It seems that socialism is like an infectious disease that everyone has to get ill of to develop immunity. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn pointed out, “For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.”

This dead dog, expelled from Russia, acquired a new life in the United States and regained vitality to become a living lion within the Democratic Party.

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The 2018 Democratic victory in the midterms brought new Marxist arrivals to the House of Representatives who are interpreting the elections as an endorsement of socialist policies. They dropped all the pretenses — no liberals, no progressives — they are proud Marxist-Leninists driven by the ideology and committed to converting this country into the United Socialist States of America.

This militant crowd is comprised of uninformed and misinformed people looking at themselves as unfortunate, underpaid, underappreciated victims of capitalism, overwhelmed with jealousy that there are people who are everything they are not.

They are the face of new Democratic Party – “We have been naught, we shall be all.”

The Democratic Party explicitly casts itself as an inheritor of Marxism. The Democrats’ demands are almost total inversion of the Constitutional arrangements and traditional American values. The economic redistribution, open borders, repeal of the Second Amendment, the abolition of the Electoral College, the election of a president by popular vote, voting rights and free health care to illegal aliens are just part of the comprehensive strategy of putting the harness of socialism around the necks of the American people.

The driving force of the Democratic Party is economic “inequality” — the argument socialists have never tired of invoking since the dawn of capitalism. The mantra brought into play by the French Revolution — “War to the palace, peace to the cottage” — is alive and well today in the Democratic Party. The seductive idea of wealth redistribution has proved to be irresistible to the masses discontented by the inequities. The philosophy of envy and siphoning from the rich appeals to a large segment of the population that does not realize that the definition of “rich” is a spiral of devolution that eventually will reach every business and every individual who works for a living.

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From the Democrats’ perspective, President Donald J. Trump is a disrupter of what had been a smooth transition to the bright socialist future. In a concerted effort to denigrate the President and paralyze executive authority, they are branding him a racist and blatantly subvert every program on his agenda. To render him ineffective, they actively support a collective mania for ever more sweeping investigations of dubious claims, rumors, unsubstantiated allegations and innuendos that has descended over the President, his family, his associates, and nominees. People who cannot even spell “impeachment” demand one without any substantiation. They act as if their fiat is turning the country into chaos, or as Lenin called it, “revolutionary environment.”

Unfortunately, the contemporary political thinking of the American people is more backward than that of the Russians or Chinese, and too many of them are living in a flat-earth, know-nothing, Jesse Watters’ world. Neither education, nor upbringing, nor life experience prepares Americans for grasping the veracity of the socialist assault on the American way of life.

Thanks to the fatuity of the American public, there has not been any effective comprehension of the totality of the assault nor its enervating effect upon national vigilance. We may surmise that the socialist dragon has come of age and socialism in America, be it democratic or otherwise, no longer looks like an exceedingly lofty ambition.

The great historical irony is that unlike the Russian people who understood the perils of socialism and fought the Bolsheviks in a bloody three-year civil war that by some estimates took fifteen million lives, the freedom-loving Americans keep voting themselves into socialism.

Indeed, Communist leaders from Lenin to Brezhnev are sardonically grinning from hell and watching in disbelief as what was impossible for the Soviet Union to accomplish with all its military might and nuclear arsenal is being endorsed by the duly elected American legislators.

Fifty-five years ago, in 1964, Ronald Reagan gave a speech on behalf of presidential candidate Barry Goldwater that would become known as “A Time for Choosing.” His ardent warning of the advance of socialism in the United States resonates even more today:

"You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done."

Did we?

Alexander G. Markovsky is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, a conservative think tank hosted at King’s College, New York City, which examines national security, energy, risk-analysis and other public policy issues, He is the author of "Anatomy of a Bolshevik" and "Liberal Bolshevism: America Did Not Defeat Communism, She Adopted It.” He is the owner and CEO of Litwin Management Services, LLC.