I am an immigrant from Colombia, a country that the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)âa communist revolutionary groupâspent half a century tearing apart. FARC murdered thousands of Colombians through sanctioned massacres, kidnappings, and terrorism, and the war FARC drove displaced over seven million Colombians, resulting in one of the largest internal displacement crises in the world. I am now a naturalized citizen of the United States, a country that millions from around the world are still trying to reach. So, I read the latest polling on American capitalism with a particular kind of alarm.
This polling is the result of a survey released by The Free Press using a method to surface the opinions people keep to themselves. The finding: just one in three Americans holds a positive view of capitalism. Not one in three Democrats. One in three Americans.
Before the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) take a victory lap, consider the rest. That same survey found that most Americans remain wary of socialism, and Gallup found that while capitalism drew 54 percent approval, free enterprise drew 81 percent and small business 95 percent, compared with 37 percent for big business. Americans have not turned against free enterprise, ownership, or entrepreneurial risk. Yet DSA candidates keep winning elections. The gap between Americans faith in free enterprise and the DSAs wins is a real vulnerability, and it deserves an honest question: Why not communism?
MORE AMERICANS THAN EVER NOW HAVE A POSITIVE VIEW OF SOCIALISM, NEW POLL SAYS
An honest answer requires an important clarification. There is no meaningful difference between socialism and communism, and the founders of the movement said so without pretense. Lenin devoted chapters of The State and Revolution to expounding on Marx and what he called the first phase of communist society and its ultimate end. Socialism was never the alternative to communism. It was the on-ramp.
So why not take it? Because the record is unambiguous and is written in blood. No communist revolution has delivered the justice, equality, and prosperity it promised.Â
Estimates place the death toll of communist regimes near 100 million across Russia, Eastern Europe, China, Africa, and South America. And consider one plain fact. No communist state in history has been concerned about people sneaking in. Every one of them has had to worry about people getting out, a concern that produced a heavily guarded 4,300-mile Iron Curtain across Europe built to face inward. Nations that people flee have not solved anything.
SOCIALISM WILL ‘CONTROL PEOPLE’ AND ‘TAKE EVERYTHING AWAY’ FROM AMERICA, ACCORDING TO THESE EXPATS
Yet the communist appeal is real, and pretending otherwise is foolish. Communism begins by naming a genuine pain. American capitalism is too much big-business economics with its ethos of the very large, the consolidated, and the impersonal. This makes the household, the small business, and the ordinary person willing to take a risk weaker and less important. Millions of Americans experience this as a shrinking future and a loss of control over their destiny. The communist arrives, agrees with them, and offers the oldest bargain on record: “You have nothing to lose but your chains. Workers of
