In a development almost certainly motivated by the election of Zohran Mamdani, and perhaps even timed to coincide with Mamdani’s White House meeting with Donald Trump, the U.S. House for the second time passed a non-binding resolution condemning the “horrors of socialism.” As with an earlier resolution passed in 2023, the resolution cites atrocities committed by communist regimes over the decades, adds in the post-communist Maduro regime in Venezeula, and then in a huge bait-and-switch identifies all these bad actors with “socialism” writ large.
The New York Post quoted Staten Island Republican congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis as saying: “Let me educate our colleagues on the other side of the aisle: socialism is communism-light.” That is, to put it bluntly, a historically illiterate lie. The battle against 20th-century communism featured vast numbers of democratic socialists, beginning with the last non-communist leader of Russia, Alexander Kerensky; the bulk of European social democrats between the October Revolution and World War II; the democratic-socialist parties that governed Western Europe on-and-off throughout the Cold War; and the democratic-socialist international labor movement that rigorously opposed communism in all its manifestations.
It’s disgraceful that 86 House Democrats voted for this resolution, which gives a stamp of approval to the ongoing MAGA practice of labeling the self-same Democratic Party’s leaders as “communists” (a label Donald Trump repeatedly applied to the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris). It also promotes ignorant or malicious misinformation at a time when understanding of history is more important than ever.
