You Just Can’t Argue Against Communism

Communism, one of the most virulent ideologies in the history of mankind, has proven harder to defeat than imagined just one generation ago. Though it doesn’t typically parade itself around in red uniforms anymore, communism is still very much alive, even if it is cloaked in the green jacket of radical environmentalism. And communism’s fundamental tenets of equality, class warfare, and wealth redistribution are core principles of the American left.

Most Americans no longer think communism is a threat or that discussing it is even relevant to modern political discourse. Though many understand that socialism is still around, they don’t consider it to be as dangerous as communism, or akin to it in any fundamental way. Communism no longer exists in the  public mind, because the Soviet Union is no longer formally embodied, and the Chinese have introduced some market elements into their state capitalist economy.

But communism is just socialism run by the wrong people, so many leftists think. If one resorts to history to prove to a leftist that communism was a scourge on mankind that was a necessary result of socialist doctrine being put in practice, he will deny that history is relevant, or will claim that communism was never actually implemented.

The best way to describe this mindset is utopian. “Utopia” is a word from Greek meaning “no place.” It was first used in modern parlance in Sir Thomas More’s work “Utopia” to describe through the words of a world traveler in a classless society.

And communism is truly no place.

The broader point is that it is impossible for the right to use counterfactuals to disprove that communism works, because communism, the way the left idealizes it, doesn’t exist, and never existed. They see all the flaws of the world, they see capitalism, they see war, they see greed, and they see crime, and as long as those exist in any way, we don’t have communism. We have a capitalist society, one that must be razed to the ground so that a brave new world can be molded from the ashes.

Thus whatever the world is, as long as it is imperfect, it’s not communism. And as long as the world exists, communism cannot be argued against.