The Cause That Turned Idealists Into Authoritarian Zealots

For more than a century, the American left has been pulled in two directions. The better one seeks revolutionary change through the democratic process, as the Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs did in the early 20th century. Emulating the abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, Debs tried to convince people of many political persuasions to expand the promise of equality embedded in the Declaration of Independence. The Socialist Party that he led got more than 1,000 members elected to public office, and he himself won 6 percent of the vote when he ran for president in 1912.

A competing vision arose during and after the First World War in Russia, a country that bore scant resemblance to Western democracies and had no tradition of government based on principles of equal rights. To overthrow Russia’s czar, Vladimir Lenin created a tightly organized and ideologically disciplined corps of “professional revolutionaries” who would dedicate “the whole of their lives” to the movement. Their success at destroying the old order in 1917 appealed to a contingent of American radicals who, in 1919, left the Socialist Party to form what would eventually be named the Communist Party USA. Like the original Bolsheviks in Russia, the CPUSA subordinated democratic ideals and individual conscience to the decisions made by a hierarchical party apparatus. That approach—which assumes that adherents’ fervor and discipline can compensate for a lack of popular support—has done little to create a more equitable society in the United States.

I am a lifelong democratic socialist. I was a founding member of the Democratic Socialists of America, a group established in 1982 in the spirit of Debs, Garrison, and Douglass. I am also the author of Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism, a new history of that movement from 1919 to 1991. I wrote the book as a cautionary tale. The Communist Party’s ignominious history—of taking instructions from Moscow, drumming out dissenters, and making excuses for communist regimes’ human-rights violations in the name of revolutionary solidarity—should be a warning to ideologues pushing for greater uniformity on the left and to anyone tempted to think that dogmas, slogans, and tactical orders from headquarters should be accepted without debate. Unfortunately, some factions within the organized left are repeating the CPUSA’s errors today, most notably in their rigid, doctrinaire response to the Hamas attack on Israel in October.

The American Communist cause attracted egalitarian idealists and bred authoritarian zealots. Their belief that “bourgeois democracy”—the kind with regular voting and secret ballots—is a sham caused them to boycott the 1920 election instead of attempting to build power within the existing political system. While Debs campaigned for the U.S. presidency from his prison cell in 1920, the Communists refused to endorse him or any other candidates for public office. Instead, they called upon the working class to prepare for armed insurrection. (Those calls went unheeded.)

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Democratic rights unjustly denied to American radicals such as Debs, who was convicted of sedition for voicing his opposition to U.S. involvement in World War I, were rights that American Communists no longer honored themselves. In January 1921, the Communist leader Robert Minor declared, in a debate in New York City with the Socialist leader James Oneal, that a true revolutionary “will take a position of free speech when it is the bourgeois dictatorship that is on top, and he will take a position against free speech when it is the workers on top.” Some party figures openly delighted in the possibility of simply crushing their political enemies. In his 1932 book, Toward a Soviet America, the CPUSA leader William Z. Foster dreamed of “the workers” abolishing all opposition in the United States, leaving “the Communist Party functioning alone as the Party of the toiling masses.”

Communists in the United States, like their counterparts around the world, considered defending the Soviet Union their top political priority. American Communists did not deny that opposition to the Soviet regime brought harsh penalties for those living under its rule, but argued it was all for the greater good. As Moissaye Olgin, the founding editor of the CPUSA’s New York City–based Yiddish daily newspaper, Frayhayt, declared in its pages, the Soviet dictatorship “forces the individual worker to follow proletarian rule like a father forces his child to take medicine that tastes bad to him, but will make him healthy.”

Sticking up for Moscow resulted in frequent, dizzying reversals of the “party line.” From 1929 to 1934, as Joseph Stalin consolidated his totalitarian control and pushed for rapid industrialization in the Soviet Union, American Communists adopted an equally hard-line and ultra-revolutionary stance, calling for proletarian revolution. From 1935 to 1939, as Stalin awoke to the danger of an attack from Nazi Germany and sought to woo the Western democracies as allies in the event of war, Communists in the United States dropped calls for immediate revolution, and sought instead to form a broad anti-fascist “Popular Front” with American liberalism. From 1939 to 1941, the years of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, when Stalin and Hitler collaborated in dividing much of Eastern Europe between them, American Communists dropped anti-fascism for anti-war isolationism. And so on for decades, as party leaders in America would advocate whatever served Moscow’s interests, no matter how illogical or nonsensical the argument might be. Gus Hall, the general secretary of the CPUSA during the latter half of the 20th century, supported the Red Army’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 as a measure that would strengthen that country’s independence.

Communism in the United States was an adopted and embattled faith and, as such, precariously held by many CPUSA members. American Communists were not born Leninists or raised in a society where obedience to party dictates could be enforced by violent repression, as it was in the Soviet Union. Tensions around questions of democracy produced a constant stream of defections from the party. In my research, I found ample evidence of members’ unease over many Soviet policies. But, strikingly, many of these members failed to speak up. In 1931, the labor journalist Mary Heaton Vorse, who had secretly joined the party in the mid-1920s, confided in her diary that she was “in a bourgeois frame of mind about the kulaks”—which is to say, uneasy about the brutal displacement of peasants from their land during the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture in the first Stalinist Five-Year Plan. “Who cares which class rules so long as the sum of injustice remains the same?” she asked, underlining the question. Yet Vorse kept her doubts to herself.

By the time I first encountered the organized left, as a 17-year-old college freshman in the fall of 1968, American Communism had been reduced to a tiny and mostly elderly remnant, of little appeal to my own generation. Instead, I joined the radical campus group Students for a Democratic Society, at what seemed at the time like another moment of revolutionary upheaval.

Although American Communism was largely defunct, the Leninist tradition was not. Sometime after joining SDS, which had been founded half a dozen years earlier on the Debs model, I sat down with a pile of the Soviet founder’s revolutionary polemics (in tattered paperback copies inherited from relatives who had been party members back in the 1930s and ’40s), and tried to convert myself to Leninism. Like earlier would-be Leninists, I was not immune to the temptation of becoming part of the elect that understood and would shape history in apocalyptic days to come.

Fortunately for me, the genuine Leninists whom I encountered on the fringes of SDS recognized that my actual political beliefs differed from theirs. Beneath my thinly applied layer of Bolshevik-speak, I ascribed to a version of hippie anarchism, a tendency much more characteristic of rank-and-file sentiment in SDS in those years than either communism or democratic socialism. But by dissecting my ideological deficiencies, they also inadvertently convinced me that their Leninist alternative was a political dead end. Within a few years, all of the “new communist” groups formed in the late ’60s and early ’70s tottered off to sectarian irrelevance and historical obscurity. I’m grateful to have missed that experience.

Instead, in 1982, I became a founding member of Democratic Socialists of America, the successor organization to Debs’s Socialist Party. DSA equally stressed the two descriptors in its name, both socialist and democratic. Beyond that, in the Debs tradition of American radicalism, there was no party line. DSAers were free to follow their own ideas and conscience.

Over the next few decades, the organization’s commitment to pluralism helped bring it to the verge of realizing the goal that its principal founder, the late Michael Harrington, set for it: serving as “the left wing of the possible.” Although Bernie Sanders was not a DSA member, his 2016 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination helped popularize the concept of democratic socialism among younger voters. The election of four DSA members, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to Congress from 2018 to 2020 also helped raise the group’s national profile and expand its membership.

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Unfortunately, at the very moment that DSA was enjoying its greatest practical achievements, the Leninist temptation was emerging within the organization. By the fall of 2023, a coalition of hard-left caucuses had gained control of many big-city DSA chapters and had assembled a majority on the group’s ruling National Political Committee.

Like the Communists who came before them, members of these caucuses share a vision of international solidarity that requires them to be devoted apologists for foreign tyrants and gross violations of human rights. The Red Star caucus, which counts one of the DSA’s co-chairs as a member, believes that as long as a foreign regime or movement is part of the global anti-imperialist “camp,” which is to say anti–United States, it can basically do anything it likes. Red Star’s statement of unity proclaims, “We see no benefit in levying public criticism of states or movements that are opposed to US empire, as such critique in effect serves no purpose except to create consent for empire.”

These developments had an all too familiar ring to me, as a historian of American Communism. I resigned from DSA last fall following Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, when DSA’s national leadership only tepidly condemned the mass murders, rapes, and kidnappings of civilians, and placed responsibility for the bloodshed on Israel and its American backers. Various DSA chapters have since adopted resolutions providing for the expulsion of any member deemed to be a “Zionist,” which can include anyone who defends Israel’s right to exist, regardless of their support for a Palestinian right to independent statehood. In May, the Red Star caucus circulated a statement with the revealing title “We Do Not Condemn Hamas, and Neither Should You.”

As far as DSA leadership is concerned, the only bad actors in the world are the United States and its allies. The organization refrains from criticizing the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It has labeled President Biden “Genocide Joe” for failing to cut off U.S. military support for Israel, but has bestowed no such damning titles on Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, or Kim Jong Un.

Major elements of the left in the United States have embraced the Leninist tradition before, from World War I to the Cold War, and now some American radicals appear ready to choose ideological uniformity and organizational discipline over free debate. That choice has always ended in disaster and disillusionment. There is a far better tradition of genuine American radicalism that stands for democratic rights and common decency.