A Strong Communist Party

Economic and political competition create gravity. Authoritarianism and fascism are not the only competitors we want.

It irritate the bejesus out of me when Democratic leaders say we need a strong, reasonable Republican Party.

Biden told voters in 2019 to stay Republican and vote for him anyway. Obama said in 2016 that a serious opposition would challenge the blind spots and dogmas in the Democratic Party. Cuomo went past saying it and helped Republicans hold the New York Senate to wall off the progressives in his own party.

They wanted a strong opposition. But only to their right. Not one of them ever said this country needs a strong socialist party keeping us honest.

A party gets pulled toward whatever it’s competing with. FDR’s Democrats were competing with communists and socialists, so they got pulled left. Social Security. The Wagner Act. Rural electrification. Public power. A minimum wage. The socialists weren’t the threat to the New Deal. They were the reason for it.

Communism’s been tried plenty. It’s never been achieved, no more than the free market has. The Soviets and the Chinese never got past authoritarian socialism, a handful of men owning everything through the state. But it was never the reality doing the pulling. It was the hope. The idea of working people owning their share put over nine hundred thousand votes behind Eugene Debs while he sat in a federal prison for a speech, and it scared FDR’s Democrats into delivering.

Then the Soviet Union collapsed, the moneyed interests quit having to pretend, and the pressure from the left dried up. Everything still tugging on a politician tugged the same way. Wall Street, the lobbyists, the military industrial complex. Fifty years of appeasing all of that instead of the people who vote for them.

So ask me which one I’d rather have across the room. A strong MAGA Republican Party or a strong Communist Party. By God I’d take the communists every time, because it’d give me a Democratic Party worth fighting for.

They always start with the communists. Nobody stands up for a communist. That’s the reason they start there, and it’s never where they stop.

The State Department proved it this week. A report naming forty-three people and organizations as fellow travelers of Cuban communism. Ben Cohen. Amy Goodman. Hasan Piker. The Democratic Socialists of America, a sitting congresswoman, and George Floyd, who’s been dead since 2020. It talks about the McCarthy blacklists like they were a job well done. On top of that, a presidential directive turning every law enforcement and intelligence agency on political networks. Stephen Miller laid out the verbs. Disrupt. Identify. Defund. De-bank. Arrest. Prosecute. And the Speaker of the House wants three hundred and fifty billion extra Pentagon dollars, some of it for fighting communism on our own shores.

All of that is a confession. When you have to make an idea illegal, you’ve admitted you can’t out-argue it and you sure can’t out-deliver it.

Any concentrated ownership goes the same direction. A state that owns everything ends up authoritarian. A handful of oligarchs that own everything ends up an oligarchy. Whoever’s name goes on the deed, you get the same country. What keeps power honest is a check on it, and in an economy the only real check is competition. You can’t compete with an outfit big enough to buy every competitor it meets, so the competition has to come from somewhere that can’t be bought. Public options. Public ownership. Public competition. Health care, housing, infrastructure all the way up the chain.

Call it socialism if you want. The TVA lit up my part of the country when the private utilities wouldn’t. If that’s socialism, people seem to like it every time they get some.

So I want the socialists organizing, loud, running candidates, winning seats, because that pressure is the only thing I’ve ever seen move a party like mine. Everything I love about this government got won by people the respectable folks called communists at the time.

You shouldn’t have to jail an idea, track it, or debank it. You should just have a better one. And if you can’t come up with one, get out of the way of the people who can.

Corbin Trent