This is not the ‘red wave’ America needs

A specter is haunting America — the specter of communism. Across the country, socialists are emerging from the political margins, convinced that their moment has arrived.Recent victories by Zohran Mamdani and Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York and Melat Kiros in Colorado have emboldened the Democratic Socialists of America. The organization is now looking beyond deep-blue strongholds toward battleground states such as Michigan and Wisconsin.The red wave is rising. Americans must stop it before it reaches shore.Abdul El-Sayed could very well capture the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in Michigan, while Francesca Hong is mounting a serious campaign for governor of Wisconsin. Hong recently finished close behind Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez in a straw poll of Democratic state convention activists.The movement suffered a setback in Maine, where Graham Platner ended his Senate campaign after a former girlfriend accused him of sexual assault. Platner denied the allegation. His departure, however, does not mean the socialist faction will relinquish its growing influence within the Democratic Party.Some Democrat leaders are now trying to distance themselves from the movement. They cannot so easily escape responsibility for it.For decades, Democrats at every level have cultivated the soil in which this radicalism has grown.In Portland, Oregon, activists tore down statues of America’s founders while local leaders proved unwilling or unable to stop them. More recently, Mamdani used his Independence Day address to portray his opponents as believing that America is “an arena of supremacy” reserved for those with the correct race, accent, or ancestry.The remark did not directly condemn America as such. It did, however, reflect the left’s familiar habit of interpreting the country primarily through oppression, exclusion, and domination.Gallup’s latest polling shows how deeply that attitude has penetrated the Democrat electorate. Only 14 of Democrats say they are extremely proud to be American, compared with 70 of Republicans and 28 of independents.RELATED: What if the commies were right after all? bauhaus1000/iStock/Getty ImagesPatriots instinctively recoil from such contempt for the country. But they should also understand precisely why socialism and communism are incompatible with American principles.The founders built the republic on natural rights. From those rights flow liberty, private property, religious freedom, free enterprise, and self-government.Communism rejects them all.It replaces private property with state control, religious faith with materialism, voluntary exchange with centralized planning, and political dissent with coercion.The modern democratic socialist may avoid the language of dictatorship and revolution. The underlying tendency remains the same: Transfer more authority from citizens and local institutions to the state.Mamdani calls for government-run grocery stores, rent controls, and sweeping redistribution. Hong favors aggressive state action to impose her economic and climate agenda. El-Sayed campaigns for Medicare for All, placing still more of the health care system under federal control.Each proposal is presented as an isolated benefit. Together, they describe a political philosophy in which government assumes ever more responsibility for providing food, housing, medical care, employment, and personal security.That bargain always comes with a price.Socialists begin by promising free goods and services, financed by taking the people’s “fair share” from wealthy “parasites.” But economies do not run on resentment. When governments suppress prices, punish investment, seize property, and replace market signals with political commands, the results are familiar: shortages, corruption, censorship, and poverty.Stalin’s Soviet Union imposed collectivization and famine on Ukraine, killing millions. Castro’s Cuba still struggles to provide reliable electricity and basic goods. Venezuela fell from one of Latin America’s wealthiest countries into hyperinflation, scarcity, and mass emigration.These catastrophes were not unfortunate deviations from socialism. They followed from concentrating economic and political power in the same hands.America rests on the opposite premise.It trusts citizens more than bureaucrats to understand their own needs, pursue their own interests, and build their own lives. The Constitution divides power precisely because the founders feared a state capable of crushing liberty while claiming to act for the public good.RELATED: Democrats can’t outrun their socialist wing mj0007/iStock/Getty ImagesThe Democratic Party now faces a pipeline of candidates who reject that inheritance, moving from DSA chapters into Democratic primaries and, increasingly, elected office.The stakes extend beyond New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, or Colorado.America will not survive another 50 years — let alone another 250 — by embracing the ideas that impoverished, terrorized, and destroyed societies throughout the previous century.The new socialists may have better branding, fashionable social-media accounts, and carefully softened language. Their program still demands that Americans surrender more of their property, independence, and authority to the state.The red wave is rising. Americans must stop it before it reaches shore.