Soon You Too Will Be A Commie

If, like me, you grew up in the eighties, you probably had to deal with bullies. It was a very pro-bully sort of time, the 80s— boys will be boys and all that—and majestic herds of bullies roamed our nation’s proud cafeterias and schoolyards. If you grew up in some other time, perhaps you had bullies, too—it seems every era has been fairly kind to bullies. I don’t know the ins and outs of how 2000s bullies or 2010s bullies operated, but I know how 80s and 90s bullies operated: They called you gay. They usually used a different word for it, or they appended the suffix “wad,” but that was the gist. You are gay. This was the preamble to a beating, because being gay meant you were somebody who deserved a beating. This was an idea that enjoyed broad acceptance in the 1980s, and at other times too—like now, depending who you ask.

Still, it seems likely 2000s and 2010s bullies must have had a different starting point than gay, because bullies have spent the last several decades whining about how, because of anti-bullying policies that “go to far,” you just can’t say [insert slur here] anymore. Incidentally, bullies still say [insert slur here] all the time, so they still absolutely can say it, but I have a sense that, unlike the 80s, if you do say it, you might get criticized. This suggests that bullies seem finely attuned to matters of permission when it comes to bullying, and also tend to be massive whiny babies about getting even the mildest pushback. Just a couple potential bully facts to tuck away for later, in case they come in handy.

Maybe you’re like me, an 80s kid who often responded to a bully’s suggestion that you were gay by insisting hell no I am NOT gay, I would NEVER be gay, yuck ick patoooey gay. Words and actions to that effect anyway. Maybe like me you only had a dim idea of what “gay” even meant, other than that if you were, you deserved a beating, and you wanted to establish that you didn’t deserve a beating. So you did what you could to make sure you would not be called gay.

How did that work out for you? I’ll tell you how it worked out for me. I still got the beating, but I had established that “gay” was indeed the correct metric for determining if somebody deserved to get beat up. I had unified with the bully on that one. We had come together across the aisle, and found some bipartisan common ground based on shared values. A real third way.

As mentioned, bullies seem to have a finely tuned awareness of where the margins of permission lie as regards abuses, and choose their targets based on whose suffering will be most broadly acceptable to others. Seems to me bullies always seek to expand the margins of permission for their violence, and one of their standard tactics is expanding the definition of whatever group is broadly acceptable, to include more and more people. Seems to me that when you insist that you aren’t in that group, or take pains to demonstrate that you aren’t in that group, you appease the bully’s premise that the person in that group deserves abuse. Seems to me that when you get the abuse anyway, the bully has successfully completed the expansion of permission wherein that group now includes you. In a bully’s world, where gay means a beating is deserved, eventually you’ll be gay, too.

That’s what I learned, anyway, when I told various bullies hell no I am NOT gay, would NEVER be gay, yuck ick patoooey gay. Words and actions to that effect anyway.

I didn’t have any gay friends in high school, by the way. By this I mean I do not mean that none of my friends were gay (some surely were), but I didn’t have any friends who confided to me about it. At that point in my life, nobody extended that level of trust to me—a guy who tacitly and sometimes overtly agreed with the bully’s premise regarding gayness in a futile attempt to avoid a beating.

Probably an unrelated matter.

Hey unrelated question but have you ever had a bully say he was offering you protection? How did that work out for you? Did the bully do a lot of protecting? Keep you nice and safe? Protection was their big motivation, as it turned out?

Let's move on.

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New York Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, who is pretty clearly running for president in 2028, made a disappointing statement recently. She was asked about the idea of defunding and/or abolishing the police, and she responded that “woke 1.0 was crazy.”

I found that disappointing.

I know that by saying I find it disappointing I am encouraging everyone to run their pre-established pundit scripts about elections and voting and political strategy and slogans and AOC as a person and a politician, and why I shouldn’t be disappointed because she’s doing the right thing, or why I shouldn’t be disappointed because she’s always been disappointing, or about AOC’s chances in 2028 vs other candidates, and all the rest of it, and I would like to encourage you to run and play in that field to your heart’s content—but I won’t join you and please don’t invite me to the frolic. Big yawn in my opinion.

I want to focus on why I find Cortez’s statement disappointing—which is that it gave away the frame to bullies, and it’s dispiriting when our politicians, who are meant to represent us, do that. AOC is somebody who has risen to prominence by frequently declining to give away the frame to bullies, so that makes it all the more dispiriting whenever she does so.

To see how AOC’s statement gave away the frame, let’s look at the present situation we face when it comes to police. In the United States we have a police state waging racist class warfare on behalf of a mass incarceration engine. Racist? Yes indeed, if you look at the data of how laws are enforced and how neighborhoods are policed, or look at prison demographics or sentencing outcomes. Class warfare? Yes indeed, if you look at the evidence showing that policing exists to protect property and monied interest, and the fact that police have no legal obligation to protect people, or if we see the impunity within our legal system that the wealthy and powerful enjoy, and the ways that same legal system targets and channels the poor toward incarceration even from their youth in the spaces meant for their education. Incarceration engine? We incarcerate more people than any other country. By per capita rates we are only behind Turkmenistan, Cuba, and El Salvador—which is a country that now takes some of our surplus prisoners. Our police forces are full of white supremacists, domestic abusers, rapists, and child predators—which may explain the institution’s population among Republicans. In some places police form actual criminal gangs. Now we have a new squad of goons—ICE—ostensibly border patrol, who patrol far from the border and kidnap people in their homes, in churches, in airports, and anywhere else. Their ranks are larded with child sex criminals. They were just given $20 million worth of electro-shock torture gloves, which have been used by police in schools. They have human history’s most invasive surveillance apparatus at their electrified fingertips.

In most cities and towns, we spend more money on racists brute squads full of abusive goons than on any other domestic area, and what we get in return is brutality, surveillance, harassment, and abuse. To put it plainly, this system needs to go, boot and kaboodle. I don’t think we need to spend anything at all on brute squads full of racist abusive goons, but at the very least we need to spend less.

Yet the dominant narrative about police and our carceral state is that it protects us and keeps us safe, and any suggestion that we abolish it or defund it or is met with panicked cries that this sort of thing is dangerous, or unpopular, or crazy, or all three, and mustn’t be attempted—mustn’t even be spoken, least some version of we all get painted as dangerous or crazy, lest some version of us becomes as unpopular as those dangerous crazies who want to solve the problem of brute squads full of racist abusive goon by abolishing or at least shrinking their funding. I don’t think abolishing or defunding the police is dangerous or crazy in the least … but unpopular? It often seems to be, even among those who would see a world of equality and justice. On some level, as a collective people, we seem to be operating off of a script that says that the people our bullies beat up are the people who had a beating coming to them, and that those beatings keep us safe.

You’d think that if policing and incarceration and surveillance kept us safe, we’d be safe. Nope. This index has us ranked 47^th out of 89 ranked countries. This one has us at 134.

Woke 1.0 was crazy? I’d say its real offense was moral clarity.

It’s not just police. We can see similar framing for any other solution to any other desperate problem. The solution is the danger. The problem keeps us safe. Fixing what is broken is radical, dangerous, unrealistic, unpopular.

Examples? Here’s an incomplete list.

We need to stop burning fossil fuels if we want to avoid the worst of catastrophic climate-change based calamity like unlivable temperatures, fires, and drought. We are dealing with historic wealth inequality driving rises in human suffering across a broad range of needs, all of which are becoming corporatized and privately controlled and held—food, housing, education, health care, water, air. We are destabilizing the planet with our belligerent militaristic posturing—and while we spend more on our military than any other federal sector, we get little in return other than illegal and destabilizing wars and abandoned homeless veterans. Meanwhile we’ve defunded the public sector, including gutting our scientific research, leaving us exposed to multifarious dangers, including climate catastrophe and preventable disease. We have crafted a society where you have to work or you’ll die, and at the same time we have a tech sector, run by an increasingly wealthy gang of increasingly deranged and apocalyptic billionaires, working very hard to make a world where human labor is eliminated to save costs and grow profits. Our national debt just passed $40 trillion. Did you get any of that money? I didn’t. Trust, though: We’re going to get the bill.

That’s a lot of problems, and while a lot of people have managed to ignore them for a very long time, ignoring the machine that eats people gets much harder when one or more of its mouths actually starts to consume you. That’s the way fixing broken things works: First you have awareness of the problem, which leads to a conviction that broken things ought to be fixed and that we all bear a responsibility to fix them, to a public declaration confessing the reality of the problem and the responsibility, to a reorganization of priorities and beliefs and laws and infrastructure toward maintenance and repair, to the actual work of repair, and actual payment of the actual costs.

So it happens there is a rising awareness of what our actual problems are and a rising conviction that we ought to solve those problems, and a rising willingness to actually reorganize our priorities and beliefs and laws and infrastructure in order to do the work and pay the costs.

And this, I think, is why people who benefit from our national and global brokenness spend so much time making sure that repair of what is broken is framed as not only unrealistic and foolish but dangerously unpopular and crazy.

That’s what “woke” means when you agree it is crazy. “Woke” originally meant awareness of the systemic institutional nature of oppression, and it still means that, if you are in Black spaces and politically minded. These days in popular discourse it often simply means that awareness is annoying and conviction is crazy, that confession of inequality is a crime, and reorganizing priorities toward repair is dangerous, and actual repair of things that are broken is traitorous. It also means “human diversity has been given room to exist here without our permission, and that is annoying and crazy and criminal and dangerous and traitorous, because expressions of human diversity outside of our defined boundaries deserve abuse, not inclusion.”  

What you give up, when you give up the frame to fascist bullies, is the idea that fixing what is broken is not only unpopular but crazy. Not only crazy but dangerous. Not only dangerous but traitorous—yes, traitorous. The current fascist regime is running the same old playbook for identifying traitors. They’re naming the people they think deserve a beating. Like any bully, they’re choosing people whose abuse and exclusion they think will earn them broad support. They’ve got trans people in their sights, for one, and Black people, of course, and Muslims, naturally. And they’ve been targeting anti-fascists, which is a bit of a giveaway.

Historically, fascists’ favorite opening target is filthy Commies. The literal Nazi playbook came for the Communists first. The liberals couldn’t tell which was the greater danger, except in the end they could. They decided it was the Commies. They went with the monster eating them because the people opposing the monster wanted to make changes they weren’t comfortable with. It’s the standard fascist playbook. Jonathan Katz has a great breakdown; read it.

Fascists still like that playbook.

Are you now or have you ever been a filthy Commie?

No?

You will be one.

Just wait.

I wrote last week that there are stories of Me and stories of Us, and that stories of Me look for a story of Us to attach to. Trump gave people who no longer believe in the old frameworks a story of Us to attach to, a radical one that promised change. Democrats in leadership like Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer didn’t offer one in return. which gave people who are looking for change few places to go. Some, to their shame, loved Trump’s white supremacy, incompetence, corruption, gross misogony, and authoritarianism. Others, to their shame, overlooked it, because they wanted things to change, and Trump’s horrific authoritarian vision and huckster posturing was the change that was on offer.

Well, there’s a new coalition, called Democratic Socialists of America, and they have a story of Us for America that deals with solidarity rather than exclusion. They want to demolish and transform structures that harm people rather than (as Trump) the ones that help people. They caucus with Democrats, and participate in Democratic primaries, and a lot of them are starting to win those primaries. A lot of others, who are not members of DSA, but who share similar goals and similar politics, are also winning primaries, often against the will of party leadership and in the face of massive spending efforts to prevent their nomination. These are candidates who—socialist or not—do not spend their time worrying about what their enemies will call them. They don’t spend their time on incoherent statements, vowing to reach across the aisle to find solutions with the people who want the problems. Instead, they focus on naming real problems for real people, and then identifying real solutions. This usually involves using government to make sure that the people represented by the government get basic human needs, which is what government should do. Once in office, they pursue and enact those solutions, and then they celebrate the results.

People tend to enjoy basic human needs, and tend to not enjoy being consumed by a machine built to eat people, so this vision is catching on. A third of Democrats now identify as Democratic socialists, per one poll. Some level of support for democratic socialism is polling above 50% with Democratic voters, per another. These voters are speaking, and for them socialism isn’t as much of a threat, despite the hundreds of billions invested by billionaires in anti-socialist propaganda.

I know that by bringing this up I am encouraging everyone to run their pre-established pundit scripts about democratic socialism vs socialism vs. communism, and voting and political strategy and slogans, and the efficacy of democracy in a fascist state, and what communist theory is or what it isn’t, and about socialist chances vs establishment candidates, and all the rest of it, and I would like to encourage you to run and play in that field to your heart’s content—but I won’t join you and please don’t invite me to the frolic. Big yawn in my opinion.

Here’s what I want to focus on: The Trump administration and the fascist party he leads are hard at work converting clear and needed solutions to our most pressing problems from “woke” to “socialist” to “Communist,” to “traitor.”

Socialist or not, they are planning to cast us all as filthy Commies.

Today’s regime is not being subtle. Last September’s NSPM-7 presidential memorandum used the event of Charlie Kirk’s murder as a springboard to frame anyone holding left-leaning political views as violent extremists and political terrorists. Recent draconian sentences handed down in Texas for anti-ICE sentiments were framed by the judge as deliberate attempt to quash those holding similar views. The president regularly refers to all Communists as traitors that he intends to “send into exile,” and he frequently casts all Democrats as Communists. The regime is still pursuing the eradication of birthright citizenship (the first attempt was very nearly successful), and ICE’s gang of child-raping thugs is still pursuing its right to detain who they want, however they want, with total impunity from legal consequence, unrestrained by the Constitutions.

The case being made: Commies are dangerous traitors and violent extremists and domestic terrorists. People who fix problems are Commies. People who use evidence are Commies. People who stand up for others are Commies. Commies are dangerous people, and dangerous people deserve to be abused, brutalized, charged, convicted, incarcerated, disappeared, tortured, killed.

It’s all for our protection, the bullies tell us. For your protection.

And into this fray come conservative Democrats in party leadership, who claim to be opposed to these national fascist bullies, but want to make sure it is understood that the Commies are equally bad, equally dangerous, equally crazy—while demonstrating that, when it comes to who they ally with, they actually believe the Commies are worse.

Some of them, like the conservative Democratic/fascist collaborationist think tank Third Way, vow to wage war against the rising popular tide of socialist solutions. War was never on the table for fascists, I notice. For fascists, the ideas is always to unify over shared values, come together across the aisle, find some bipartisan common ground.

Others talk about their worries. They talk about how DSA goals are too idealistic, too far-flung, too unrealistic. Some, like mummy made of dust James Carville, call them a “pack of fools” They say this vision—which, again, enjoys massive support within their own voting base—is unpopular. They say that these candidates—who, again, just won elections—cannot win elections. They say that these people—who are, again, their own electorate—are out of touch. They say that their goals—which, again, offer clear solutions to obvious problems—are radical, off-putting, alienating to normal Americans. They claim that big tents are needed, never noticing that a big tent might just need to include a majority of their own party’s voters. They say for example Dr. Abdul El-Sayed can’t win a general election. I’ll note that billionaires don’t generally spend $60M in a primary to defeat somebody they think can’t win.

Some of them simply run away from popular ideas. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jefferies used a recent appearance on Meet the Press to submission-pee toward Republicans and conservative voters. He explicitly distanced himself from Medicare for All, the DSA agenda, and calls to abolish ICE. He firmly promised to seek solutions for regular Americans, and just as firmly promised that he was not in favor of the actual solutions that are out there.

In engaging in this sort of incoherent messaging, these Democrats pose as anti-bully while agreeing with the bully framing, that fascist structures keep us safe, that corrupt structures build our wealth, that socialists are all Commies, and Commies are the truly dangerous ones. In doing this, they say hell no I am NOT socialist, would NEVER be socialist, yuck ick patoooey socialist.

Scared of Communism, some of them. Americans have been propagandized to fear Communism most of all. An anti-Trump conservative buddy of mine text during the height of the ICE terror campaign in Minneapolis to admit that yes, he had to admit, this was fascism. In exact same text, he made sure to mention that we had to be careful because socialism was an equal danger. Imagine seeing fascist death troops literally executing citizens on the streets, and reflexively looking for Commies. It’s extraordinary, the degree to which we have been propagandized.

Scared of being called Communists, some of them. The irony is they’re obviously going to be called Communist anyway. They always are. Ask a Republican, they will probably tell you= Bill Clinton was a socialist. Barack Obama was a socialist. Kamala Harris was a socialist. Joe Biden was a socialist. Joe Biden. Joseph Sugar-Lumping Biden. A socialist. A filthy Commie.

The bully is always going to expand the boundaries of permission. They’ll make anyone a Commie, as long as people still agree that Commies are the ones who deserve a beating. And yes, many people do agree about that. It's a broadly popular view, just as it was a broadly popular view in the 80s that gay people deserved beating.

It doesn’t mean we have to join in. We can choose new scripts.

For those scared of Communism: Even if we grant it is a danger, Communism isn’t the remotest danger for any of us. It’s the very furthest thing in an empire currently in end-stage capitalist collapse.  Like being in a leaking submarine and fearing volcano eruption.

For those scared of being called Communist: My God, sack up.

Have you ever tried agreeing with a bully? How did it go?

Have you ever had a bully tell you he was protecting you? Jesus Christ, did you sleep through everything? Come on, it’s too late in the game to be this naïve.

Calls to abolish our carceral state are dangerously unrealistic? OK, let’s talk about our carceral state. ICE has a quota of 2,000 arrests a day. Over a year, that maths out to 0.2% of the entire U.S. population. That’s one in 500 people in America, every year. In five years, one in 100 Americans needs to be arrested by ICE. And by the way they are building concentration camps with that capacity—resulting in, as Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons put it, be “[Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.” That’s not just dangerously unrealistic—it’s deranged. I’d say it’s traitorous. It’s definitely human trafficking.

Calls to abolish ICE? That’s like water when you’re thirsty. Not only the obvious thing, but the only thing. Who told us it was dangerous? Who told us it was unrealistic? Who told us it was crazy? And who told us the cops were part of a different project than ICE? I bet it was the same people. Just a guess.

El-Sayed isn’t a Communist, and neither is Ocasio-Cortez. They have risen to where they are largely by standing unapologetically for what the believe in. It would be a real shame if they and those like them stopped doing that. More than a shame, crazy. More than crazy, a danger, a betrayal.

The bully doesn’t go away when we don’t stand up to them; they just use the lack of friction to expand the margins of permission regarding abuse.

If they say you’re gay, do we say hell no I am NOT gay, would NEVER be gay, yuck ick patoooey gay?

Or do we instead say “Yes motherfucker, if whatever it is you don’t like about me makes me gay then I’m gay. I’m gay all day, and proud as hell of it, and I don’t like people who don’t like gay people. What are you going to do about it?”

Do you think that saying that means you now have to have gay sex, even if you aren’t gay? If so, you might also think that you also need to loudly proclaim to a fascist that you’re not a filthy Commie, because you aren’t comfortable with some aspect of democratic socialism, and don't want to become a Commie.

What are you going to do about it? It’s a good question. What are they going to do about it? We should find out.

We might get a beating. If so it’s the same beating we were going to get anyway.

We might not get a beating. Bullies are finely tuned to the margins of permission, and they tend to be whiny babies who operate within those margins. They’re cowards, bullies, who prefer beatings to fights. Offer them a fight.

We might even find some new friends. We might earn trust from people who were looking for somebody to stand up for bullies. If you stand up to a bully, you’ll persuade people that you stand up to bullies in a way that not standing up to bullies will not. This should be obvious, no?

People need solutions to their problems. And yes they’re confused many of them, and yes incomprehensibly incoherent in their politics many of them. And yes, some of them want their bigotry more than their lives, and probably can’t be convinced, and they’ll have to be left to the consequences of that. But some will be persuaded by solidarity, provided there are people who stand on business and provide some. Pandering doesn’t convince people. Conviction does.

So a word to those who think the socialists and Communists pose a danger:

If we think the first danger we face are people who want to fix our problems too quickly, who think too broadly, whose hopes are too high, and we oppose them, then we will probably defeat those people, because they are not the ones in power, and the dominant narrative scripts are aligned against them.

We will defeat them, on behalf of those who benefit from our problems. And then they will be gone, 2000 of them a day per the quota, into the prisons that are now being built, right now, to house them. And what will you do then?

There was a poem about this. Did we sleep through the class?

Who will speak for us when they come for us, we who did not speak?

When they remove the Commies, they’ll look for new Commies. They’ll look for people who would like to solve problems more slowly, more incrementally. They’ll look for people who disagree with the regime in any way.

They’ll look for the rest of us.

Will we look for the socialists and Commies then? Those still in power will show you where they went. They’re building the facilities now. They’ll take us there, under cover of dark and in broad daylight, 2000 of us each day, in unmarked vans and eventually in marked ones.

Worried about Commies? Don’t worry.

Some day—some day soon—you will be a Commie too.

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A.R. Moxon is the author of the novel The Revisionaries (2019) and the essay collections Very Fine People (2024) and Fighting in the Dark (2026), which are available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places. You can get his books right here for example. He can't spare a moment for the dog-faced boy.