Why Communism Refuses To Die

More than a century after the Bolshevik Revolution, communism continues to attract followers despite its legacy of tyranny, economic devastation and more than 100 million deaths worldwide. In Episode 60 of Roots, Rights & Reason, host Lee Smith speaks with Dr. Bradley Thayer, Fellow at the American Freedom Alliance, about why this destructive ideology continues to survive and find renewed support in the United States.

Drawing from his new book, America’s 100 Years’ War: How to Win Against Communism, Dr. Thayer examines how communism exploits grievance, resentment and the desire for political power. He also discusses its influence within American institutions and offers an optimistic message: America can defeat communism by restoring a strong national identity rooted in individual liberty, God-given rights, free markets and the rule of law.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

The Brave Roots. The unstoppable force of American If you the sacred inheritance of freedom protect. This is our legacy. Join investigative data. Lee Smith on Roots, Rights and Reason. Powered by America's future.

SPEAKER_03 0:21

Hi, I'm Lee Smith. Welcome and thanks for joining us for this new episode of Roots, Rights, and Reason. This week we're asking a question that cuts to the heart of the modern world. Why, after so many failures, is communism still with us? Why won't it just die? When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Americans understandably believed we had defeated communism once and for all. But today's guest argues that what disappeared was a communist state, not communist ideology. The struggle that began with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 continued, changing its methods, its language, and sometimes its location. The Cold War, as it turns out, was just one phase of a much larger ideological conflict. The Soviet Union is no more, but the Chinese Communist Party governs the world's second largest economy and possesses enormous military, technological, and economic power. Beijing represents not merely a conventional geopolitical rival, but the most powerful surviving embodiment of the communist ideological tradition. Communism has always understood itself as an international revolutionary project. It was never going to stop at Russia or China or Cuba. It seeks to transform all societies, including our own. Indeed, as leader of the free world, the U.S. has been communism's top target for over a century. Thus, Marxist, Leninist, and Maoist ideas have migrated into Western institutions and influence contemporary movements in our political and cultural institutions, including education, technology, and political identity. And that's why communism can't be defeated just through military superiority, economic sanctions, and technological competition. We have to recover confidence in our own civilization and individual liberty, political liberalism, free expression, constitutional government, and the Western tradition from which those principles emerged. Our guest today is Bradley Thayer, an American Freedom Alliance Fellow and a founding member of the Committee on the Present Danger of China. His new book is America's Hundred Years' War, How to Win Against Communism. Brad Thayer, welcome. Tell us, after so many failures, why does communism still exist? Why won't it just die?

SPEAKER_01 2:55

Great to join your audience and you today. That's a great question. And Orwell anticipated this a little bit in 1984 when he under he he asked the he wrote and uh had Winston Smith, of course, the protagonist in 1984 write in his diary that he understood how the party operated, but he didn't understand why the party was doing what it was doing, crushing humanity. So that's it exactly. Lee, I think there are two uh parts to the answer. The answer is for diehard communists, it offers a promise of totalitarian control. A small elite who are going to be in power, a Leninist elite uh who sees power uh in the Bolshevik Revolution, for example, in 1917. So there is that promise for the uh diehard communists. At the mass level Lee, why does communism continue to generate support? Well, I think that gets to human nature. I think that a lot of folks uh abide or listen to the pro the promises made by communists, taking from the haves and giving to the have-nots, for example. And that's very appealing uh at every age, but perhaps particularly when you're young and you see injustice. Uh, second element uh that also speaks to the human condition is a hatred of those who have more, a desire for revenge or hatred to tear down an order which is oppressing or which is perceived to oppress you. Uh so there's the promise that the communists give that they're going to destroy everything. They're going to destroy the old order and replace it with a paradise, a new element. And then, thirdly, also, that gets to elements of the human condition, a naivete about politics, uh believing promises of the creation of a paradise, the entering of a millenarian age where all injustices are going to be swept away and people are going to live uh in harmony and uh together. So at the elite level, it's certainly driven by power and a desire for totalitarian control.

SPEAKER_03 5:12

I think at a mass level, at a popular level, it's a complicated uh answer that uh that you know I've I've I've come to think more and more, you know, as we're as we look at what's happening in New York, we look at the uh Democratic Socialist of America, as we look at the different candidates that that that that they're running uh, you know, for for office in Washington, D.C., as well as local and state offices. Uh and people say, well, why has socialism become so so popular again? And I've come to I've come to think more and more it's it's it's in the second, uh, when you were describing why it appeals to the masses, it's more and more in the second category that people see it as an instrument to attack and to destroy their their enemies, right? No matter who their enemies are, it's a part of that. It's how to it's how to weaken people and how to take some sort of revenge by you're taking their property or their money or you you're humiliating them. And I mean, I I I wonder if that's something that's changed, or if there used to be more people who are like, no, communism is dreamy and wonderful, and everyone will be fed and everyone will be taken care of. Or to what extent people have said, yeah, you know, we we actually don't believe that. If I believe that, I would, you know, I I would be living in some, I would choose some other fantasy. What it's really good for is it's good for taking from them and giving to us.

SPEAKER_01 6:33

And smashing an old order and Western civilization, which is the point of the Bolshevik intent, Lenin's intent to destroy everything, uh, including Western civilization. So I I think that uh Lee is right, uh, that there is uh that desire uh to break the old uh and uh generate a system, even though theoretically it doesn't work. I mean, in terms of the political theory, it is, it's it's madness and in incomprehensible. And then empirically, everywhere it's been tried, it's ended in blood and tears. So the evidence, theoretically and empirically, is overwhelming. Um, and when folks realize that communists have killed over 100 million people worldwide since 1917, uh that should create an element of caution.

SPEAKER_03 7:26

But you're right when you're this is fascinating because right, because the question that we're the question that not not that you're answering, you're answering, you're making me think about something. The question that people often ask is, look, it's how we started, look, it doesn't work. Why do people still like communism? Well, empirically it doesn't work, right? It breaks, it breaks orders, that's what it does, but it satisfies certain important human needs. Not everyone shares these needs, but some people do. We look at the at we look at the cultural revolution in China. It's like, oh my goodness, that is just horrible. These young kids, these, you know, the the the red guard going around like shooting people and and and and humiliating, uh, humiliating the their elders. And like, well, unfortunately, that that actually satisfies the needs of some people.

SPEAKER_01 8:19

Uh it does, and and particularly the tyrannical leaders, right, like Mao Zedong, who is who are employing those uh Red Guards, for example, or Antifa on the streets of Portland or Minneapolis, St. Paul uh today to uh serve their ends uh as well. So it um it preys upon the naive, it preys upon those uh who want uh a dramatic change and who don't understand or appreciate what they have uh as a uh as a as a society, uh however imperfect, it's far better than the tyranny uh that's inevitable when you choose a communist road.

SPEAKER_03 8:58

If I can ask you, your I mean, your book is fantastic, congratulations. Um, it covers so much territory. I guess uh if you can explain the fundamental differences between uh Soviet communism, Chinese communism, and that's then I'm gonna ask you to speculate a little bit uh what would a real American communism look like? How would that differ from Soviet and uh and Chinese communism?

SPEAKER_01 9:24

Well, it that's an important question, Leah. Uh I start the book with an explanation of Leninism, because Lenin is the guy who did it uh and his his Bolshevik colleagues. He took Marx and Engels' theory, and he was uh also contributed greatly to that theory, as well as empirically. This is a guy, a man of action, who seized in a coup d'etat, uh really power uh in Russia. He was also a genius at political warfare. He understood that things could not just stand in Russia, you had to spread the revolution, so he created the Communist International. And the point of the Communist International was to spread the revolution by creating communist parties around the world, including in China. The Chinese Communist Party was created in 1921, which is the same year that the Common Turn basically creates the American Communist Party uh in the United States, uh, as well as around the world. So the Common Turn is a critical uh uh uh element really of how the Bolsheviks spread their power. The Soviets, of course, were defined by uh tyranny, and so is was Mao's uh the uh the Chinese Communist Party, which is still uh tyrannical. Whether it was Soviet or whether it's Chinese, you get the same outcome, which is uh a tyranny. Deng Xiaoping, of course, opened China in a way that Mikhail Gorbachev tried to do but failed uh in the Soviet Union. Deng Xiaoping was supremely successful, Li, as you well know, in making um Wall Street his partner, in allowing investment, allowing uh manufacturing uh in the People's Republic of China, and then taking that money and buying, if you will, influence in American universities and colleges on Wall Street, uh in uh the media. Now, how would that uh how would it exist in the United States? Well, it still would be tyrannical, right? It it no matter whether it's going to be a Soviet variant or a Chinese variant or an American variant, it's still ultimately Leninism. And Leninism rules by terror. At the end of the day, communists rule by terror, the threat of violence and violence. Uh, whether that's in Beijing or Moscow, or whether that, heaven forbid, would be in Washington, D.C. So there's no flirting with it. It's the devil, right? You don't want to get near it because it is going to corrupt you uh inevitably. And there's no socialism with the human face, like we used to talk about in 1968 with Dubček's uh revolution in Czechoslovakia. It was crushed by the Soviets, uh, and there's no alternative. This would be tyrannical uh in America as it has been everywhere else. And you see in North Korea, or you see in communist China, or you see in Cuba uh today, uh where those remnants uh exist.

SPEAKER_03 12:25

One of the things that we that that we're hearing people talking about, especially uh regarding New York City and the mayor there, Zoran Mandani, people are talking about, well, we've spoken about the Red Green Green Alliance for a long time. That is between uh between communists and between Islamists. Um does this uh does this recipe work or or are uh or are they are they bound to clash enough so that um well effectively there's a poison pill, but neither Islamism nor communism will be uh truly relevant in the United States so long as these two forces are are uh are united because they will eventually clash. Or uh or is this hybrid something that's unique to the United States and we should be terrified of?

SPEAKER_01 13:18

Well, certainly we should be uh terrified of it, to my mind. Uh I see in the red-green uh coalition, of course, it's uh incomprehensible. Uh the communists, of course, are uh atheistic, fiercely atheistic, uh, and Islamists, of course, uh advocates of sharia uh are the reverse, uh clearly. Um the red allowed the green into the United States. And that's why, to my mind, the communists are the far more formidable threat, because the communists control what I call the ideas industry. Our educational system, K-12, our colleges, universities, our media are heavily influenced uh by uh uh that influence that uh element, also our immigration policy. It was a period when the United States opened its borders uh clearly, in the wake of 9-11, for example, and then of course in the Biden administration, we've had many tens of millions of people enter the United States. Who would do that if you love the United States of America? Well, if you understand Lenin's the Bolshevik aphorism, the worse, the better, that makes a lot of sense. By the worse, the better, the Bolsheviks meant they wanted to make things worse. They wanted to destroy Russia. They didn't want to support the Russian army, they didn't want to support even the Russian people, so that revolution would be advanced. So the Reds let the Greens in and think that they're going to be using the Greens uh as a battering ram against American identity. Uh and uh that's how I see that situation. It's very dangerous. Both the red and the green are supremely dangerous. And with this marriage of convenience, however temporary, because it is a temporary uh arrangement, uh that makes them even a more formidable threat. Lee, as we're seeing in in Michigan, for example, with the candidate uh for the Democratic candidate for uh Senate uh in Michigan, as we're seeing in Colorado, we're seeing obviously in New York. Uh it is becoming, if you will, um almost on trend, right? It's becoming very popular to nominate uh for the Democratic Party to nominate uh these types of uh candidates. And it really shows how precarious the situation is for the United States and for the survival of our constitutional republic.

SPEAKER_03 15:47

So you think that communism is more a more powerful force than Islam? I guess that the the what I'd forgotten before is that we also saw something of a combination like this in in Iran uh during their revolution, and the communists, the the communists were involved with that, and then the communists lost. They lost on the streets to the you know the the um Islamic Republics and Hezbollahis. So but you think generally here in the United States the communists have a more significant uh base of support?

SPEAKER_01 16:19

Well, I I think that they're uh extremely influential in media, in the ideas industry, Democratic Party, uh and uh that makes them, of course, uh the uh the more significant threat to my mind is President Trump has been calling out in his truth social posts, really, for the last two months now, uh, where he's been calling attention to the danger uh of uh communism. And you see on July 3rd, of course, Lee, your audience may remember the pr the speech that President Trump gave uh at Mount Rushmore.

SPEAKER_02 16:53

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 16:53

And twinning that with the speech that Mandami gave in New York City that morning.

SPEAKER_02 16:58

Right.

SPEAKER_01 16:59

Uh President Trump, of course, gave that full-throated uh essentially uh uh embracing uh the United States uh and and explaining the importance of the Declaration of Independence and American Independence Day. Well, Mandami said Independence Day is whatever you want it to be. Well, that's a classic communist tactic of remaking history. As again, Orwell said, if I own the present uh through an educational system, for example, I'll control your past. And if I control your past, I own your future. So if I'm teaching the kids that American independence means everything, I'm hijacking your history. I'm unhinging your history to diminish and ultimately destroy American identity. And by so doing, I'm going to own the future.

SPEAKER_03 17:47

I think on Danny's speech was fascinating because the optics were so bad. Yes. Um, I mean, he he he's not an ugly guy. He's, you know, charismatic. I mean, I don't find him that charismatic, but people find him charismatic, but just the optics of it were awful. It just looked dark and nasty and angry. And it's hard to imagine that that's going to appeal to a lot of uh Americans when we're we're kind of the experts at advertising. The the the the amount of ads that we're watching since birth, and we know what appeals to us viscerally, and what are the optics we like. And it seemed to me that that was going entirely in the opposite direction. And and that is a pretty clear indication of what communism is: a lot of darkness, a lot of ugliness, both externally and internally.

SPEAKER_01 18:35

Yeah. Well, he was taking his finger and sticking it in Uncle Sam's eye, right? He had the picture of Washington in the background uh in an effort to hijack or to have some type of legitimacy while saying everything that Washington and the founding fathers and that Americans generations after generations of Americans created with their sweat and their blood is uh being thrown out the window. Uh so I agree absolutely. It was uh in that respect, it was a horrible speech, but it was an alarming speech because he was saying, I don't care. Uh I'm remaking your history right now, and there's nothing you can do about it.

SPEAKER_03 19:15

We're hearing a lot of people, or or or I'm hearing this, saying, well, yeah, socialism is not that appealing, but who knows if these proposals aren't going to find some footing because AI is going to wipe out so many people's jobs. So we may need something like a universal basic income, which is something that people like Elon Musk, who's presumably not a communist, have been talking about. Does that concern you? That that different things are lining up so that people will that more and more people will be inclined to say, yeah, I d I I I don't have work. Uh I can't find work. Work has eliminated entire industries. So how are we going to be taken care of?

SPEAKER_01 19:56

The immiseration of the proletariat, of which the Leninists, uh Marx and the Leninists spoke. I Lee, I agree with that. And really, I would add to that, the LLMs, the large language models are also going to be driven by Lenin because the content that's going into the LLMs uh is going to be drawn from, if you will, dominant discourse uh today, and that's Leninist, right? If you're drawing your material.

SPEAKER_03 20:22

Can you explain this? Can you explain what you mean by that that Leninism is the dominant discourse? I mean, I think, you know, I'm surprising to me. Um, what what do you mean by that?

SPEAKER_01 20:34

Sure, if you're hoovering up CNN, right, to provide your the large language models are going out and searching, right? And and uh and although it's a complicated issue, they're basically vacuuming up uh um uh our media, our books, for example, what folks are saying, podcasts, uh all of that. Well, if you own the ideas industry, right, then you're gonna have uh obviously control or heavily uh influence in those large language models. And so if you're asking Chad a question or Grok a question, what's the response going to be? Well, it's going to be one which is colored by uh the folks who own the ideas industry. Wow. Uh and that means what? And then your point, I think, is spot on. Uh there is going to be unemployment, right? There are going to be um uh a lot of folks who are uh who will be alienated because they've lost their jobs and they'll be looking for dramatic political change uh in in this uh situation. So to for my mind, both of those causes uh means our future is uh is precarious.

SPEAKER_03 21:52

Your your uh your book, America's 100 Years War, How to Win Against Communism. It's there in the subtitle. You have a positive message too. And that's and that's how I'd like to end our talk because I don't want everyone to think it's all dire. We live in the greatest country in the history of the world. And also, look, insofar as we're fighting this, we're starting in a much better place than most people who fight totalitarian and totalitarian regimes are starting, right? You and I are speaking openly here. We both live in decent homes. We're not in a trench. We're not in a basement somewhere in the Warsaw ghetto or something like that. So but what is what is our way forward as Americans?

SPEAKER_01 22:40

Learn from the past. We've been fighting a hundred years' war against communism, and uh it hasn't triumphed yet. And why didn't it triumph? Because American identity was very strong in the past. When American identity is strong, communism is weak. When communism is strong, American identity is weak. So uh in the past, what did we know? With our identity, we recognized, as Trump has called out, right, that communism is anti-American fundamentally. Americans see people as individuals. Communists see people as collectives, as groups. You're not uh you're not Lee, obviously, you're a white man, obviously of a particular class, all of those elements, and that determines your identity. Americans reject that. We believe we have rights that are given by God, and those rights cannot be taken away from any from from us. And from that foundation, seeing people as individuals with rights, we have built a political system and institutions which respect liberty, freedom, the rule of law, free market uh economics, which as you said, it's created the best political, economic, and social system that's ever existed in the greatest civilization, Western civilization, which has ever uh existed. When Americans recognize that, they can see that of course our identity is something for which to be supremely proud, uh and and to recognize that if you're coming in to attack that, uh then um uh uh then it's uh you're anti-American fundamentally. You're rejecting the spirit of 1776 uh for something which is much darker uh and totalitarian. And Americans won't have it. I would also add to that, Lee, that Amer there's an American spirit. Americans have a good head on their shoulders. We're kind of empirical folks, right? That look at situations, we look at things, we quantify things, and we see whether this is gonna be positive for us uh uh uh as a people or whether it's not. And I think despite the dangers we've discussed today, again, Americans have a good head on their shoulders, and they're gonna reject these promises uh as Mandami is going to open his grocery stores, but they're going to fail. Mandami is gonna crack down on billionaires, but he's gonna drive many out. He's gonna make the he's gonna immiserate the people of New York City. Now, he doesn't care about that, right? But peop Americans looking at the situation are going to say this is not the right uh path um uh to uh to pursue, and we need to return to what um the strength of our identity uh to reject this. So the message of the book is optimistic. Americans have defeated communism before, it's been a long war, and we can again if we remember who we are. I Brad Thayer, thank you.

SPEAKER_03 25:41

That's great. I it it reminds me of uh why dissidents are are so important to this country, why people who have lived through communism, why people who have lived through totalitarian regimes are so important, because some of the times, some of the times we're the fish who don't know the water is wet, right? We we we're here, we take we as we should take it for granted because it's you know God God granted us these rights. But once we look around and realize that not all the world is like that and history moves awfully quickly, and that's why it's so important to have dissidents telling us what the rest of the world looks like, and that's why it's so important to read Brad Thayer's brand new book. Brad, congratulations. Thanks so much for being here with us today on Roots, Rights, and Reason, and we'll see you all in our next episode. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Roots, Rights, and Reason. If you enjoyed today's conversation, please subscribe, share this episode, and visit America's future.net for our full library of podcasts. Until next time, remember that understanding our roots, defending our rights, and exercising our reason are essential to preserving the greatest country in the history of Earth. I'm Lee Smith. See you next time on Roots, Rights, and Reason.