Communism Is Sneaking Up on Us Americans; In Fact, It’s Nipping at Our Heels
“The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism,” goes the apocryphal saying generally attributed to six-time presidential candidate Norman Thomas. “But, under the name of ‘liberalism,’ they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”
While this line’s origin is dubious, the prediction has been shown to be prescient, say many. And one of these observers, media analyst and law professor James Hirsen, has sounded an alarm.
“Our crawl to communism has us practically there,” he warns.
The signs are everywhere. A 2025 poll found that 62 percent of Gen Z’ers (ages 19-30) like socialism — and 34 percent have a positive view of communism. Whereas comic books once portrayed socialists and communists as villains, they’re now often presented sympathetically. Avowed socialist Hasan Piker, who has said “I like communism,” is currently a top left-wing political streamer and commentator. Reflecting this electorate indicator, there are now approximately 260-270 avowed socialists in office coast to coast, according to an AI analysis. And reading this dark room, the Democratic Party has begun openly embracing socialism.
Of course, this state of affairs would have been unthinkable in 1950s America. And what has happened since then to take us from McCarthy to Mao (or, at least, Mini-Mao)?
Anatomy of a Social Illness
Addressing this, Professor Hirsen first laments that as with Nazism, murderous communism should have been relegated to history’s dustbin. Instead, the ideological monster just took a different form. As he writes at Newsmax:
Just about the time when the 1970s counterculture appeared to be fading away, a quiet yet insidious revolution was set in motion here in the United States.
There was no red flag waving in the air bearing a hammer and sickle.
Rather, a long march through American universities began to take place.
New left radicals weren’t storming barricades.
Instead, they were earning PhDs.
Humanities and social science departments became ideological echo chambers.
Drawing from Antonio Gramsci’s theory on how the ruling class maintains power, and also the Frankfurt School’s critical theory that derided capitalism and promised social liberation, communist principles became the blueprint for how to deconstruct a societal framework, with the ultimate goal of supplanting it with a Marxist one.