The evidence is more than clear. Communism, socialism, and progressivism have each made huge comebacks, re-entering political discourse blatantly and, just as importantly, very quietly, over the past decades. Even the very words “socialism,” “communism,” and, especially, “progressivism,” have reacquired respect and a semblance of dignity in many circles of public thought and discourse.

I am fiercely proud of the fact that I was raised in an anti-communist household in central Kansas in the 1970s and 1980s. Whatever faults my family had (and they were many), my mother made sure that I knew that socialism and fascism were flip sides of the same coin, that Hitler and Stalin had more in common than not, that individualism and Catholicism were utterly opposed to all forms of socialism, and that America stood tallest when it stood for freedom against control. Books by Barry Goldwater and Robert J. Ringer and Milton Friedman littered the house, and John Wayne movies were cultural highs of a fierce republic, not embarrassments of a sagging empire. We thanked God for the Titan II missile fields (even as we had nightmares of a Soviet first strike), and we always prayed for the victims of tyranny abroad. We cried when Reagan was nearly assassinated by John Hinckley, we cheered for the Wolverines when the Soviets invaded in Red Dawn, we read Tom Clancy novels as a sort of gospel, and we believed the insurgents in Nicaragua, Angola, and Afghanistan were noble freedom fighters.

This was, to be sure, a more innocent time. And, to be certain, there was even a time in my high school years—a less jaded time—in which I assumed most Americans were raised in the same manner and believed as I did. President Reagan, Prime Minister Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II were normal leaders of the West, not extraordinary ones. Many of my teachers—clearly the children of the New Left and the 1960s—revealed to me a blatant hypocrisy.  While they shouted for love, they behaved as would-be tyrants, hypocrites . . . not all . . . but many.

Somehow, and in a myriad of disturbing ways, my delusions and illusions and wishes and hopes and dreams and subjective realities collapsed over the years. Not that I lost faith in liberty, but I’ve certainly lost faith that others kept the faith, if they ever actually had it.

The evidence is more than clear. Communism, socialism, and progressivism have each made huge comebacks, re-entering political discourse blatantly and, just as importantly, very quietly, over the past decades. Even the very words “socialism,” “communism,” and, especially, “progressivism,” have reacquired respect and a semblance of dignity in many circles of public thought and discourse.

For those of us who spent our lives witnessing the horrors of each—in the Soviet gulags, the holocaust camps, and the Cambodian killing fields—and celebrating the demise of each in Eastern Europe and Russia between 1989 and 1991, we can only scratch our heads in wonder and search our souls in guilt. After all, we have and had very clearly failed to convince the world that such terms and such ideas should be remembered as a means of what never to do.

Read More