When attending my first student club fair at Northwestern University during the fall of 2022, I had a single objective in mind: own the libs. Sure, I would browse clubs that looked interesting to me, but more entertaining and fun would be to go and antagonize the left-wingers whose sole purpose, I presumed, was to destroy my country. When I encountered the Platypus Affiliated Society, a club whose purpose is “self-criticism, self-education, and, ultimately, the practical reconstitution of a Marxian Left,” I thought I had hit the jackpot. I went up to them and, like a Republican frozen in the 1980s, asked, “How could you possibly support Marxism in light of brilliant thinkers like John Locke, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek?” Not aware that I was trolling, the group’s spokesman went on a long theoretical monologue about the bourgeoisie, liberalism, and history, all of which went right over my head.
Two years later, a few of the group’s most involved members attended a presentation I organized about the cost of casual sex. During the Q&A, they proved the most engaged of the audience members, asking questions whose implicit premise was that the liberation of sex has not been the boon our woke overlords claim it to be. Unexpectedly, they were more sympathetic than hostile to the socially conservative argument being put forth by our invited speaker.
During my last year and a half at Northwestern, I had many energizing conversations with this group’s members. I found them far more tolerant of my opinions on affirmative action, the capture of student government by grievance groups, and immigration than my frequent debate opponents, the College Democrats.
For example, in the spring of 2025, I debated the College Democrats on the topic of academia, during which I made boilerplate arguments against racial preferences in higher education. Drawing on data documenting the well-established black-white gap on standardized tests as well as evidence that these gaps carry over into performance during college and graduate-level education, I argued that aggressive racial preferences may sometimes place striving black students in academic environments where their entering preparation differs significantly from that of their Asian and white peers. In such cases, the resulting academic “mismatch” between affirmative-action beneficiaries and their peers can increase the former’s risk of academic probation, lead them to abandon their intended majors, and contribute to psychological distress. Judging by their surprise at the data and shock at my recitation of it, it was obvious not only that they did little preparation to anticipate my arguments on the matter but also that they were utterly incapable of digesting information that challenged their egalitarian worldview—one in which racial differences in academic preparation must be ignored in pursuit of society’s lodestar of equity. A few weeks later, my debate opponents, who I thought were friends, told Northwestern’s student newspaper that my arguments were rooted in “racist ideas” and that in future debates there would need to be a “clearer line between ‘free’ and ‘hateful’ speech.”
From this experience and others, it is apparent to me that these College Democrats and their parent party represent a far greater threat to the right and to our constitutional republic than small bands of learned Marxists. The Democrats have tens of millions of voters ready to provide them with the political power to act on their desire to stamp racism and sexism out of society, no matter how manufactured these claims of systemic bigotry may be. The authentic Marxian left, however, is more focused on studying history for reading groups and conventions than on the exhausting work of enforcing political correctness, silencing conservatives, and tearing down traditional institutions. Nor do these small Marxist circles possess the electoral constituency or institutional power necessary to turn their radical economic dreams into reality.
In conflating Democrats with Marxists, conservatives miss the true radicalism of the Democratic political project—a radicalism that is not chiefly, or even largely, economic, but cultural and institutional. That project’s most revolutionary aim is to preserve and expand the Democratic Party’s gains in pursuit of liberation, which takes two forms: cultural and administrative. The former entails the dissolution of any distinction or inherited restraint concerning sex, race, family, and national identity. The latter demands the emancipation of judges, public health authorities, educators, and other credentialed experts from limits on their power, whether these limits come from the president, Congress, or the people.
Not one of these aims is recognizably Marxist in the traditional sense. The Marxist left largely expired during the 1960s and 1970s, when the politics of socializing production was displaced by a politics of socializing consumption and liberation for racial, sexual, and cultural groups. At the same time, the left reconciled itself with managerial capitalism and embraced the authority of the New Class, which older socialists such as Michael Harrington regarded with justified suspicion. Rather than abolish capitalism, the triumphant New Left and its present-day progeny seek to manage its surplus, regulate its social consequences, and direct its institutions toward liberationist cultural projects. And yet the right remains convinced that it is confronting a Soviet-style enemy.
Even the success of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)–affiliated politicians is little evidence that Marxism, communism, or socialism are on the rise. Two-thirds of Democrats may hold a favorable view of socialism but mostly because they confuse it with a more benevolent welfare state and a more “pro-worker” economy. The DSA’s own publicly available political platform makes this confusion plain. It features economic priorities such as a shorter work week, higher taxes on the rich, free college, and government-guaranteed universal health care paired with an equally radical social agenda of ICE abolition, “feminism for all,” and the demilitarization of police departments. Read alongside DSA star Darializa Avila Chevalier’s praise of Sweden and Norway as successful models of socialism, the conclusion is clear: Marxists aren’t inching closer to power; woke social democrats are. “Woke Social Democrats of America” would be a more accurate name.
The tenuous relationship between Marxism and Democratic politics is nothing new. And there is an argument to be made that allowing the left to retain and wear with pride its counterfeit socialist label may just be what is necessary to mobilize Boomers, whose political consciousness has been stunted by a steady diet of Fox News, and “normies” into squashing a national takeover by the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Fueling this deception does come at a cost, however: When conjuring images of the Stalinist system to frighten Republican voters, cultural radicalism is recast as economic radicalism.
Thus, whatever the nomenclature, the right should be able to distinguish between the threat posed by Marxists who gather weekly to read Hegel and the post-Marxist left that runs our universities, media, institutions, and the Democratic Party. I came to Northwestern expecting enemies among the former and friends among the latter. I left having discovered the reverse.
