The Republicans have decided that their best way to retain control of the House and Senate is to run against - drum roll please - communism. And some members of the House on the Republican side have introduced a resolution condemning some of the policies of the Democratic Socialists of America which they hope people will confuse with the dangerous communists.
Hidden in the resolution is support for a law called the SAVE act which is a very strong voter suppression bill which President Trump has touted as the way to make sure Republicans never lose another election. Luckily, it has no chance of passing the Senate.
By the way, it passed the house on Sept. 1 and eight Democrats voted for it!
Not to be outdone, a handful of Democrats introduced an amendment to this Republican bill which strips out the support for the SAVE act but attempts to make sure that the public realizes that Democrats are just as negative about communism and some of the policy proposals that have been floated by members of DSA.
Here is a shortened version of the Democratic resolution:
Whereas the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, built on Marxist-Leninist doctrine, subjected its people to forced collectivization, the man-made Holodomor famine that starved millions of Ukrainians, mass deportations, and a sprawling network of gulag labor camps;
Whereas the People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong carried out the Great Leap Forward, whose forced collectivization produced the deadliest famine in recorded human history, followed by the Cultural Revolution, which claimed millions more lives;
Whereas the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, in pursuit of a socialist utopia, murdered roughly one-quarter of the nation's population;
Whereas the DSA's ideology and socialism, in any form, are incompatible with American values and the United States Constitution;
Whereas the DSA openly seeks to abolish capitalism and to seize control of private American industry;
Now, therefore, be it resolved
"That the House of Representatives condemns and denounces socialism in all its forms, including the Democratic Socialists of America, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States."
In my view, those Democrats are falling into a trap - the trap that the Republicans have set for them by introducing the specter of communism to the 2026 campaign.
I mean, come on - there is no Soviet Union. So-called Communist China is a capitalist behemoth beating the world in export markets.
[The entire Democratic amendment can be viewed here.
If you go online, the DSA platform includes the following:
A quick look makes clear they are not going to re-create Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao’s China should they get into power.
· Legislative Overhaul: Abolish the U.S. Senate, expand the House of Representatives, and establish a unicameral legislature where the House holds primary power. [1, 2, 3]
· Executive and Judiciary: Replace the President and the Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress. [1]
· Electoral Changes: Implement proportional representation, ranked-choice voting, and a national popular vote for president while replacing the two-party system. [1, 2]
· Foreign Policy: Defund the Department of War/Pentagon and close all overseas U.S. military bases. [1, 2, 3]
· Criminal Justice and Immigration: Abolish the carceral state (prisons and policing), defund the police, end ICE deportations/detentions, and grant universal amnesty for immigrants. [1, 2, 3]
What is interesting about both the Democratic and Republican attacks is they start with the Soviet Union, Mao’s China and the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia and then somehow think that the current set of DSA proposals are the first step towards those repressive regimes with their famines and atrocities. I mean that is the gas lighting of Donald Trump and the Republicans and it’s unworthy of the Democrats.
But perhaps my most serious complaint about the Democrats’ efforts to inoculate themselves from the Republican charge of communism (an impossibility by the way - the best way to respond to being called a communist is to laugh it off as a throwback to the era of Joe McCarthy and President Trump’s favorite lawyer, Roy Cohn.) is that it creates a danger of damaging the very broad coalition that is poised to defeat Trump and Trumpism in November.
The pro-Democracy coalition includes people who are disaffected Republicans, traditional Democrats, progressive Democrats and yes, members of DSA. It also, by the way, includes lots of Independents who are not members of any political party. Any effort to drive any of the people in this broad anti-Trump coalition that the Democrats need in order to take back the House and Senate in November must be resisted.
Consider this historical analogy. During the 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt put together a massive coalition within the Democratic Party that came to dominate American politics for more than 20 years. That coalition included a group of southern Democrats who supported segregation as well as the Jim Crow laws that made it virtually impossible for Black people to exercise their 15th Amendment right to vote.
One could have made a case that those Southern Democrats were practicing a politics that was completely at odds with the democratic traditions of the United States as promised by the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. Yet it was not until the 1960s that the Democratic party leadership broke with those southerners and supported civil rights and voting rights for Black Americans.
Before then, the broad Democratic coalition had passed federal relief, Social Security, The National Labor Relations Act, a minimum wage law, and all the alphabet laws that made up the New Deal. Without the support of those Southerners, none of the New Deal laws would have passed.
My conclusion: the Democratic Party would be making a serious mistake if it tried to read anyone - even members of DSA - out of the anti-Trump coalition. Instead, they should acknowledge that there are significant policy differences within the anti-Trump coalition but remind voters that the issue that unites them - protecting American democracy from authoritarianism - is much more important than their policy differences.
Michael Meeropol is professor emeritus of Economics at Western New England University. He is the author with Howard and Paul Sherman of the recently published second edition of Principles of Macroeconomics: Activist vs. Austerity Policies.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.