gen Z.

Government employees are among the most positively disposed towards Communism with 14% “very favorable” towards Communism and 17% somewhat favorably disposed so that 31% or nearly a third of government employees have a positive view of Communism.

A few generations ago we would have seen that as an urgent national security crisis. Now it just helps explain why our system works so badly and why the bureaucracy is so radical.

While some women have been overrepresented in the ranks of the radicals, men at 26% are far more likely to view Communism positively than women are at only 15%. (This may however be partially balanced by the longer lifespans of women and the shorter lifespans of men.)

At 17%, white people have the lowest support for Communism of any group, while at 37%, black people have the highest rate, with Hispanics at 30%, falling in the middle. The 17% of black people ‘very favorable’ towards Communism is not surprising as Communists had targeted the black community over a hundred years ago, organized some of the first race riots and continue to recruit heavily in the black community.

Communists traditionally used to begin their addresses with “workers and peasants”, but Communism in America doesn’t have much rural appeal. 30% of city dwellers view Communism positively while only 14% of people in rural and 17% of people in suburban areas do. That’s why despite the flannel and gimme cap, Graham Platner is failing among non-college rural voters.

Dense, diverse urban environments with lots of students and young people are the most fertile ground for Communism, which helps explain recent DSA victories in New York City, but suggests that it will have limited headway outside a limited number of areas in the country.

Considering the radical foreign composition of the DSA’s push centering around foreign nationals like Zohran Mamdani, Dariazila Avila Chevalier, Melat Kiros and others, one might have expected Communism to be an immigrant problem, but Americans born to American parents are more susceptible to Communism (22%) compared to the children of immigrants (21%) and immigrants (17%) reflecting the reality that younger generations of Americans have no clue what Communism is while a number of immigrants came to America from countries that were ravaged by Communism. As the son of a refugee from Communism, I have insights into Communism that all too many younger Americans just don’t have as part of their history.

The bad news for the Democrats from these statistics is that Communism has become all too popular among the demographic groups that the party has come to depend on, leftists, younger voters, students, urbanites, black people and the overly educated.

The Democratic Party alienated much of its working class base, southern white people disappeared, so did rural voters in general, and non-college voters, leaving an electorate prone to leftist extremism and a party machinery that had lost the ability to push back against it.

It’s no coincidence that the rise of the ‘Berniecrats’ accompanied the ‘Obamaization’ of the party and the loss of the rural and the working class base. Every political cycle, Democrats have become more radicalized, more prone to extremist ideology, and Socialists, Marxists and even Communists are their next steps on the road from democracy to tyranny.

Unless the Democrats break the cycle of extremism, theirs will be a Communist Party.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.

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Read my book ‘Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left’ to discover the true origins of the American Left.