What Makes A Person Become A Communist?

This year’s primary season features the rapid ascent within the Democratic Party of the faction going by the name “Democratic Socialists of America.”  Despite the gratuitous co-opting of the label “Democratic,” it is by no means clear that the DSA faction would continue open elections once they had achieved enough power to end them.  Instead, the DSA adopts the hardest of hard-line socialist positions on every issue.  

I previously reported in my June 24 post that the DSA candidates in New York had accomplished nearly a clean sweep of all the Democratic Party congressional and state legislative primaries in which they had participated.  Since then, a DSA candidate has knocked out a 15-term incumbent progressive Democrat in a safe Democratic district in Colorado.  And The Washington Examiner reports on June 25 that DSA candidates have succeeded in some 30 down-ballot primary races in “Oregon, California, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Utah, Maryland,” as well as New York.

So who are these people calling themselves “Democratic Socialists”?  I’ve spent some time researching the biographies of these successful candidates.  Remarkably, there is a pattern that repeats time after time, with only slight variations.  Your budding Communist ideologue comes from a family that has recently achieved modest or even substantial (but not extreme) success in the free market economy; and then a member of the next generation goes away to school at some “elite” institution, often on scholarship, studying some subject where leftist orthodoxy is pervasive (African Studies, Middle Eastern Studies and Sociology are typical examples).  The scion then either remains in school indefinitely, or leaves school but disdains the private economy and dabbles in political organizing or other left-wing not-for-profit endeavors.  Combine this sort of background with a sense of entitlement, and the result is a bitter, angry, resentful young person, with no understanding of the blessings of freedom or of the private economy, completely ignorant of human history and convinced that the socialist/communist program will quickly lead to utopia.