The Ecstasy of the Young Communists

One of my favorite scenes from the film Hail, Caesar!, which we are showing at the upcoming Anti-Communist Film Festival, is when Josh Brolin slaps around George Clooney. Clooney’s character, a Hollywood actor named Baird Whitlock, had spent several days kidnapped by communists. Safely back at the studio, he begins spouting some of the Marxist nonsense he had absorbed from his kidnappers. Brolin, whose character is a studio fixer named Eddie Mannix, grabs Clooney and begins slapping him. The Marxist spell breaks. Clooney snaps out of it.

I like this scene because it depicts communism not as a coherent philosophical system, but as a mania, an ecstasy - something beyond reason. This is one of the themes we will explore at the Anti-Communist Film Festival. The rise of young communists in America in 2026 has less to do with any kind of coherent ideology and more to do with giving empty lives meaning.

In the recently published book Stalin's Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire, Antonia Senior explores the Cambridge Five, the British spy group that during the Cold War sold out to Stalin and the Soviet Union. In one section, Senior examines the young communist street protestors who trashed parts of London in 1933:

[They loved] the potent brotherhood of the crowd—and not just any crowd but one infused with faith and virtue. The blood beating in your ears as you faced a line of rugby-playing, braying, bullying, gammon-faced reactionaries who did not understand that they were on the wrong side, of not just this skirmish but the whole relentless, restless sweep of history. Shortly after the Armistice Day riot, poet Julian Bell wrote a letter to The New Statesman magazine, explaining the magnetic allure of communist activism to his generation. He wrote that communism provided an intellectual framework to understand the political crises of 1933, but it offered more than that. This generation was not called upon to fight and die like their fathers. They needed, he said, their own “moral equivalent of war.” Bell wrote, “And communism provides the activity, the sense of common effort, and something of the hysteria of war.” In 1929, he said, all anyone cared about at Cambridge was poetry. By 1933, all anyone talked about was politics, and “a very large majority of the more intelligent undergraduates [were] communists, or almost communists.”

According to Senior, “Communist fervour in Cambridge, from the inside, seemed like a surge, a torrent, carrying its acolytes towards a glorious and inevitable, if never quite articulated, future. As Polish writer and apostate communist Czesław Miłosz wrote in 1951, ‘The stage of fully realized communism is the holy of holies. It is heaven. One dare not direct one’s eyes towards it.’”

“The holy of holies.” This is religious language, appropriate for communism, which is a pseudo-religion. In Hail Caesar!, Josh Brolin’s character Eddie Mannix eventually stops struggling against the reality that God wants him to stay at his job as a studio fixer because he has become a shepherd to the other people who work there. He quietly accepts his fate.

I have often argued that the Left in America, particularly the media, has an addiction problem. Like the communist rioters in 1930s London, they are addicted to the ecstasy of what they perceive to be their own virtue. Spared going to war, bad at sports and addicted to their phones, desperately uniting to prove themselves, the young are turning to Marx. Eventually, of course, they will discover it doesn’t work — and hopefully all do less damage than the Cambridge Five. Their wake-up call may be as bracing as George Clooney’s.

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