Republicans Embrace of New Communism

Republicans pretend to fight communism while copying all the features of Chinese and Russian governments.

What you learned in school about communism hasn't been true for decades. And that's exactly the problem with "fighting communism" today.

Look at the New communism taking shape in China. The Party didn't abolish billionaires. It captured them.

Favored companies get state backing and sometimes state ownership. In exchange, their billionaires stay loyal, and the Party keeps power. Old-school communism hated the rich. New Communism recruits them.

Now watch what "fighting communism" looks like here. A one-party push to hobble rival parties using state power. That's the one-party state, imported.

A dramatically stronger executive, a total reversal of the GOP's own small-government tradition. That's strong central control, imported.

Shrinking tolerance for press criticism, protests, and dissent from students, teachers, and public figures. That's no criticism of the state, imported.

Government taking direct ownership stakes in favored companies. That's state-and-capital fusion, imported.

Musk and other billionaires funding campaigns and sitting inside the government they fund. That's the billionaire ruling class, imported. The ruling class in Russia and China expanded to include their billionaires.

And now, crackdowns on minority religions, gays, trans, and ethnic groups. That echo Moscow's and Beijing's own playbooks.

Communist states now love their billionaires. And it seems many American billionaires have decided communism is their preferred government, as long as they are part of the ruling elite.

They say they're fighting communism. Look closer, and they're not fighting it. They're building it, one imported feature at a time.

Real communism doesn't arrive with red flags. It arrives with someone insisting they're the ones fighting it.

We have not gotten to One-Party authoritarian state rule yet, but the Republican politicians are pushing us there

The Wrong Threat

Kimberley Strassel warns that Democratic Socialists are working to capture the Democratic Party, and she blames schools for not teaching young Americans about socialism. I agree schools should teach the differences among capitalism, socialism, and fascism, as she says. But her lesson plan has a hole in it.

She defines socialism as government ownership of the economy. That is not how Russia and China run today. Both dropped the utopian promise of shared wealth and brought billionaires into the governing elite. Owners keep their fortunes as long as they stay loyal, favored industries get protection and contracts, and critics are punished. Jack Ma largely vanished from public view after criticizing Chinese regulators. Mikhail Khodorkovsky went to prison after challenging Putin, while oligarchs who backed him prospered. Dissent is repressed, and minorities like the Uyghurs are persecuted. Call it "New Communism" or state-directed capitalism. Students should learn about it, and Strassel doesn't mention it.

She is right to scrutinize the DSA manifesto's call to abolish the Electoral College and the Senate. But by her own definition, look at what her party has done. The Trump administration took a 10% stake in Intel. The government's stake is passive, but it came only after Trump backed off his attacks on Intel's CEO once the CEO professed his allegiance to the United States. In the Nippon Steel deal, the government took a golden share in U.S. Steel with veto power over plant closures, offshoring, a headquarters move, and acquisitions of rivals. Nvidia and AMD agreed to pay the government 15% of their revenue from some China sales in exchange for export licenses. Washington also pressures law firms, universities, and media outlets that criticize it. Government rescued firms in 2008, and some will call these deals more of the same. But a bailout saved failing companies, and the government then stepped back. These deals use government leverage to extract stakes and concessions from companies and their CEOs, and loyalty seems to be part of the price.

Meanwhile many billionaires appear to have concluded that this system I call New Communism suits them, as long as they are inside the governing elite. The Republican Party and institutions like Heritage seem to be pushing to make our Republic more like the strong executive one-party Russia-China states I call New Communism.

Democratic Socialists, whatever you think of their policies, are fighting for votes in contested elections under a free press. The Russia-China model works by making elections and a free press meaningless. Strassel treats politicians who want to restrain billionaires as the threat and says little about billionaires who want to merge with the state. I suspect those billionaires find her warnings about Democratic Socialists useful.

The Rise of Democatic Socialism

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/the-rise-of-democastic-socialism/