“There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land,” Trump declared at the foot of Mount Rushmore on the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. “You can be loyal to Karl Marx, or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.” 

Determined to turn the 2026 midterm elections into a referendum on “communism,” the president dedicated no less than one-third of his Fourth of July speech to the specter haunting this country. A 23-minute fireworks show immediately followed the tirade, which he concluded with his signature catch phrase: “America will never be a communist country.”

This is quite the statement for a president who is leading US imperialism deeper into a humiliating defeat against Iran; who mocks the hundreds of millions of Americans who are buckling under rising inflation; who is unleashing masked thugs to murder and disappear innocent people on American streets; and who is suppressing the Epstein files because his name appears there 38 times more frequently than Jesus’s does in the Bible.

It’s little wonder Trump’s favorability ratings have been underwater for 16 months, currently standing at the lowest level of his political career and primed to sink even deeper.

Democratic socialists advance

For their part, growing numbers of Americans are unfazed by the ruling class’s worn-out redbaiting. None of this rhetoric is new, and it’s done nothing to stop the appeal of socialist and communist ideas in the US.

According to Reuters, Trump attacked communism 81 times in the two weeks following the June 23 victory of three democratic socialist candidates—Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Brad Lander—in the New York City Democratic primary elections for Congress. These results came on the heels of DSA-member Chris Rabb’s surprise victory in his race for an open Congressional seat in Philadelphia, and were followed by another DSA success in Denver, where Melat Kiros defeated a 15-term incumbent “progressive” Democrat.

In recent months, DSA candidates have also advanced in the mayoral elections in Washington, DC and Los Angeles, building on Zohran Mamdani’s 2025 victory in New York City. This month, DSA announced that it reached the mark of 120,000 members, claiming to be the largest socialist organization in US history. 

Recent polling confirms the forward momentum of socialism and communism in the United States, and paints an increasingly bleak picture for capitalism. A right-wing CATO Institute poll released on July 2 shows that 37% of Americans have a favorable view of socialism, and 21% of communism. Notably, support for communism has grown by seven points compared to last year’s polling, while socialism’s appeal has dropped by six—a sign of sharpening radicalization. Further, a Wall Street Journal poll from July 8 shows that 51% percent of Americans don’t believe capitalism is functioning well or at all, up from 37% in 2015.

Frothing at the mouth

Out of touch with the real mood in society, GOP candidates nationwide are following Trump’s act. In a rabid rant, House Speaker Mike Johnson offered the following:

We’re fighting right now in Congress over whether we’re going to maintain our status as a constitutional republic or we’re going to trade that in, dismantle the foundations and go down this dark road of death to communism. That is the question on the ballot this fall …These crazy little mini-Mamdanis who are popping up all around the country; they are a danger to you and your family.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt followed suit:

This is a full-blown communist revolution that is taking over Capitol Hill right here in Washington, DC. The inmates are running the asylum. These are crazy people who are advocating against what I call the three P’s: prison, police, and private property.

The capitalist press has unleashed a deluge of noxious hit pieces on communism and the millions of young workers who are openly embracing it. One particularly nauseating example appeared in The Wall Street Journal under the title “The Selfie Generation is the Baby Boomer’s Mistake.” What is the author’s profound explanation for the youth’s embrace of socialism and communism?

Young voters are electing socialist candidates who spew hatred of those who achieve greatness. These movements aren’t about creating opportunity. They’re about grievance, redistribution and the conviction that your own failures are the result of someone else’s success. It is a politics of envy dressed up as justice.

 

The hallmark of today’s young generation is the selfie. A photo of yourself, taken and posted for the approval of others. That says everything. And when the world doesn’t deliver the validation young people have been told they deserve simply for existing, the explanation is always the same: The system is rigged, the deck is stacked, someone else has too much.

The author, Dr. Scott Atlas, knows a thing or two about failure: he was a leading member in the first Trump administration’s Coronavirus taskforce, which oversaw the government’s disastrous response to the pandemic that killed some 1.2 million Americans. It is the abject failure of people like Trump and Dr. Atlas—and the capitalist system they defend—that is driving millions to the left.

The reason for the deluge of redbaiting is clear: Trump, the GOP, and their partisans face defeat in November if they run on their own dismal record. They’re fearmongering about communism to rally their wavering base in a scramble to save their political careers—and their system.

The Democrats pile on

For their part, the liberals are amplifying Trump’s anticommunist nonsense. In a pitiful effort to prove their party’s loyalty to the billionaires, a group of Democratic candidates spent the end of June formulating a “Promise to America,” which reads like a programmatic statement of the bourgeoisie. 
The very first point: “We are capitalist, not socialist.”

The “pledge” goes on to explain that they want a “growing, fair, and competitive economy” that “rewards hard work” in a way that makes it possible to “own a home, raise a family, afford healthcare, and retire with dignity.” Then, it declares: “We will prioritize tackling the national debt honestly. We must pay our bills, and not leave our children in debt.”

In a country with nearly $40 trillion in government debt—and growing by $1 trillion every 100 days—these two goals are mutually exclusive. As they did in the 1990s, the Democrats want to balance the budget on the backs of the poor and working class through austerity, tax hikes, unemployment, and inflation, while leaving the ruling class (and their trillions) safe and secure.

James Carville, Democrat strategist and mouthpiece of the party’s establishment, piled on, referring to democratic socialists as “fucking idiots” before adding:
“I am a proud liberal. I am not a leftist. I don’t believe you ought to break the thing up … if you believe that, blame the left wing of the Democratic Party for the catastrophe that we’re facing right now, because as much as any group, it’s their fault.”

Class independence

Days prior to this outburst, Carville went on Fox News to attack the freshly minted NYC DSA Congressional nominee, Darializa Avila Chevalier: “I don’t think that the congressional Democrats should seat her as a member of the Democratic Party. She actually describes herself as a democratic socialist.” His implication is that Chevalier and other democratic socialists belong in their own party, separate from the Democrats.

Andrew Yang, millionaire entrepreneur and former Democratic candidate for president and New York mayor, observed: “The Democratic Party really is at least two parties in one at this point.”

Democratic socialist candidates have advanced within the Democratic Party, but they are nowhere close to “taking it over.” 2026 will likely see more democratic socialists elected to Congress and other offices around the country, but even in the best case scenario, they will remain a small minority. Even if we assume the best of intentions, these candidates will find themselves in the hostile, alien milieu of the bourgeois state, facing enormous pressures from the ruling class on all sides—with nothing resembling a party of the working class to support them or hold them accountable. 

Once in Congress, what will the newly elected democratic socialists do? Will they vote to confirm Hakeem Jeffries as speaker if the Democrats take the House, as their forerunners did for Nancy Pelosi? After all, he’s the leader of their party in Congress. Will they deal with the crushing federal debt by maintaining taxes on the working class? Will they continue funding the forces of repression, as Zohran Mamdani has in NYC?

These are open questions, but the record of elected democratic socialists is not promising. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez voted with the Democrats to deny our railway unions’ right to strike in 2022, while declining to oppose sending $500 million to the Israeli military in 2025. Mamdani has quietly backed away from popular campaign pledges like free bus service, while “balancing” the budget by deferring payments to the city’s pension fund. These are all consequences of accepting the bounds imposed by bourgeois politics rather than seeking the means to expose, break from, and overcome these constraints.

The tactics pursued by the new crop of candidates suggest no alternative approach is on offer. Even before her campaign began, Chevalier took the time to delete old social media accounts that featured statements denouncing Kamala Harris, referring to Joe Biden as a rapist, and calling Marx’s Capital an “essential must-read!” She has gone so far as to personally apologize to Kamala Harris since these posts came to light, and has publicly rejected accusations that she was a communist.

She would be doing so much more for the socialist movement if she stood by these correct ideas and defended them to the working class, instead of kissing the ring and throwing communism under the bus to curry favor with her party.

What would a genuine workers’ party do?

The rule of thumb for assessing whether a tactic advances the cause of the working class is this: Does it help workers understand that their class is the agent of fundamental change? Does it amplify their class unity, develop their organization and cohesion, and raise their level of consciousness and confidence?

Running campaigns within the Democratic Party achieves the opposite result. It blurs the class line, chains the working class to capitalist institutions, and smooths over the class divide. It foments the false illusion that collaboration with the exploiters will somehow bring about a kinder, gentler form of capitalism. It conflates socialism with the widely hated Democrats, which will lead to disappointment with “socialism” itself once electoral promises are broken.

By contrast, communists approach electoral activity with our ultimate goal in mind: the creation of a workers’ government, which removes the capitalist class from political and economic power by nationalizing the Fortune 500 monopolies, establishing a democratically planned economy, ending imperialism, and implementing a socialist program that guarantees jobs, housing, healthcare, and education for all. 

Further, we understand that a workers’ government cannot arrive through the bourgeois state. A revolution is necessary—and possible—as demonstrated by recent mass struggles against ICE, the George Floyd uprising, and the countless general strikes and revolutions that have swept the globe in recent years. The only means of achieving a victorious socialist revolution is the creation of a mass communist party that the working class can use to organize itself for political and economic power.

The class struggle takes place on three different, interconnected fronts: the political front, including elections and street demonstrations; the industrial front of union struggles and strikes; and the ideological battle to clarify which ideas the working class needs to win the class war and reshape society. A communist party fights the class enemy on all fronts. It represents a very different type of political party from the bourgeois parties a majority of Americans have come to detest. The Democrats and Republicans are little more than electoral machines in the service of the Epstein class.

The candidates and elected representatives of a genuine socialist party would view the development and strengthening of that party as their most important priority. Every action they take would be with the ultimate victory of the socialist revolution in mind.

While fighting tooth and nail for every measure that brings real improvements for the working class, genuine socialist politicians would use their campaigns and elected positions to address the working class, bringing the ideas of open class struggle and Marxist theory into debates on the legislative floor, in the media, and at the head of mass demonstrations and strikes. At a time when confidence in all ruling institutions is crumbling, they would not seek to restore their credibility, but rather, would  further expose them as cynical tools of the capitalist class. They would use the authority gained by campaigning and winning elections not only to fight for reforms, but to organize the strikes and other struggles required to achieve them.

Communist politicians, accepting only the average worker’s wage, would connect all of this activity to the need to build the revolutionary party, rather than simply furthering their own individual careers. Their role would be to serve as the electoral face of the party, acting in its service to further the struggle against capitalism as a whole.

The youth turns to communism

Karl Liebknecht famously wrote, “He who has the youth, has the future.” The 2026 CATO poll included much hand-wringing about Gen Z support for socialism and communism:

Gen Z stands out for having more people who like socialism (53%) than capitalism (45%). More than a third of Americans under 30 (38%) say they have a favorable view of communism. This means that nearly as many Gen Z Americans have a favorable view of communism (38%) as capitalism (45%). Moreover, Gen Z is the only age group with a more favorable than unfavorable view of communism (38% favorable, 36% unfavorable).

For comparison, the 2025 CATO poll found that 34% of Gen Z Americans held a favorable view of communism. This means that communism’s favorability among Gen Z has grown by four points in just a year. Moreover, the 2026 results indicate that more Gen Zers support socialism than capitalism, the only age group where this is the case.

This is not a fluke; Gen Z has grown up knowing nothing but crisis, decline, disorder, and class polarization. They are drawing the necessary conclusions even without a mass socialist or communist party present to influence their views.

Just imagine what could be accomplished if such a party existed, actively linking and coordinating the struggles against ICE, against the genocide in Palestine, against imperialist intervention in Cuba and Venezuela, building unions across entire industries, and much more!

The human material is already out there, among the nearly 60 million Americans who hold a favorable view of communism. If even just 1% of them were organized and trained in Marxist ideas and methods, this would mean a force of 600,000 class fighters that could then reach broader layers of the working class. This is the task the Revolutionary Communists of America have set ourselves.

Communism will win



Marx and Engels introduced The Communist Manifesto 
with the following words: “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism … Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communist by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?”

The fact that the ruling class’s liberal wing feels the need to close ranks with the “anti-establishment” MAGA wing to attack socialism and communism speaks volumes about the dire situation our class enemy faces.

In the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ruling class assumed that communism was dead and buried forever. Buying their own propaganda about the “liberal democratic order,” the supposed efficiency of the market economy, and “the end of history,” they never expected to have to confront communism again in the United States. But as the Communist Manifesto points out: “What the bourgeoisie produces, above all, are its own gravediggers.”

The two-party system, which the capitalists perfected to divide and conquer the American working class, is not long for this world. Like capitalism itself, it has not always existed and will not always exist.

The political crisis engendered by the struggle against chattel slavery and its further incompatibility with the development of capitalism resolved itself into a four-way presidential election in 1859, won by a new party led by Abraham Lincoln. The result was the Civil War—America’s second revolution.

The 1912 elections were also a competitive four-way race, at a time while US capitalism was still ascending and consolidating its power amid bitter industrial struggle in the country’s steel plants, coal fields, railroads, and textile mills. The Socialist Party, led by Eugene Debs, won 6% and came in first place in many key working-class constituencies.

Like the 1850s and 1910s, the class struggle is intensifying dramatically in the United States today. To those who assume that the two-party system is etched in stone and unassailable, we say that the forces of history are far more powerful than any bureaucratic apparatus.

The crisis of capitalism is tearing apart the US political landscape, with the likes of Marjorie Taylor-Greene and Tucker Carlson openly abandoning the Republican Party. On the other side of the aisle, 81% of Democratic voters think “the system needs major changes” or to be “torn down” altogether, and the recent elections are only the latest expression of that mood.

The emerging class struggle in the US will clarify the class lines sooner or later. A new independent mass party of the working class will arise in one form or another. The question is whether it will be armed with the necessary ideas, program, methods, and leadership to defeat capitalism. The Revolutionary Communists of America are preparing to bring these ideas boldly into the movement to ensure the third American revolution ends in victory.