Communism. The New Boogeyman on the block.

I don’t know about you, but I’m hearing the word communism everywhere lately.

It has officially become the hot new boogeyman in town, unleashed to direct your fear toward a common enemy and away from a more nuanced and thoughtful conversation about policy.

But is there actually a communist wave ready to sweep across America? Or are we watching a familiar political marketing tactic with a new look but the same great taste?

One of the things I love about the Finishing School is that I am learning right alongside you. I am not a historian, a policy expert, or a politician. I am an artist and a concerned citizen who believes in questioning power and peeling back the curtain on the theater it thrives on.

I genuinely want to see my country live up to its ideals and become a place where all of us can prosper, which is partly what inspired this series in the first place.

So when I create these lessons and write these essays, I am forced to research what is actually going on, contemplate the subject more deeply and interrogate my own opinions about it. And lately I have been doing a lot of Googling along the lines of: What exactly is the difference between communism, socialism, Stalinism and authoritarian communism?

Progressive Democrats, particularly Democratic Socialists, have become primary targets for this new warning label. And democratic socialist candidates are running and winning Democratic primaries across the country, with several potentially poised to enter Congress this November.

But the headlines, commentary and sheer volume surrounding these races might lead you to believe we are on the precipice of a DSA onslaught.

We aren’t.

So far, seven DSA-backed House candidates have advanced through their primaries to the general election. If all seven win and enter the 435-member House, they would represent about 1.6% of the chamber. Even if a few more ultimately get elected, we would still be talking about a very small faction of Congress.

In the Senate, one DSA member, Angie Nixon of Florida, won her Democratic primary this week and will face Republican incumbent Ashley Moody in the general election. The progressive Democratic Senate nominee drawing perhaps the most national attention, is Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed. But El-Sayed does not identify as a democratic socialist and was not endorsed by DSA.

All of these candidates have explicitly said they are not communist. That does not mean, though, we should simply take politicians at their word.

Policy is evidence. Labels are not.

To be fair, the DSA is not just advocating for a slightly more robust social safety net. Its long-term vision is to move beyond capitalism by shifting ownership and control of parts of the economy, particularly essential industries like energy and transportation, away from private shareholders and toward public, worker or collective ownership.

Those ideas deserve scrutiny and debate. But public ownership of major industries is also not some wild concept that only exists in communist economies. Capitalist democracies like France, Germany and Norway maintain significant public ownership in sectors like energy and transportation, the advantages and disadvantages of which can be debated.

There is one candidate in this cohort, New York’s Darializa Avila Chevalier, who in the past called for “seizing the means of production” among other social media posts advocating for nationalization and seizure of private property. She has since retracted those statements and said she no longer stands by them.

Democratic socialism is genuinely on the farther left end of the American political spectrum. You can love these ideas, hate them, vote for them or organize against them.

But there is still a very big difference between a small socialist faction gaining representation and America being on the brink of communist rule.

So if the actual scale is so small, why does the threat seem so large?

Fear is one of the most powerful motivating forces in the human emotional spectrum. And the intensity of the emotion does not always match the reality of the threat.

It is an evolutionary survival mechanism designed to keep us out of danger as much as save us from it. Which means a perceived threat can produce an emotional response as real as an actual one.

Politicians know that something does not have to be prevalent for it to be perceived as a threat. It just needs to be amplified.

If this feels vaguely familiar, that’s because we have seen this blueprint before.

Take, for example, the cacophonous symphony of outrage we have heard over the last several years about transgender people supposedly overtaking schools, sports, bathrooms, medical care and American culture itself.

Laws have been introduced to regulate which bathrooms people can use, which sports teams they can join, what medical care they can access and how gender can be discussed in schools.

Meanwhile, transgender people represent approximately 1% of Americans age 13 and older.

That does not mean the issues transgender people face are unimportant or unworthy of being addressed. But look at the disparity between the size of the population and the volume of the national panic surrounding it.

People scream into podcast microphones regularly about the catastrophic threat posed to women’s sports by transgender athletes as though this is an issue touching every locker room and every family in America, when the number of actual cases at the highest levels of women’s professional sports is vanishingly small.

For most Americans, the hypothetical controversy is far more present in their lives than an actual transgender person is.

That unfamiliarity is precisely what makes caricature easier.

Complexity gets flattened. Isolated examples get presented as ubiquitous. Rare circumstances become evidence of a national emergency, and politicians can then position themselves as the protectors standing between you and the manufactured threat.

Communism may be one of the latest boogeymen to roll back into town, but this one comes with nearly a century of American cultural baggage already attached to it.

To be explicitly clear, I am not arguing that we should not be wary of communism. I am certainly wary of it myself.

What I am arguing is that when power uses a label to avoid having to answer for its own record, we are in trouble.

Discussing complicated policy is hard.

Explaining competing economic systems is hard.

Debating taxation, labor rights, housing, health care, public ownership and wealth inequality requires specificity.

It is much easier to deal in loaded emotional trigger words.

It is much easier to prey on people’s fear of cultural or economic change than to convince them why they should hire you again for the job.

So complicated policies and very different forms of economic and political organization get deliberately collapsed.

Social democracy, democratic socialism, socialism, Marxism, communism and Stalinism become interchangeable, flattened until they mean simply:

Bad, scary left-wing thing.

You do not have to know what communism means to be afraid of it. Politically, it often works even better if you don’t.

Investigating our fear response, working to understand definitions and considering what change might actually look like is part of being an engaged citizen. It doesn’t require supporting the policies in the end, but it does make it harder to be manipulated.

Investigating our fear response, working to understand definitions and considering what change might actually look like is part of being an engaged citizen. It doesn’t require supporting the policies in the end, but it does make it harder to be manipulated.

Because once you understand that these words describe very different systems, philosophies and degrees of state control, politicians are forced to do something much more inconvenient for them: Explain exactly what they object to.

If voters are consumed by the threat of the month, politicians can avoid scrutiny over the promises they failed to keep, the corruption they enabled, the incompetence they demonstrated, the economic problems they didn’t solve, the health-care system they didn’t fix, the housing people can’t afford, the wages that did not keep pace, the public services that deteriorated and the power they may have abused.

Instead of asking who is actually prepared to deliver for us, the electorate spends its energy asking how do we stop them?

That is the democratic cost of constant fear and it is not exclusive to one political party.

Which is why citizens have to resist being constantly redirected and, at the very least, do some minimal work to investigate and think through the ideas and policies being proposed.

It is also why moderate Democrats would be better served spending less energy panicking about whether a tiny democratic socialist faction is moving beyond the establishment’s ideological comfort zone and more energy making a persuasive case for their own governance, challenging the Trump administration on its actual record and explaining what they intend to do differently.

You do not have to love democratic socialism to understand that eight DSA-backed candidates are not about to seize control of the American economy.

But you do have to maintain a sense of proportion. That doesn’t mean dismissing a threat simply because it seems unlikely. It just means examining the evidence, the power behind it, and the path by which it could actually become reality.

And perhaps we need to become much more accustomed to asking a few basic questions whenever someone announces that a new existential threat has arrived:

• What exactly is being proposed?

• What does this word mean?

• How many people support it?

• What would have to happen for this to actually be implemented?

• How likely is that to happen?

• What evidence shows that this is a major threat?

• Who benefits from keeping me focused on it?

• What am I not asking about while I am afraid?

A healthy democracy doesn’t require us to agree about capitalism, socialism, immigration, gender, taxation or anything else.

It requires us to argue about what is actually being proposed rather than the boogeyman someone has constructed around it.

In fact, perhaps I am in the minority, but I believe we are better off when we don’t agree on everything.

We need competing ideas to battle it out and, eventually, find compromise in Congress. We need radical proposals to challenge us to think differently when the systems we have in place are not working. We need healthy conservatives who make the case for decentralizing power, keeping more money in the hands of individuals and limiting unnecessary government regulation. We need progressives willing to question concentrations of wealth and power. And we need moderates who can sometimes help bridge the gap between them.

That tension is not necessarily a failure of democracy. It is democracy.

But the moment fear replaces specificity, power becomes much harder to hold accountable. So perhaps the most useful thing a citizen can learn is not whom to fear, but how to recognize when someone is trying very hard to make them afraid.