The Enduring Allure of Communism

People far removed from communism can’t understand how anyone these days can be drawn to an ideology whose horrors are so well established. They assume that the young people joining far-left groups today—the Democratic Socialists of America, or the Party of Socialism and Liberation, or the tiny Trotskyist organization I once belonged to—are ignorant, and that protecting this generation is a simple matter of arming them with the gruesome facts. So they teach about the millions murdered by Stalin and Mao, how much of the world suffered under relentless terror, and assume that any decent person will henceforth recoil at the mention of socialism. Well-meaning as this is—and I’m all for presenting these truths—it largely misses the point.

The first time I met a self-described communist, which happened when I was a freshman at Berkeley, I was shocked to discover that such people still existed, in 1985. Didn’t he know about the gulags? That communist, and the others I went on to meet, certainly knew about the Stalinist labor camps and bloody purges, the misery and death. They swore that that was not their vision, that they were as repelled as I at the crushing of freedom and lives. And since I could see that they were not evil people, but were remarkably intelligent and committed to a better world, I started listening to their arguments—about why what existed in the Soviet Union and China wasn’t genuine communism, and why under different circumstances history would unspool differently, allowing humanity to usher in a new age of peace, plentitude, justice and equality. It was an intoxicating vision, and once I’d become convinced that it just might work, the thought of turning my back on it seemed cowardly and selfish.

There really are no compelling substitutes in the secular world for communism, or its progressive 21st-century permutations, which is why it endures and attracts despite the best efforts at education. Whittaker Chambers, an ex-Communist, put it better than anybody. In his brilliant memoir “Witness,” he comments that “Communism makes some profound appeal to the human mind. You will not find out what it is by calling Communism names. That will not help much to explain why Communism whose horrors, on a scale unparalleled in history, are now public knowledge, still recruits in its thousands and holds its millions—among them some of the best minds alive.” He explained its appeal in “a simple conviction: It is necessary to change the world. … Communists are that part of mankind which has recovered the power to live or die—to bear witness—for its faith. And it is a simple, rational faith that inspires men to live or die for it.”

That it is necessary to change the world still sounds to me today, at face value, far more inspiring than the implicit counterargument that the world should be largely left alone. The left seems to have all the best props—the heartbreaking stories of poverty and oppression, the necessarily righteous struggle, the dream of worldwide redemption—while the right is easily charged with idealizing a system that benefits them but leaves so many others behind. As a leftist, I honestly couldn’t understand how conservatives live with themselves. It took experience—above all October 8, when my ex-comrades joined the rest of the left in baying for Jewish blood—for me to really begin shedding my astonishing degree of naïveté and self-righteousness, and recognize how a movement cloaked in justice actually serves evil.

As a leftist, I honestly couldn’t understand how conservatives live with themselves. It took experience—above all October 8, when my ex-comrades joined the rest of the left in baying for Jewish blood—for me to really begin shedding my astonishing degree of naïveté and self-righteousness, and recognize how a movement cloaked in justice actually serves evil.

And yet teaching young people to look for evildoers will only disarm them. They won’t find nefarious gnomes cackling and plotting world domination. Instead they’ll find men and women who are funny, smart and warm, who break into Judy Garland numbers at odd moments and coo over their cats, and who make them feel like part of the noble quest for humanity’s salvation. They’ll have a history filled with revolutionary heroes and martyrs—a sort of “Lives of the Saints” for the Godless. Larger-than-life leaders who give them a fleeting sense of protection. A community of comrades who make them forget their crushing loneliness. The excitement of rebellion. Secret knowledge that seems to explain everything. A cause to give otherwise empty lives meaning. And, of course, enemies: the sinister forces arrayed against them whom it is righteous to hate, and hating whom is so strangely invigorating. By the time the conscript should realize that this hate signals something dark and monstrous, it’s too late, because it’s become part of them.

Which brings me to the question that confounds so many in our post-October 7 world: How do otherwise seemingly good-hearted people deny, or even celebrate, atrocities as “resistance”? Shut their eyes and ears to undeniable accounts of mass murder, rape, torture? What accounts for such indifference to human suffering?

Terrible violence and pain are endemic to our world. They are found, distressingly, even in the most righteous of causes. General Sherman’s troops inflicted horrendous suffering on Southern civilians in the Civil War, but moral people generally accept this as the cost of ending the scourge of slavery. The carpet-bombing of German cities, the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were the monstrous corollary of defeating the Nazis and their allies. Today, scrolling through X, I’m bombarded with allegations of Israel’s depravity. I dismiss most of them as the smears of people blinded by Jew-hatred, but sometimes the account contains an element of truth, and I’m forced to sit with it as the cost of defending Israel’s existence. Our world makes all of us harden our hearts, sometimes, to pain we don’t want to think about. We may question whether this or that act committed by our side is justified, and must always try to remain sensitive to suffering—but in the end we are forced to take responsibility. The critical issue is the cause itself—whether it truly is just.

That’s where the problem with communism lies: in the very nature of its vision, in what it seeks to do. The ostensible aim of liberating humanity by destroying everything—private property, the family, religion—can only end in a hellscape because it denies unpleasant truths about human nature. I used to insist that no such thing really exists—that humans are entirely a product of their environment, and that if we only do away with material want and other sources of misery, a new, glorious, socialist man will emerge. Yet the first step toward this paradise is giving all the power to a supposedly enlightened elite—the polar opposite of freedom—ushering in a regime that can only be marked by extreme, and intractable, repression and brutality. The utopian vision turns into nightmare every single time—because it must.

The utopian vision turns into nightmare every single time—because it must.

Chambers concluded that “Communism is what happens when, in the name of Mind, men free themselves from God. … There has never been a society or a nation without God. But history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations that became indifferent to God, and died.” The Western world also discarded, with God, the belief that evil exists. Fashionable liberals smirk at the word, which they associate with snake-oil preachers warning childishly about hellfire, or Dr. Strangelove schemes to nuke evildoers. But they dismiss the idea at their own peril, because they fail to see how easily it enters their bloodstream. And the good and evil that fight for supremacy in all of us.

Kathleen Hayes is the author of ”Antisemitism and the Left: A Memoir.”