Destroying Democracy to Defend It

Less than four months before the midterms, America is converting an argument over power and wealth into a loyalty test. The immediate target is the progressive left. The charge is communism. The victim is democracy.

Here is the case the MAGA right is making. After a string of DSA primary victories in June, Trump began using the word “communism” almost compulsively; Reuters counted 81 times in two weeks. He called the DSA candidates “hardcore, godless communists” and described communism as the gravest threat the country has faced in its entire existence. His own team’s research reportedly found that the word energizes the base more than it persuades anyone, which tells you what this is: a turnout strategy dressed as a national emergency.

Mike Johnson filled in the domestic detail. The “crazy little mini-Mamdanis” popping up around the country are a danger to you and your family. Reagan warned about communism when it was a distant threat across the world, Johnson reminds us, but now “the barbarians are inside the gate.” We are no longer arguing over marginal tax rates, in his telling, but over whether freedom itself survives.

And see the work that the word “communist” is doing: it converts an opponent into an enemy, a political program into a conspiracy, and an election into an emergency. Once that conversion is complete, ordinary democratic remedies, like voting, are no longer enough. You do not debate an existential enemy. You expose it, investigate it, attack it.