Commentary

A man takes a shortcut to work, drives through a construction site, and gets a nail in his tire. Put that flat down to ignorance. The next day, he drives the same route and again gets a flat tire. Either he’s forgetful or he enjoys gambling. The third day, he repeats everything with the same results, which defines him as a fool. When he makes the same drive on the fourth day, the popular saying applies: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Anyone supporting communism in 2026—and I’m going to include its Marxist cousin, democratic socialism, and all other species of collectivism—belongs in Category Four.

For more than a century, beginning with Russia, countries around the world have fallen victim to communism, either through elections or through violence. During this same time, communism has killed more than 100 million men, women, and children worldwide. In country after country, communism squashed “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” impoverished entire peoples, and destroyed age-old traditions, cultures, and religions.

After so many flat tires, common sense alone should tell everyone to take a different route.

Yet in May 2025, a Cato Institute–YouGov poll found that “62 percent of Americans aged 18–29 say they hold a ‘favorable view’ of socialism, and 34 percent say the same of communism.” The view of socialism shocks; that of communism strikes like a thunderbolt. The most revolutionary and successful form of government ever conceived—the American republic—is now threatened by the dead hand of debunked ideologies.

Why?

Most commentators point to education as responsible for this catastrophe, and rightly so. Over the last 50 years, our public schools have failed miserably in the teaching of American history. They either downgrade its importance in the curriculum or worse, make it a tool of propaganda, teaching students to despise America for its past injustices while neglecting to mention that American law and virtue sought always to remedy them. In this same half century, the left conquered and now rules the history departments of many colleges and universities, whose graduates work in schools, government, and media. The socialist saturation of society is the result.

The antidote is to teach the real history of America and of collectivism. The 20th century is a case book in collectivism’s failures, from Lenin to Hitler to Castro, from Marx to Mao. All of us who know the bloody and sordid story of these centralized, top-down governments should be teaching the young, as our Founders well knew, that government by its nature hungers for power and control. Unchecked, it gulps down wealth and natural rights while breeding ineptitude and corruption.

We don’t need to travel overseas or venture far into the past to teach this lesson of abuse and aggrandizement. With their power extended far beyond anything envisioned by the Founders, our federal and some state governments have inflicted massive damage on American education and medicine. Intended for good, bureaucratic rules and regulations have more often than not throttled innovation, production, and manufacturing. The collapse of our border, the mishandled COVID-19 crisis, election irregularities, and the massive corruption of so many agencies: all reveal the dangers of big government gone awry, textbook examples of collectivism awaiting study from anyone who cares to learn from them.

Teaching basic formal logic in secondary school, as some home schools and private academies do, might also inoculate students against this virus. Logic, reason, and common sense are three defenses against collectivist ideology.

A woman reacts next to a portrait of a victim of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin's purges at the memorial, where the victims were buried in the woods on the outskirts of Saint-Petersburg, Russia, on Oct. 30, 2017. (Olga Maltseva/AFP via Getty Images)

Yet I suspect another factor—fear coupled with immaturity—is also adding to the ranks of this band of young socialists. Overly protected by well-intentioned parents, shielded from real-world matters and real human interaction by their phones and screens, and often made victims by a therapeutic culture, they turn to the government to act in loco parentis. Apprehensive about their future and ignorant about the work-a-day world of free enterprise, they look for the protection and guidance of a nanny state and a risk-free life. Self-reliance and self-discipline, those cohorts of liberty, scare them to death.

These are the voters who put politicians associated with the Democratic Socialists of America into office, candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani. These are the voters who model the words of Ben Franklin: “Those who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Only by teaching self-reliance along with the real history of America, its flaws, yes, but more importantly, its virtues, will the young be released from the promises of socialism, which all too quickly materialize into shackles.

Here, an old joke from the Soviet Union comes to mind:

A schoolboy wrote in his weekly essay: “My cat just had seven kittens. They’re all communists.”

The following week, the boy wrote: “My cat’s kittens are all capitalists.”

The teacher asked him to explain the change: “Last week, you said they were all communists.”

The boy nodded. “They were. But this week they opened their eyes.”

All Americans, and not just the young, need to grow up and open their eyes if we are to avoid the further destruction of our freedoms and the disastrous and failed policies of collectivism.