What is Communism?

 

What Is Communism?

July 18, 2026

Donald Trump and his MAGA acolytes have started screaming “communist” at progressive Democratic candidates who call themselves “democratic socialists.” There is only one conceivable reason why they’re doing so, and it isn’t that democratic socialists are really communists. It’s because the rise of politicians who actually care about the people and are prepared to do things like raise taxes on the ultra-wealthy to pay for social programs scares them to death. So rather than debate Democrats on the level of policy preferences they dig up the old smear term communist, hoping to scare American voters off of candidates who actually do something to improve the people’s lives.

Now, it’s possible to respond to Trump’s newfound passion for throwing the term communism around the way I just did, and doing so would be to tell the truth. However, intelligent people will want more than that. They will want to know what communism actually is so they can compare it to the programs of social democratic politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Mayor Zohran Mamdani to see whether the label communist really applies. So here I want to explain, perhaps unfortunately at some length, what communism really is both in Marxist theory and in Soviet reality—and those two are a long, long way from the same thing.

Before I undertake to explain communism, let me briefly set out my qualifications for doing so. I have a PhD in Russian history, and Russia was a fully communist country at least from 1922 to near the end of 1991. As part of my training as a Russian historian, I learned Marxist ideology. Not because anyone was trying to make me a Marxist but because you couldn’t begin to understand the USSR without understanding Marxism. I went to Russia twice. I was there first in the summer of 1968 on a Russia language study tour through Indiana University. More importantly, I spent the 1975-76 academic year in Russia doing dissertation research. My wife, our son, and I lived in the dormitory of Moscow State University. I did most of my work in Moscow but also spent some time in what was then Leningrad, now, of course, once again St. Petersburg. I had certain advantages that Soviet citizens didn’t have, but I still learned a good deal about what it meant to live in that communist country. So I think I can describe communism both in theory and in practice with some authority.

As a matter of historical reality, the term “communism” originated, or at least became important, with the politico-economic theory of Karl Marx (1818-1883). Marx was a German philosopher who did most of his work in England. He develop a philosophy called “dialectical materialism.” Both of those words are important. By “materialism,” Marx meant that only the material is real. Reality consists only of that which we humans can perceive with our senses. Philosophical materialism denies the reality of the spiritual dimension of human existence. True Marxists are, therefore, assertively atheistic. Many Americans used to throw around the phrase “godless communism,” and that phrase does indeed fully apply to Marxist ideology.

To understand the term communism, however, we need to understand what Marx meant by the term “dialectical.” Though he denied any spiritual reality, he did believe that human history progresses through what he called a dialectic. He learned dialectical philosophy from the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), but he applied it in a way Hegel never did. In a dialectic, you start with a position or proposition or, for Marx, an political economic system. This starting point is called the “thesis.” According to this philosophy, a thesis produced its opposite, called the “antithesis.” Then, eventually, the thesis and the antithesis somehow merge to create an end state called the “synthesis.”

Marxist ideology is called dialectical materialism because Marx asserted that human history progresses through such a dialectical progression. Most significantly for our purposes, Marx took capitalism to be a thesis and socialism to be its antithesis. For Marx, everything was about class and how different classes relate to the means of production, that is, to things like land and factories, etc. In capitalism, the capitalist class owns all of the means of production. The whole system is based on private property, and the private property that matters belongs to a small class of owners and entrepreneurs. Most of the people in a capitalist system are workers who work for the capitalists under conditions set by the capitalists. Marx was working within the capitalist system of nineteenth century England, and he saw that system as consisting of a class struggle between the capitalists and the workers, whom Marx called the proletariat.

Marx believed that that class struggle would eventually lead naturally and inevitably to a class revolution of the proletariat against the capitalist system. This revolution, he said, would lead to the creation of “socialism” not communism. This socialism is the antithesis of capitalism. In capitalism, a moneyed class owns the means of production. In socialism, the working class owns the means of production. The capitalist class, often called the bourgeoisie, is displaced if not physically eliminated, and their property passes to a state created by and for the proletariat. Marx anticipated that this socialist revolution would be violent, and he had no problem with it being violent. The capitalists and the institutions they created—and they created all of the society’s institutions from the state to the arts and the churches—would not go peaceably. The proletariat, through its socialist state, would have to force them out and eliminate them.

Socialism was not the end of Marx’s historical inevitability. Rather, over time, as the elimination of the class distinction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat progressed, the socialist state would “whiter and die.” Once the proletariat eliminated the bourgeoisie and appropriated the means of production, there would be no more class distinctions within society. Only the proletariat would remain. And because there would be no longer any class conflict, there would be no need for a state. So the socialist state, created to bring about the elimination of all class conflict, would simply disappear.

This situation, in which there is no longer any state, is Marxist communism. All property would be held communally. There would no longer be any conflict between people because all conflict is the result of conflict between socioeconomic classes, and there would be only one class, the proletariat. It’s not entirely clear to me how Marx’ communism is a synthesis between capitalism and socialism except perhaps that in it both the bourgeoisie and, essentially, the proletariat disappear into a classless society. In any event, the historical dialectic would end in the state of communism.

That, of course, is not what essentially anyone means by the term communism today. It is, actually, what the Soviet communists meant by the term. They never claimed to have created a communist nation. They created a socialist nation and claimed to be transitioning to communism not that they had attained it. However, in the world today the term communism usually means something quite different from pure Marxist communism. That’s because of what people, first in Russia but also in China and elsewhere, who claimed to be communists did when they came to power. To a review of those horrors we now turn.

The Bolshevik wing of the Russian Democratic Socialist Workers Party staged a coup de état in St. Petersburg, Russia, on October 25, 1917 (old style).[1] The Soviet communists would come to call this coup the “Great October Revolution,” but, at first at least, it was nothing of the sort. It was a coup that displaced the so-called Provisional Government that had assumed power after Tsar Nicholas II abdicated earlier in the year. A civil war followed that lasted until 1922. Only when the Bolsheviks finally won that civil war did Russia and most (if not quite all) of the Russian Empire become the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ruled by the Bolsheviks, who changed their name to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Soviet communism became a totalitarian regime founded in and enforced by terror. The terror began early. Very early on, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Ilich Lenin put a man named Felix Dzherinsky in charge of an organization we know as the Cheka. This organization went through various name changes over the following years, but it is best known today as the KGB. The Cheka conducted a campaign of murderous terror against anyone it took to be an enemy of the Bolshevik regime. It surely murdered at least tens of thousands of people during the Russian civil war that followed the Bolshevik coup. Both Lenin and Dzherinsky, along with all of their Bolshevik associates, believed that terror was necessary to establish their socialist state and defeat its class enemies, all of it enemies being of course class enemies. In later decades it became popular to think of Lenin as a more peaceful Bolshevik. He wasn’t. He set himself up as a murderous tyrant.

The terror that Lenin instituted grew by orders of magnitude under Lenin’s successor Josef Stalin.[2] Before Hitler invaded the USSR in 1942, Stalin and the Cheka (usually called the NKVD in Stalin’s years) killed at least twenty million Soviet people. He imposed an artificial famine on Ukraine and elsewhere, known as the Holodomor, as part of his effort to enforce the collectivization of agriculture. At least four million Ukrainians starved to death. Stalin killed all of the so-called “old Bolsheviks,” the men who had known and worked with Lenin in creating the Soviet state. He eliminated nearly all of the members of the leadership of the Soviet Red Army, supposedly because they were enemies of the Soviet state (which, of course, they were not).

Stalin created the infamous Gulag system of prison camps, where millions of people disappeared and died. I have read of NKVD agents whose job, in eight hour shifts, was to shoot people in the back of the head. All Soviet citizens came to live in fear of the “black Mariahs,” the black cars the secret police used when coming to arrest some innocent person as an enemy of the people. No one could trust anyone, not even close friends or family members, not to file a false complaint against them with the secret police. Stalin made heroes of children who reported on “counterrevolutionary” acts by their parents.

In June, 1942, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin was able to rally the Russian people (and others) to defeat them, but they did it at the cost of between twenty and thirty million lives.[3] And during the horrors of the Nazi invasion, Stalin never called off the NKVD. It continued to arrest, imprison, and execute supposed enemies of the Soviet state in large numbers. They even did during the unspeakable horror of the Nazi siege of Leningrad, in which more than one million people starved to death. Stalin died in 1953, and the terror of the Soviet regime abated to a significant extent after he was gone; but it ended only with the dissolution of the USSR on December 25, 1991 (which is not Christmas in Russia).

So, that’s what communism is in theory and what it became in practice. It is responsible for some of humanity’s greatest grimes against humanity, particularly in the USSR and in Communist China. The Trump administration wants Americans to believe that progressive, social democratic Democrats are in fact communists. They aren’t. They aren’t Marxists. They aren’t all atheists. Your humble author, for example is a social democrat but not an atheist. They believe in democracy and in the civil rights of all people. They—we—don’t want to remake our country into anything remotely like Soviet Russia. Far from it. American social democrats abhor violence and have no intention whatsoever to use it to bring about their—our—goals.  

So, Trump and his bootlickers will probably continue to accuse American social democrats like Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani of being communists. They aren’t, but the MAGA crowd cares not who whit about factual truth. Trump and his acolytes throw the term communist at social democrats because they know that the word communism is still a scare word for most Americans. We Americans would have every reason to be scared if anyone were seriously trying to turn our country communist, but for all practical purposes no one is. The emerging social democratic wing of the Democratic Party certainly isn’t. I just hope and pray that Trump’s attempt to label social democrats as communists fails as badly as essentially everything else he has tried to do has failed.

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[1] Until the Bolsheviks changed it after they came to power, Russia used the older Julian calendar not the Gregorian calendar used in most of the rest of the world. In the 20^th century, there was a twelve day difference between the two. Thus the date the west knew as Nov. 7 was known in Russia as October 25. The Soviets celebrated their “Great October Revolution” on Nov. 7. In my imperial Russian history seminar in graduate school, my major professor asked us why we thought the Russians didn’t adopt the more accurate Gregorian calendar. I said it was probably because they thought that calendar, promulgated by a Pope Gregory, was some sort of papist conspiracy. My major professor said: “Yes, that’s precisely why they didn’t do it.”

[2] Stalin was not Russian. He was Georgian. His family name was Dzhugashvili not Stalin. He took the name Stalin to style himself as a man of steel.

[3] By comparison, the United States’ losses in all of World War II totaled less than 500,000, which is, of course horrible enough in its own right but is nothing like what the Soviet people suffered.

Trump and the Upcoming Election

 There simply is no doubt that Donald Trump is laying the groundwork for a campaign not only to contest the mid-term elections next November but to take active measures to overturn enough election results to keep the Republicans in control of both houses of Congress. We can't know exactly what he plans to do, but we cannot rule out the possibility that he will attempt to use the US military to seize ballots and voting equipment in states where his candidates have lost. If he does that, and if he gets away with it, American democracy will be dead. But then, that's exactly what Trump wants, the death of American democracy. I wish I knew of a surefire way to stop him, but I don't. Democracy always depends on the will of the people. If enough people have lost their faith in democracy in this country, our democracy will die. We must all do whatever we can to keep that from happening, for only in a democratic society can individual freedom truly be maintained.

No, I Am Not a Patriot

 No, I Am Not a Patriot

July 5, 2026

I’m supposed to love the United States of America, and I have lived in a place that was much worse than the United States of America, namely the Soviet Union, where I did one year of dissertation research in the mid-1970s. I was glad to get out of there. In fact, as I was leaving Moscow for the first time, with a group of students from Indiana University in August, 1968, shortly after the USSR had invaded Czechoslovakia, we sang the hit song of the time with the lyric: “We’ve got to get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do.” I remember driving home to Eugene from the Portland airport a short time later and seeing a business flying a truly enormous American flag near the freeway. I thought: Well, that’s not my style, but at least someone’s doing that because they want to not because they have to. So yes, this country does have certain virtues.

But. And the buts control here. We are and essentially always have been the most imperialistic nation on earth. Every square inch of the United States is land we stole from other people. And not only that. We did everything we could to wipe those people off the face of the earth. Hitler thought we couldn’t object to his planned genocide of the Jews because he had committed genocide against the American Indians, as indeed we had. We took much of what is now the United States from Mexico through imperialistic war, the War of 1848. We expanded our empire militaristically in 1898 too. We are and always have been an imperialistic country, and I reject all imperialism outright.

We maintain what is by far the world’s largest military. We lie and say that we have it to defend our freedom. We call all its members heroes whether they’ve ever done anything heroic or not. We glorify military service as noble and honorable when in fact the true purpose of any military, ours included, is to kill and be killed. In fact, we have our massive military only for imperialistic purposes. We have it to project and protect American economic and political power around the world, and that is a purely illegitimate reason for having it. There is nothing noble or honorable about it at all. Yet we tie patriotism to the military. The military participates in all sorts of American activities solely for the purpose of making people feel good about the military and the country that creates, maintains, and glorifies it. Why else to fighter jets fly over football stadiums? Why else to the Blue Angels perform (yes, perform brilliantly) at hydroplane races like they do every year in Seattle? I see people online being impressed by military hardware, but every piece of military hardware is nothing but part of a massive killing machine. I will not celebrate the American military, and I will not be patriotic with regard to a country that maintains and celebrates the American military.

Our most recent use of our military is particularly unjustifiable and shameful. Donald Trump ordered it to attack Iran though there was absolutely no reason for us to attack Iran. Trump couldn’t even give a coherent reason for attacking Iran. When we did, we sent a smart weapon into a girl’s school and killed over 100 children. Yes, the military said it was “a mistake,” but why do we even deploy forces capable of making such a mistake to a part of the world in which we have no significant interest and where there is no reason for military action whatsoever?

This country was founded in racism, and it remains rotten with racism to its core yet today. We had made some not insignificant progress toward eradicating racism until Donald Trump became president. Now avowed white nationalists parade openly in our country’s capital just as the Ku Klux Klan did in the 1920s (though in considerably smaller numbers). We imprison more people than any other nation in the world, and a grossly disproportionate parentage of our prisoners are people of color. Our president is an overt racist, and he panders to the underlying racism of American society to get and keep himself in power. I will not be patriotic toward a nation as racist as mine is.

Then there is the shame of our health insurance system. Every other industrialized nation on earth has a system of universal health care supported by taxes. We don't. The power of the wealthy keeps us from creating one because creating one would nearly abolish the enormous health insurance industry. The Republican Party has been making it impossible for more and more people to obtain health insurance, something that makes not a lick of sense even from a Republican or Trumpist fascist perspective. For-profit insurance companies, in business only to make money, make decisions about people's health care that belong only to practicing physicians and their patients. I will not be patriotic toward a nation that refuses to make health care available to all of its people the way this one refuses to do.

The American economy is capitalistic. It is regulated a little bit but not nearly enough. Our economy is dominated by enormous corporations in nearly every sphere of economic activity. American law says that the duty of corporate leadership is to increase the financial return for the corporation's investors and is nothing else beyond that other than comply with whatever laws there are that control what the corporation must or must not do--and there aren't anywhere near enough of those. Capitalism works for the wealthy. It does not work for anyone else. The United States government has regulated capitalism enough that it has survived, but today the income disparity between the wealthy 1% and everyone else is so great that there may be some hope that a democratic socialist system will eventually regulate it enough so that it works for everyone.

So, no I am not an American patriot. I wish no harm for the people of the country, but I then I wish no harm for anyone anywhere. I do not value American people over other people. I wish no harm for my country, but I don't wish it anything better than I wish for any country. I want my country to become the country of justice and freedom that it has always claimed to be but has never been, but I know that won't happen in my lifetime. I wish peace for my country just as I wish peace for all people everywhere. I want my country to stop being as militaristic and imperialistic as it has always been and remains today, but I know that won't happen in my lifetime either. The forces against peace and justice in this country are just too strong for any systemic change to happen except over very long periods of time if they happen at all. 

Are you an American patriot? You certainly have the right to be one. We do have at least that much freedom in this country (though it is much less socially acceptable not to be one). But if you are, let me ask you this: Have you thought about this country seriously and open-mindedly? Have you set aside the myths about this country and seen her as she actually is and always has been? If not, I beg you to do so to the greatest extent that you can. This country could be a whole lot better than it is, but it will never be better as long as most Americans buy our national myths over our national reality. Some will say that what I just said makes me a patriot. I do not believe that it does, for I do not value my country over any other. I am indeed not a American patriot.

I Will Not Celebrate Today

 I Will Not Celebrate Today

July 4, 2026

I, of course, see all kinds of things online about today being the 250th anniversary of the birth of the United States of America. Today it is, indeed, 250 years since the so-called founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence. I don't quite see how that event got to be considered the founding of the nation. It was a step toward independence, but it took five years of war to establish independence. Yet, of course, there's no point in making that argument. July 4 marking the founding of the nation is part of our national myth, and that's not going to change.

Today is supposed to be a big deal, but I will not celebrate today. Our national myth says that we are "the land of the free," and that claim is and always has been nothing but a lie. When Thomas Jefferson wrote "all men are created equal," he owned enslaved human beings. He meant only that landed white men are created equal. He did not say, he did not mean, and he did not believe that all people are created equal. When we read "all people" rather than "all men" into Jefferson's words, we make him say something he just didn't say, mean, or believe.

Nonetheless, the equality of all people became a foundational part of our idolatrous national myth. That claim is mythic in the technical sense, but it is not and never has been part of our national reality. It wasn't part of our reality in 1776, and it is not part of our reality today. Yes, we have made some not insignificant progress toward making it part of our reality, but we still have a very long way to go before it truly reflects who we are as a nation. There are all sorts of statistics one can cite to prove that point; but, for now, just consider this. Donald Trump said there were "fine" people among a mob of violent, anti-Jewish thugs. He told armed militias to "stand back and stand by," clearly indicating his willingness to use them extralegally and violently to achieve his ends. And we made him president not once but twice. No country that truly believed that all people are created equal would ever elect him to anything once much less elect him president twice. Land of the free? In myth yes, in reality, no. Today and throughout our history we are and have been free only for some. We parrot back Jefferson's words "and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." But we have allowed that noble claim to be reality only for some Americans, never for all of them, and certainly not for people here who are not technically Americans but are noncitizen immigrants whether here "legally" or not.

So no, today I will not be a hypocrite. I will not celebrate a myth that is not and never has been a reality. I don't expect this country ever to stop celebrating July 4 as the nation's birthday. After all, nations tend to have some sort of national day on which they celebrate themselves. For Canada, it's July 1. For France it is July 14. For the Soviet Union it was November 7. For us it's always been July 4, and it will stay July 4. Which doesn't mean that our celebration is anything other than either self-delusion or hypocrisy. Our reality is not and never has been what we have always claimed that it is. So, celebrate if you want. I will not join you.

What is Christian Socialism?

 

What Is Christian Socialism?

July 2, 2026

I am a Christian Socialist. It is, I guess, only in my later years that I have come to call myself that, but now, in my senior years, I know that that is what I am and that it is what I have always been moving toward. And, of course, calling myself a Christian Socialist raises an unavoidable question: Just what does the phrase Christian socialist mean? It, quite obviously, contains two terms, Christian and socialist. To understand what I mean when I call myself a Christian socialist, you have to understand what both of those terms mean in general and, more importantly, what they mean to me personally. I will attempt here to answer that important question.

First: What does the word “socialist” mean.” I’ve written about the history of that term elsewhere on this blog, and I won’t repeat here everything I said there.[1] I don’t mean by “socialist” what the Russian communists meant when they called their country the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Far from it. Though in Marxist theory they are not the same thing, people tend to equate socialism with Soviet-style communism. Soviet-style communism was a horror, a crime against both humanity and divinity. Throughout its seventy-four years long history it was a violent, brutal, oppressive, and radically unjust political and economic system. It was worse under Stalin than it was both before and after him, but it was never good. I lived under it for a year. I experienced how depressive and drab it was in the 1960s and 1970s. I learned something of what it did to its people, especially intelligent, curious people whose spirits it attempted, with some success, to crush. Russia is still an oppressive, unjust, and violent place, but, nonetheless, the world is better off without the Soviet communists.

Rather, by “socialist” I mean the kind of political, economic, and social system that has proven its value throughout western Europe since the end of World War II, especially in the Scandinavian countries. Those countries consider themselves to be democratically socialist. Their socialist political parties may have Marxist roots, but they are not Marxist in any meaningful sense today. Rather, they have created countries that have capitalist economies, though heavily regulated ones. They have high taxes, and they use that tax money to create social safety nets with real meaning and value for all of their people.

Communism oppresses its people either both politically and economically as in the Soviet Union or at least just politically as in the People’s Republic of China. Democratic socialism isn’t about oppressing anyone at all. It encourages free economic enterprise as long as the enterprises truly work for the benefit of the people and not primarily for the benefit of wealthy owners at the expense of the people the way big corporations mostly work in the United States today. Democratic socialism, whether Christian or not, cherishes individual rights and will always work to protect them. Democratic socialism is democratic. It comes about when the people want it, and it can end if the people don’t want it.

A democratic socialist society works to assure, to the greatest extent possible, that everyone has the necessities of life regardless of their station in life or the conditions of their life. This means, among other things, that democratic socialist societies have universal, free health care paid for by tax dollars, with the wealthy paying a good portion of their incomes to the state in taxes. Democratic socialist societies do everything they can to make sure everyone has a safe place to live. They ensure that everyone has free or reduced cost access to education from preschool to graduate school. They make childcare free or at least affordable so that everyone who has to work or who wants to work can work and have a family at the same time. They make sure no one has to go hungry.

While they are doing all that and more, democratic socialist societies respect individual choice. They make all of these things available to everyone. They don’t compel anyone to participate in them except by complying with the tax law. In a democratic socialist society, paying taxes is mandatory. Very little else is.

The world’s democratic socialist nations today do maintain military establishments. I suppose they consider doing so to be a necessity in this world of conflict and violence. They do not, however, spend anywhere near the percentage of their gross national product on the military that the United States does. Keeping the size of their military reasonable rather than grossly bloated the way the American military is helps to make the social programs that are the foundation of the society possible.

So that, in a nutshell, is democratic socialism. But I call myself a Christian Socialist not just a democratic socialist. So we have to consider: What does Christianity have to do with it? Isn’t Christianity radically inconsistent with socialism? What, if anything, in Christianity would lead one to being a socialist? I am convinced that the only way a Christian can be anything other than a socialist is by misunderstanding Christianity in a foundational way. I will now attempt to explain that conviction.

What is it to be Christian? Most Christians, indeed most people, would probably answer that question: To be Christian is to take Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior. Now, it’s not that I deny that Jesus is my Lord and Savior, though I almost certainly mean something different by “Savior” what most Christians today mean by it. Except (maybe) in the Gospel of John, which is in no way historically accurate (though it is in some ways spiritually accurate), Jesus never called us to “believe” in him. Rather, he called us to “follow” him. See, for example, Matthew 16:24. There is within Christianity a minority tradition that has always understood that that’s what he calls us to do. That tradition stresses the “imitatio Christi,” the “imitation of Christ,” as being what the Christian faith is all about. That is indeed what Christianity is all about when it is being as true to Jesus the Christ as it is possible for it to be. To be Christian is to follow Christ.

OK, but what does that mean? What actually is following Christ and what is not? It is not hard to understand what it is to follow Christ if we look at the three gospels in which he tells us what it means to do so. Those are Mark and especially Matthew and Luke. In John, Jesus never really tells how to live following him, so I’ll set John aside here. It seems undeniably clear to me that to follow Christ the way we learn of him in those three gospels is to live lives of compassion for all of God’s creation. Beyond that, it is especially to support, care for, lift up, and include those the world suppresses, oppresses, excludes, or just ignores. Jesus said: “Blessed are you who are poor.” Luke 6:20. He said “Blessed are the meek.” Matthew 5:5. He said “Blessed are the peacemakers.” Matthew 5:9. He said: “Love your enemies.” Matthew 5:44. He made a hated, excluded, despised Samaritan the hero of one of his most famous parables. Luke 10:25-37. He had the prodigal son’s father welcome him home with open arms before the father knew anything about what the son had done or why he was coming home. Luke 15:11-32. If you want to imitate Christ, take these sayings of his to heart and structure your life according to them as much as you are able to do. Jesus turned the values of his world upside down. Christ calls us Christians to do the same thing, nonviolently, in our world.

What, if anything, does living in imitatio Christi mean with regard to socialism? Most American Christians would react emotionally and in an uninformed way to that question by shouting: Socialism is utterly incompatible with Christianity! No Christian can possibly be a socialist! I’m sure they would react that way because their Christian nationalist preachers have told them that socialism is evil, indeed, that it is atheistic and works in direct opposition to the gospel of Jesus Christ. The problem, however, is that those preachers are just flat wrong about both Christianity and socialism. Here’s why they are.

First, one need not be a Christian to be a socialist, but socialism is not necessarily atheistic. Marxist ideology is radically atheistic in the way many late-Enlightenment thinkers were, but modern democratic socialism has left Marxism, including its atheism, in the dustbin of history where it so deservedly belongs. The democratic socialist governments of western Europe, for the most part, practice separation of church and state though the German government supports both the Roman Catholic Church and Protestant churches with tax money. Many American socialists, like your humble author, are Christians; and many Christians, like your humble author, are socialists.

How is that possible? Well, it’s possible because the values of socialism and of true Christianity are essentially identical. Socialism is all about social, political, legal, and economic justice for all of a nation’s people. True Christianity is about the same thing. Indeed, socialist values are essentially Christian values without necessarily including the spiritual parts of that faith. Indeed, Marx’s vision of the ideal world, which he called communism, comes directly from the New Testament. The first Christians were essentially communists without being atheists. See Acts 4:32-35. Socialism doesn’t advocate that kind of radical social structure, but it does advocate the sharing of national wealth, mostly through taxes, for the benefit of all of the people.

Christian socialism is quite strongly anti-capitalist. It’s not that in the sense of requiring state ownership of the means of production. But capitalism is grounded in people being selfish. It is grounded in an ethic that says everyone gets not what they need but what they have earned. Unless it is far more tightly regulated than it is in the United States, it leads to gross income inequality. It leads to a very small class of ultra-wealthy individuals while an enormous percentage of the population struggles just to make a decent living. Its law says a corporation’s purpose, and indeed its only purpose, is to increase the financial return to the corporation’s investors. That standard leads to environmental degradation, unsafe workplaces, wages below the poverty level, the unavailability of health insurance, unaffordable higher education, and politicians purchased by the wealthy so that the government will regulate the economy even less that it already does. Surely true Christians can support none of those things, and Christian socialists do not.

A great many Americans will shout that socialism, democratic or Christian or otherwise, is un-American. About that they are essentially wrong. President Franklin Roosevelt was a democratic socialist in effect if not in name. For example, he introduced Social Security, a governmental system intended to reduce poverty among the elderly (and that reduces poverty for your humble author today). That is a socialist system. This country created the Medicare and Medicaid system in 1965. That system is intended to, and does, make affordable healthcare available to retired persons and others unable to provide for themselves, You humble author’s badly disabled twin brother would probably be dead without Medicaid, and your humble author would have no access to medical care without Medicare, which might well mean that he would also be dead. This too is a socialist system.

Democratic socialists, Christian or otherwise, advocate expanding the socialist systems our country already has in place while adding others to meet unmet societal needs. We advocate, for example, Medicare for all, something that would give us a universal, tax-based healthcare system at least a little bit like the ones every other industrialized country in the world has.[2] We advocate a radical restructuring of the country’s tax system so that the wealthy actually pay a meaningful share of their income in taxes so that the government has the money it needs to address problems like homelessness, mental health, the opioid crisis, the environmental crisis, the unaffordability of health insurance and higher education, and other social ills in a meaningful way. The higher taxes we advocate, by the way, are not unprecedented in American history. The marginal income tax rates in the 1950s, under Republican president Dwight Eisenhower, were as high as 91%, while today they do not exceed 37%.[3]

Democratic socialists, whether Christian or not, advocate tackling our culture’s underlying faults in meaningful ways. At the top of the list for those faults sits racism. Our country was founded in slavery and racism, and racism permeates our culture to this day. Look, for example, at the disparity in incarceration rates between white and Black convicts or at the efforts in Florida and elsewhere to stop the public schools from teaching the truth about American slavery. I have no magic cure for American racism. Racism is rooted very, very deep in this land. I do know that ignoring it or denying that it is still a problem will never rid us of it. Socialists do not deny it or ignore it the way American fascists do today.

So, I am a Christian socialist. I believe that being Christian means to live as much as one can in the imitation of Christ. I believe that living in the imitation of Christ unavoidably leads one to the values of democratic socialism. As democratic socialists, Christian socialists will be allied with many other socialists who are also Christians, who are followers of other faith traditions, or who are not adherents of any religious faith. That’s not a problem. What matters is common values not common spiritual beliefs, as important as those beliefs must be to the individual believer of any faith.

Democratic socialism, Christian or otherwise, is the only way out of the myriad social, political, and economic problems our country faces today. It is the way for us to overcome the MAGA fascism that rules our federal government and several state governments today. The United States will never become truly democratic socialist as long as money controls our political system, for the wealthy will never let it happen. That’s why we need a mass, nationwide democratic socialist movement. We need a nonviolent democratic socialist revolution. Christians can and, indeed must, be part of that movement if they are to be true to the one they (we) call Lord and Savior. May it be so.

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[1] See my post On Democratic Socialism, posted on this blog on June 1, 2026.

[2] It is your humble author’s opinion that our country’s failure to have such a system of universal health insurance is one of its most appalling disgraces today.

[3] “Marginal tax rate” doesn’t mean a person’s entire income is taxed at that rate. It means that income over curtained specified amount is taxed at that rate. Because the marginal rate applies to only some of a person’s income, and then only if that income is high enough, a tax payer’s actual rate will be lower than the marginal rate.

Throw the Bums Out!

 

The more I think about the Supreme Court’s decision upholding birthright citizenship, the more concerned I become. Yes, the court upheld it, but it did so only by a 6-3 majority. Three justices said that the Constitution does not say what it so obviously says and/or doesn’t mean what it so obviously says. Those three justices violated their oath of office when they voted to reject birthright citizenship. They should all be thrown out of office immediately, but, of course, they won’t be. Normally I wouldn’t support impeaching any judge because of his the judge decided a case, but I’ve never before considered what to do if a judge of Supreme Court justice violated their oath of office by so clearly ruling against the Constitution as these three justices did. Now I say: Throw them out!

The United States Is Not a Democracy

 

The United States is Not a Democracy

June 27, 2026

I’ve been told my whole life that my country, the United States of America, is a democracy. We’ve claimed to be democracy’s defender all over the world. It’s obvious, of course, that we have been no such thing; but we’ve still claimed to be that abroad, and  we have always claimed to be truly democratic at home. The undeniable truth, however, is that the United States of America is not a democracy and never has been. The list of reasons why it is not and never has been is long. Here are the reasons I’ve thought of so far.

In addressing this issue, we have first to consider what a democracy is. The word comes from Greek roots that mean “rule by the people.” A true democracy is a political system in which the people who are the subjects of the system actually rule themselves. Ideally, they do so quite directly. The old New England town meeting was democratic. There, the people of a town met together and together made decisions about their life together. The United States has never been ruled that way.

Nonetheless, most Americans think that the United States Constitution creates a democracy. It doesn’t. Instead, it creates a “representative republic.” The people do not vote on laws, at least at the federal level they don’t.[1] Instead, they elect people to national offices who, in theory, represent them and their interests. At the national level, these representatives are the president, the vice president, the members of the Senate, and the members of the House of Representatives. These are the people who enact and, in theory at least, enforce the nation’s laws. The United States is a republic because it is not a dictatorship (though Trump would like it to be with him as dictator), and the people elect the people who make the laws. Those characteristics, however, do not make the country a democracy. They just make it a republic.

Next, I would say that the country is too big to be a true democracy. The United States is geographically enormous. It stretches from Alaska and Hawaii to Maine and Florida. Although India and China have orders of magnitude more people than the US does, we are still the third most populous country in the world. We are also an extremely diverse country. We sometimes seem to be so diverse that it doesn’t make much sense for us to be one country at all. I live on the “left coast,” in the Pacific Northwest of the country. And I live west of a mountainous divide that even seems to make my state really two states.

I find the politics of much of the rest of the nation to be not just wrong but to be reprehensible. Yet we are all one country, and I and people who think like I do have to live with the consequences of millions of other Americans thinking very differently and very destructively. Sometimes it seems that my state of Washington has so little in common with, say, Mississippi that it truly doesn’t make any sense for us to be all part of the same nation. Washington and Mississippi nearly always vote for candidates of different parties with different priorities and agendas. Why are we in the same nation? Why do Mississippians have a say in laws that affect Washingtonians? I can explain it through history. I can’t make it make political sense.

There is another more or less geographical problem that makes the United States not a democracy. It is the way senators are apportioned. Our states are immensely diverse in size. California has a population approaching 40 million. The population of Wyoming is only slightly over 500,000. Yet all states have the same number of senators. That means that the vote of a Wyoming voter for a senator carries far more weight than does the vote of a California voter for a senator. That result is, of course, radically undemocratic.

The same is true of the way we elect the president and vice president. They are not elected solely on the basis of popular vote. Rather, they are chosen by the “electoral college.” Each state has the number of electors in the electoral college that corresponds to their total number of federal representatives and senators. Perhaps with very rare exceptions, the electors vote for the candidates who won the popular vote in their state. Because every state has two senators regardless of its population, this arrangement gives small population states far more say per capita in the election of the president and vice president than do large population states. This arrangement not infrequently results in a candidate who did not receive the majority of the national popular vote winning the election, an undemocratic result if ever there were one.

Then there is the question of what the Republican Party is trying to do to our elections these days. President Trump and his acolytes are engaged in a concerted campaign to deprive as many voters of the vote as they can. They strive in particular to reduce the number of women and people of color who actually cast votes. They want the federal government not the states to control state elections, never mind what the US Constitution says about the matter. They keep insisting that there is a massive problem with voter fraud when there isn’t; and when they lose an election, they claim the vote was rigged when it wasn’t. The Republican Party is no longer a small d democratic party. It is no longer committed to democracy, and, at the moment, it controls our federal government. Republican politicians seem to care about only two things—passing laws that benefit the very wealthy at the expense of the people and holding onto power so the federal government can’t pass laws they don’t like. True democracy advocates neither of those things, so the Republican Party has become truly un-democratic.

Then there is the matter that is primary factor in determining that the United States is not a democracy. It is the power of money in our politics and a Supreme Court ruling that gives the ultra-wealthy the ability to infuse limitless amounts of money in political campaigns. In a case called Citizens United, decided in 2010, the US Supreme Court held that donating money to political campaigns is free speech protected by the First Amendment and that, therefore, the government cannot restrict corporations or labor unions from contributing as much money to political campaigns as they want. Big corporations and the wealthy people who control the benefit from them, of course, have far more money than labor unions do. Therefore, since Citizens United, even more than before that decision, money is deciding the outcome of our elections. The result is that Republican politicians, who actually represent only a minority of American voters, buy their way into office and run the country for their own benefit not the benefit of either the middle class or of people truly in need.[2]

So no, the United States of America is not a democracy. Two possible changes in the law would go a long way toward curing that fault in our body politic. We could, and should, amend the Constitution to eliminate the electoral college and provide for the election of the president and vice president by a popular majority of the votes case nationwide. We would then never again have a president who received less than a majority of the popular vote as we have had far too often. There would still be disproportionate representation in the Senate. I don’t expect that we can ever eliminate the electoral college because the small population states that benefit from it would never vote to ratify an amendment that eliminated it. It is even less likely that we will ever deal with the disproportionate representation of the people in the Senate. We are, I fear, stuck with this undemocratic character of governmental structure.

We must, somehow, do the other thing that would bring us closer to being a democracy, namely, get money out of our politics. Because Citizens United is grounded in an interpretation of the US Constitution, it would take a constitutional amendment to overturn it unless, that is, the Supreme Court overturned it itself.[3] The current Supreme Court, with its majority of ultra-conservative justices, who certainly appear to be in the pockets of the wealthy, white population and were appointed by Republican presidents, will never do that. So we’re stuck with the unlikely prospect of amending the constitution to overturn Citizens United. That, I fear, will never happen because the monied classes will never let it happen. They don’t want the country to be democratic. They want it to be an authoritarian oligarchy with Republicans in control.

Those of us who value true democracy cannot give up the fight. The stakes are too high. The politicians money puts in power have been ruling against the people and for the wealthy far, far too often (and once is too often). Our country needs a peaceful, nonviolent democratic socialist revolution, not that I truly expect one to happen except perhaps in some of the progressive “blue” states. Unless it does happen, we’ll remain stuck with an undemocratic country far too often controlled by the wealthy. Would that it were otherwise, but it isn’t.

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[1] Some states have initiative and referendum systems in which the people do occasionally vote directly on some laws or proposed laws. These systems are nowhere near pervasive enough to turn even one state into a true democracy much less the entire country.

[2] Money wouldn’t have the power in our elections that it does if more American voters were not persuaded by television advertising and did not buy the lies of the MAGA Republicans, but I sure don’t expect that to happen.

[3] I hear of Democratic politicians say they will overturn Citizens United through legislation. They can’t. The Constitution always trumps mere legislation, and Supreme Court says the Constitution, not a mere federal statute, requires its decision in that case.