Who remembers Leon Trotsky, founder of the Soviet Union’s Red Army and the intellectual and brilliant orator whom the arch-communist Vladimir Lenin preferred as his successor? Instead, it was the cunning peasant bumpkin Joseph Stalin, who proved more devious than Trotsky, whom he quickly outmanoeuvred, sent into exile, and ultimately had murdered.

Trotsky and Stalin had a bone to pick with one another. Both were convinced Marxists and believed firmly in the communist future, but they disagreed about the road leading to it.

Trotsky did not believe that communism could survive if confined to backward Russia. As Marx had pointed out, communism belonged in modern, industrialised countries with a developed capitalism and an industrial working class that had nothing to lose but its chains.

Stalin held a different view, namely that one could very well begin with “socialism in one country”, namely the Soviet Union, and from there subjugate the rest of the world. As is well known, the project did not succeed, as Soviet socialism collapsed in 1991. (It is possible that the centrally directed economy will re-emerge under the name Putinism, but Putin himself does not describe his dictatorship as socialist or communist.)

It now turns out that Trotsky understood what he was talking about, even though he received an axe in the skull in 1940. Communism could indeed not endure in an isolated Russia, which could build up an impressive military power, but not much else. The hated capitalists were stronger, and as the Marxist theoreticians were to discover to their great sorrow, the Western working classes refused to rally to the revolution. The workers preferred to pursue gradual improvements in their conditions. They became social democrats rather than revolutionaries.

But the late commander of the Red Army is now witnessing the fulfilment of his old dream of a communist resurgence, and this time in the United States – a country he could scarcely have dreamed of conquering in 1917. Trotsky always placed his hopes in Germany.

The US Democratic Party does not (yet) call itself either socialist or communist, but it is well on the way. Senator Bernie Sanders – one of the Democratic Party’s leading ideologues – is proposing legislation that would impose a 50 per cent “property tax” on AI companies. In other words, he wishes to confiscate half of their property. The money is to be used for the further expansion of the United States welfare system, which enables countless millions of work-shy Americans and immigrants to live a life free from work.

The undisguised confiscation of other people’s property is the Democratic Party’s latest strategy for stealing citizens’ possessions and distributing the proceeds to its friends, who are found in the trade unions and the bureaucracy, while keeping the underclass under control with crumbs that the Democrats have stolen from the productive population.

Of course, that is not how the socialists present it. During his inaugural address as Mayor of New York, the Islamo-communist Zohran Mamdani announced that he would enrich the city with “the warmth of collectivism”, and his message is making an impression on voters and particularly on the young. Increasing numbers of Democratic politicians are professing allegiance to “democratic socialism”, and as we have learned over more than a hundred years, “democratic socialism” quickly becomes undemocratic.

Socialism inevitably leads to dictatorship.

But the young in the United States do not know that. A recent poll from Heartland Institute/Rasmussen Reports shows that almost 60 per cent of Americans aged 18–24 want a Democratic Socialist in the White House after the 2028 election. Sixty-two per cent of young people have a positive view of socialism, and 34 per cent prefer communism.

It is something they have learned at school and university, where a large majority of teachers hate the United States and worship the taxpayer-funded golden calf that secures their abundant livelihood. Teachers’ unions are eager advocates of the far left, and their members will no doubt refrain from speaking about Stalin’s terror, the Gulag, Mao’s mass murder of countless millions, or Pol Pot, who exterminated a large portion of Cambodia’s population. The bloodshed, torture, oppression, hunger and poverty that have been the consequences of realised socialism, wherever it has been attempted, do not fit into the narrative of the socialist upper class – and now of the Democratic Party. Nor do the media wish to hear about it, being too busy hating Trump.

So what can we expect from the ignorant young?