With the midterms coming up, these words are being uttered more and more each day. So what does it really mean when we call someone a socialist, communist, or fascist? Where did these ideologies come from, and why do we have ideologies in the first place?
Today we speak with Patrick McGovern, professor of political science at Buffalo State University, and Susan Kang, professor of political science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and host of Left On Red.
Transcript
Nick Capodice: Hello everyone. Nick Capodice here from civics 101. So this January, a democratic socialist, Zoran Mamdani, was sworn in as the mayor of New York City. And that party, the Democratic Socialists for America, the DSA. It has been growing. In 2016, about 6000 Americans were registered as members of the DSA, and now their numbers are [00:00:30] over 100,000. Several members of the DSA won their primaries. They are running for office in the upcoming 2026 midterms. And in response, members of the Republican Party are not just using the word socialist in their campaigns against them, they're switching it out with another word.
Archival: Michael will stand up to the radical left communists in Congress, and he will always put America first, and he's going to put Wisconsin first.
Archival: We are fighting right now in Congress over whether we're going [00:01:00] to maintain our status as a constitutional republic, or we're going to trade that in, dismantle the foundations and go down this dark road of death to communism. This is not a game. Everybody needs to understand these crazy little mini mamdani's who are popping up all around the country. They are. They are a danger to you and your family.
Nick Capodice: And tying all this together. When Mayor Mamdani visited with President Trump at the white House, he was asked about his feelings regarding Trump and a third word.
Archival: He asked about your comment, calling the president a fascist. Um, [00:01:30] and your answer was, both President Trump and I have been clear about our positions and our views. Are you affirming that you think President Trump is a fascist?
Speaker 5: I've spoken about..That's okay. You can just say, okay...Okay.
Archival: It's easier. It's easier than explaining it. I don't know.
Nick Capodice: Socialism, communism, fascism. It is a scant three months until the midterm elections, and we're all gonna hear this trio of words a heck of a lot more in those months. [00:02:00] So we want to make sure everyone is on the same page. What do these words mean? What do they not mean? Today on Civics 101 from HBR, it's all about the isms. So stick around.
Archival: Hurry! Step right up, folks. Here's the answer to your problems, doctor. Utopias. Sensational new discovery ism. Ism will cure any ailment of [00:02:30] the body.
Nick Capodice: Do you recognize that voice, Hannah?
Hannah McCarthy: The voice of Doctor Utopia. No, Nick. I don't recognize it.
Nick Capodice: It's Frank Nelson.
Hannah McCarthy: Who?
Nick Capodice: Wait. Let me try this. Do you recognize this? Yes, yes.
Hannah McCarthy: Oh. That guy.
Nick Capodice: That guy. The yes guy.
Hannah McCarthy: I know, I know a guy.
Nick Capodice: You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: And today we are tackling three isms. This [00:03:00] is a trio that sees a lot of use and misuse in the media and on social media.
Archival: We will never let socialism destroy American health care.
Archival: According to a new survey, 70% of American millennials say they'll likely vote socialist, and 1 in 3 of them view communism favorably.
Archival: The leader of the American military compared the president of the United States to hitlerian fascism.
Nick Capodice: We are talking socialism, communism [00:03:30] and fascism. Words that you or I, Hannah, or even you, gentle listener, might misuse with the best of intentions.
Hannah McCarthy: Okay, Nick, each of those words on their own are college courses.
Nick Capodice: You're not wrong, Hannah. So this is going to be as light of a touch as I can manage.
Hannah McCarthy: Hang on. Before you start. What was that thing you played with? The guy peddling isms?
Nick Capodice: Oh, yeah. That is as good a place to start as any. It is from a cartoon called Make Mine Freedom. It was a cartoon funded by [00:04:00] the Alfred P Sloan Foundation in the 1940s. It is a jocular short where we learn how great the American way of business is. The scene I played for you there had the shady Doctor Utopia peddling them bottles of isms. And these Americans see what life is like once they get a taste.
Archival: I'll take this case to the Supreme Court. The state is the Supreme Court. Our decision is as follows. No more private property, no more. [00:04:30]
Hannah McCarthy: You wait. What is the ISM cocktail? Communism. Socialism.
Nick Capodice: Interestingly, Hannah, it is not named or specified once in the entire movie, but this is clearly an anti-communist piece. But whatever the ism is we're talking about today. All isms at their core are ideologies.
Patrick McGovern: So ideologies are frameworks. There are ways of organizing the way we think and engage, uh, society [00:05:00] and political power structures.
Nick Capodice: This is Patrick McGovern, professor of political science at Buffalo State University. And he gets a very special shout out.
Hannah McCarthy: Why is that?
Nick Capodice: Patrick is responsible for teaching political theory to the person we have had on our show more than any other.
Hannah McCarthy: You mean Dan Cassino from Fairleigh Dickinson University?
Nick Capodice: I do indeed.
Hannah McCarthy: Ah, thanks, Patrick.
Nick Capodice: Thank you Patrick. But back to the episode. Patrick told me why we have ideologies, what they do in the first place.
Patrick McGovern: They provide [00:05:30] us with. If you think about the human brain as having, you know, the, the, the, the reptile brain that says run like hell. Uh, and then the brain that sits on top of that says, well, let's think about this. Ideologies are in the run like hell thing. They're there. They're there to help us simplify, filter and deal with an onslaught of data that we, that we get hit with coming out of our political realm, coming out of the social world we engage in. So these are things that help us understand what's coming [00:06:00] at us. And if you look at anybody who's defining this, it's they're deeply within us. They are part of who and what we are. Someone like Karl Marx would say about ideologies. We don't know their ideology. We simply think one. Other people think this way, think the same way we do. And if they don't, they're bad. It's that easy. Um, black and white. Good over here, bad over there. So ideologies help us organize those things.
Hannah McCarthy: Okay, so ideologies are the labels we adhere to that help guide lots [00:06:30] of other choices we make.
Nick Capodice: Yeah. And labels that we attach to other people that we may disagree with. And all three of the isms we're talking about today were created in direct contrast to another ism.
Patrick McGovern: If we're going to talk about friends and enemies, all of those were organized primarily against liberalism.
Hannah McCarthy: Liberalism now not liberal as in left wing, but liberal as in the old school definition. The freedom of the individual is the most important [00:07:00] thing.
Nick Capodice: Absolutely.
Patrick McGovern: We in the United States call it libertarianism. And that that's a whole nother show. Uh, but the liberalism that we get from someone like the English, um, political thinker John Locke, writing in the late 1600s, promotes the idea of, of the individual as coming prior to society that the individual societies are made up of atomized individuals. Society is just a collection of individuals. So when you organize [00:07:30] government, government has to be restricted from impinging upon the individual pursuing their own interest.
Nick Capodice: Last thing on ideologies, generally, before I get into any one of these in particular, Patrick posits that the notion of the United States having one is relatively new.
Patrick McGovern: One of the things I think my students and most people just don't understand. And that's it's okay. But we just taught this way is that the nation state, as we organize, we're organized politically, internationally. [00:08:00] And, you know, the way we look at the world today, we are members. We're citizens of the United States, the United States. That's something we we only come to recognize after the Civil War. That's what the Civil War was about prior to it. We call it these United States.
Nick Capodice: But after the Civil War, we really start to run with this idea of the U.S. as a nation state, because it is a lot more effective to get soldiers to join [00:08:30] and fight for a country and what it stands for than for your town or your state to do the same.
Patrick McGovern: So what happens is we start seeing the development of nation states, getting in cahoots with economies, organizing society in such a way as to make them better at projecting their power into the rest of the world, particularly Europeans. The question becomes, what's what's the best way of doing that? And how do you avoid some of the problems that come with it? And one of the problems that comes with it, [00:09:00] and this is where socialists and Marxists kick in and say, hey, when you look at that economy that you think is fueling everything, one, you're making some people super rich and you're destroying the lives of other people.
Hannah McCarthy: Okay, we're getting to how the economy works here, making the wealthy wealthier and hurting the non-wealthy at the same time. Are we straying into our first ism?
Nick Capodice: We are indeed Hannah: socialism.
Susan Kang: I define socialism as a political movement that seeks [00:09:30] to equalize political, social, and economic power within capitalist society.
Nick Capodice: This is Susan Kang, professor of political science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Susan Kang: I'm a member of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America. And also for fun. I also co-host a podcast called left on Red.
Hannah McCarthy: Left on Red is a very funny name for a podcast about socialism.
Nick Capodice: Well, as I am a thousand year old vampire, I don't really get the joke, Hannah, but I sort of do. I asked [00:10:00] Susan, though, what the goal of socialism is. What are socialists trying to do to me?
Susan Kang: The fight for socialism in like, you know, our contemporary context would be promoting rights for workers, social and economic rights for regular people, whether it be like guaranteeing housing, health care, education, things like a clean environment. Did I say child care? Uh, and lots of things that we in our current society think of as things you pay for. Right. Because [00:10:30] I'm also a scholar of human rights. So human rights are not just the idea that you have a right not to be discriminated against, which is of course also fundamental to socialism in my mind, but also that you don't have to have value in a capitalist market economy to be able to have your basic needs met. And so that's like a really minimalist view of socialism.
Hannah McCarthy: Okay. So Susan identifies as a socialist.
Nick Capodice: She does.
Hannah McCarthy: Now, when I think of extreme socialism, [00:11:00] I think of things like a system where nobody owns property and everything is distributed equally. Is that what she's advocating for?
Nick Capodice: Absolutely not. There are dozens of different kinds of socialism.
Susan Kang: My own family, for example, my grandmother lived in what is now North Korea. They lost land. There was a lot of repression. You know, there was starvation, like, you know, under Stalin, for example, there was attempt to create a new society through force. And like, no one that I know who calls himself a socialist wants [00:11:30] to do something like that. Like we know that really radical, top down, state mandated social economic reforms, they don't work. Right. What we need is to build a broad consensus among people who think, yeah, this is what we want.
Patrick McGovern: One of the things I like to point out to people that if you, you know, you don't like socialism. All right, then don't read Dickens. That anger that you see in Charles Dickens against the factory owners, Marx [00:12:00] is writing the same thing. Just they're doing it different ways, but it's the same anger. And again, this is particularly this time that the rise of the textile mill, the rise of automation. We're not quite there yet. But it's you know, you can see it beginning to happen. Child labor, the reason you have kids working these looms is their little hands work faster and can get into the machinery. Oh, the kids hand is ripped off. Yep. Too bad. Go beg. There's no there's no social net. So you had people who were making the argument [00:12:30] that, okay, we've got this rise of the nation state. Maybe we can use it to provide a baseline of protection against the citizens that you're asking to commit to the nation state.
Nick Capodice: Even though I'd be hard pressed to find someone who referred to the U.S. as a socialist country, we do have an awful lot of socialist policies, places where the government steps in to help people out.
Hannah McCarthy: Okay. Off the top of my head, I'm thinking, uh, like food assistance programs, [00:13:00] unemployment insurance, Medicare, Social Security, the mail, the mail.
Susan Kang: The U.S. mail, like they get stuff there. Right. And we take it for granted, but it's really nice. What if I offered you 25? I don't know, 50 odd cents to deliver this thing to my friend in California. That would never work. There's no market for that.
Nick Capodice: And there's one big, big one that I never before thought of as socialist.
Patrick McGovern: Just get on Google and type in biggest discretionary spending U.S. [00:13:30] government. And what do you get? That is the spending outside of debt maintenance and Social Security that are mandated. You have to pay into that. What's the next thing? Okay. It's defense. You and I are not going out and buying a B-2 bomber. We can't, we cannot. You know, France cannot buy a B-1 bomber from us. There's one group that's purchasing that's that's the United States military. That's socialist. That's government buying [00:14:00] these things for us.
Susan Kang: Capitalists have to work really, really hard to go against that existing consensus to tell them that this is going to be not in your favor. Having these kinds of basic rights are going to mean that you hard working American are going to get cheated, when in actuality, the cheating is already there.
Nick Capodice: Again, a reminder here Susan identifies as a socialist. We're sharing her political viewpoint here. But I have to add, it's not an uncommon one.
Susan Kang: It's the wealthy who are hoarding their wealth, hiding it offshore, [00:14:30] refusing to pay their share of taxes, um, doing things like kicking people off Medicaid, like hundreds of thousands of people are now being kicked off Medicaid. Other social programs which in no way will benefit anyone, not even like, you know, employers. So we see that this is like an ideological war that has to constantly be fought, because otherwise, if we were allowed to present our ideas, then we would win. Um, because they're popular ideas.
Hannah McCarthy: Okay. I'd like to move on to a more specific [00:15:00] form of socialism, one that the U.S. has certainly been at odds with over the years. Communism.
Nick Capodice: Ah, yes. Communism. We're going to get to that as well as fascism right after the break.
Hannah McCarthy: And Nick, speaking of free things for the common good.
Nick Capodice: Oh, I see where this is going.
Hannah McCarthy: Civics 101 is and always will be as long as I draw breath free, but it relies on listener support. If you have the means, donate what you like at our website, civics101podcast.org dot org. We're [00:15:30] back. We're doing a gentle touch on a bunch of isms today. And Nick, we were about to dive into the system of government that provides from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.
Nick Capodice: Top marks to you, Hannah. Let's do a minute on communism.
Archival: Now the world begins to learn the truth about communism. Family ties are discouraged. The state is supreme. Religion is the opiate of the people. [00:16:00]
Nick Capodice: The basic definition of communism is a system based on the ideals presented by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels work, The Communist Manifesto. And the big thing you got to know about it is that it removes all class.
Hannah McCarthy: Like there's no more upper class, no more working class, no more so-called lower class, etc..
Nick Capodice: Right. And everyone owns everything together, leading to the eventual removal due to irrelevance of private property, of money and [00:16:30] ultimately the state itself. But like we said with socialism, Communism is also not so cut and dried.
Patrick McGovern: When you talk about communism that comes out of Marxism, you get Leninism, you get Maoism, you get Trotskyism, just to name a few.
Nick Capodice: Again, this is Patrick McGovern, professor of political science at Buffalo State University.
Patrick McGovern: They all have different views. For example, Lenin had no problem with the state. The revolution was the people seizing [00:17:00] the state, using the state to organize workers, and then eventually the state goes away. But as you can see with Stalin, Stalin had no problem with keeping the state right in place. And this is one of the breaks between Stalin and Trotsky. That's no, no, no, no, no, that's not we don't want the state. We can see what the problems with the state is this. It's authoritarian and classic. Marxists are not authoritarian.
Nick Capodice: To my understanding, Hannah, no country has yet successfully had a Marxist style government. [00:17:30] Again, here's Susan Kang, professor of political science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Susan Kang: In my mind, communism is what various states, like various countries of the world, participated in before the end of the Cold War, in which there was an attempt to use a powerful state to radically transform society, to fit socialist ideas. Sometimes people use the term actually existing socialism or state socialism to describe this. But we could think of this as like [00:18:00] East Germany, Soviet Union, like the Eastern Bloc, maybe Vietnam, North Korea, and China, obviously, and some people in some places it was very Stalinist, um, with like a really powerful totalitarian state. Um, but the general idea was that there was an ideology of socialism that justified the whole project, but the practices were not necessarily ones that someone like myself would ever endorse [00:18:30] or say we're good, right? So for example, Stalin thought that most farming in Soviet Union was done through privatized means. And he was like, no, let's do something called collective farming. And if you don't fall in line, I'm going to send you to the gulag. And so he it was very top down, not a lot of appreciation for local knowledge.
Nick Capodice: And a lot of people protested and were indeed kicked out or sent to the gulags. Those were forced labor camps where over 18 million [00:19:00] people were imprisoned. And this, of course, had horrible repercussions.
Susan Kang: And so his great Soviet collectivization of agriculture led to some of the most devastating famines in Russian history, in which, like, millions of people died. So that's not something that socialists would endorse, at least not contemporary socialists.
Patrick McGovern: Marx wouldn't look at China, Marx wouldn't look at the Soviet experiment or Vietnam or Cuba and say, yeah, that's yeah, that's what I had in mind. No, those people are those people are miserable. That's not what [00:19:30] he had in mind. He had in mind a radical democracy where we all own the means of production.
Hannah McCarthy: All right. In the US, we have historical moments like the Red scare, the Cold War. These are things that supported the idea that America is a nation state, does not espouse a communist ideology, that it is, in fact, anti-communist. But there was a Communist Party in the U.S., wasn't there?
Nick Capodice: There was. And I got to bring this up because it happened just a few blocks from where [00:20:00] I live. A historic marker dedicated to the birthplace of a member of that party has very recently been removed.
Archival: I am dead set against this, and I think it's an embarrassment that we have a program that allows us to put communists on historical markers and then say, oh, that's part of our history. It's not part of my history.
Patrick McGovern: Certainly in the 1930s in the United States, there were a lot of people who were, you know, members of the Communist [00:20:30] Party flirting with the Communist Party. And the fear was that they were just agents of the Soviet Union. And certainly the Soviet Union was trying to make them agents. That that's clear. Um, but once a lot of people caught wind that that was going on, they hightailed it out of there.
Nick Capodice: So a historic marker dedicated to the birthplace of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was removed. Not during the Cold War, not during the Red scare, but a few weeks ago. And New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu [00:21:00] signed off on the removal. Flynn was a leader in the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World Labor Union, as well as a founding member of the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union. And yes, she was indeed a leading member of the Communist Party USA. She went to prison for that. She was accused of advocating the violent overthrow of the government, and she defended herself at the trial, saying, quote, never have I and not now do I intend to advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence. Nor do [00:21:30] I intend to bring about such an overthrow. She died during a visit to Russia in the 1960s, but as per her wishes, her remains were shipped to be buried in Chicago, right next to Emma Goldman.
Patrick McGovern: Not all people who claim Marxist roots, of course, are not endorsing what Stalin was up to. And look how many people left Marxist left the Soviet Union, because that's what he was up to. They knew what he was doing, and they got the they got out of there.
Hannah McCarthy: Okay, [00:22:00] Nick, last ism here. Fascism. It's a little strange to include it in this list, because communism and socialism share a lot of principles. But fascism does not share those same principles.
Nick Capodice: I agree they do not share principles. I picked these three specifically because of their prevalence in social media, and we've been in the historic vein for a while, Hannah, but I have to let our listeners know that in this last part, we're going to touch on today's political climate and our guests view [00:22:30] of it. And we don't do that too often on the show. Okay. Okay. First, I'm going to start with a contrasting piece of propaganda to make mine freedom. Here's a clip from another film called Don't Be a Sucker. It's an anti-fascism movie produced by the U.S. Department of War in 1947.
Archival: I'm speaking to you as an American American, and I tell you, friends, we'll never be able to call this country our own until it's a country without without Negroes, [00:23:00] without alien foreigners, without Catholics, without Freemasons.
Archival: What's wrong with the Masons? I'm a mason. Hey, that fella's talking about me. And that makes a difference, doesn't it?
Hannah McCarthy: Wait. The protagonist is going along with fascist ideas until he hears they're against Freemasons.
Nick Capodice: Yeah. Not really a persecuted group today, Hannah.
Patrick McGovern: Or ever in [00:23:30] in getting ready for this podcast, I was reading up on all of this and where people are worried about the ism of Marxism, communism, fascism had a much bigger impact on the world. More countries are willing to engage in fast fascist tendencies, authoritarian totalitarian tendencies than, you know, a successful communist revolution.
Hannah McCarthy: Do you have, like, a Webster's definition of fascism?
Nick Capodice: Yeah, this one's harder to define. [00:24:00] There's no like fascist manifesto, and it's not a term anybody really uses to describe themselves. But Patrick gave me a good breakdown.
Patrick McGovern: Okay, um, I'm going to say it's an authoritarian, nationalist ideology that's characterized by strong central government, a dictatorial leader, a strict control of the economy. It suppresses political dissent. It's aggressive, it's militaristic, and it has a clear [00:24:30] sense of an enemy who has caused a crisis in the nation. And the only there's only one person that can solve that crisis. And everybody has to get on board with with the leader, whether you call it IL IL Duce, you call him the Führer, you call him the man. Um, and again, it's almost always a male figure. It's very, very gendered in that regard.
Hannah McCarthy: Getting on board with the leader is an idea that has been around since we have had leaders. But [00:25:00] when does that word fascism arise as an ideology?
Patrick McGovern: Fascism came out of Italy in the 1920s, um, under Benito Mussolini, um, who was trying to organize again like everybody else. He's looking around saying, you know, Italy kind of didn't do so well in World War One. So Benjamino Mussolini comes along and says, I'm gonna make you the. You know, I'm gonna make you a reincarnation of the Roman Empire. We're going to be important again.
Hannah McCarthy: That [00:25:30] is a pretty bold claim. How does he go about doing that?
Nick Capodice: Well, first, by concentrating on massive weapons production and equally massive industrial production and also framing this Italy first ideology. We are the best.
Patrick McGovern: The other thing is that fascism ties in with the rise of national communication systems, film, radio, um, propaganda. During World War One, nation states figured out how to get millions [00:26:00] of people into the trenches and be willing to walk into a meat grinder and not give a second thought about it. Fascists do this extremely well.
Nick Capodice: And unlike our other isms, fascism allows people to get very, very wealthy.
Patrick McGovern: Fascism is all about the nation state. It does not challenge private property. That's one of the things where it's going to come after Marxism and say, no, we're going to let the private, especially large capital [00:26:30] holders. We're going to let them be. We're going to let them get rich so long as they're supporting our regime's aim, and that is to make Italy great again.
Nick Capodice: And as we all know, Mussolini wasn't the last fascist.
Hannah McCarthy: Right? Many leaders since have used the idea of the nation above the individual or race above the individual to gain power.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, like Adolf Hitler. And while Hitler and Mussolini are dead and gone, and the fascist ideologies of Italy [00:27:00] and Germany that led to World War Two are no longer tied to those nation states. Fascism itself is not gone from the earth.
Patrick McGovern: One of the things we tend to forget is that with the end of World War Two, elements that bring about fascism were not defeated. They did not go away. Um, So that's that's always a threat. One of the, you know, Fascism's biggest targets is democracy. They don't want our vote. They want our participation, [00:27:30] but they don't want our vote because that they don't want an in a sense of individuality. It's be a good soldier. Strap on, you know, this national bird and take up arms.
Nick Capodice: And Patrick says that if we're looking at fascism today in America, the enemy isn't necessarily another nation.
Patrick McGovern: It may not be taking up arms, you know, go off to Afghanistan and fight, but take up arms against the people who are driving our country apart. But but you certainly opened up [00:28:00] a can of worms. It's like, well, what what fascist elements do we see in the United States? Um, you know, if I come out and say, Trump, you're going to get a boatload of, you know, you're, you're going to be overwhelmed. Uh, but certainly that tendency that I am the answer. We are in crisis. I am the answer. God. Guns and Coca-Cola or you know, don't don't challenge, um, industry unless it's Disney and they're making us woke or [00:28:30] something. But the people who won't get on board with them, the people who are on board with them are clearly good and everybody else is bad. That certainly shows, you know, at at least a tendency towards authoritarianism.
Hannah McCarthy: Patrick said the ideology of fascism didn't end after the war. But does that mean we're stuck with it?
Nick Capodice: Maybe. Maybe not. I mean, I don't want to end an episode on a shrug, but this is truly something [00:29:00] that comes and goes.
Patrick McGovern: This has been a long slog, I would argue, since World War Two. Um, and, you know, it came in waves. And, you know, American politics is always on this pendulum and we happen to be swinging towards a not so discursive mode right now. Um, my hope and history tells us will swing back, but what's going to take us to swing back? Maybe [00:29:30] it was January 6th that we say, oh, okay, we've gone, we've gone far enough.
Nick Capodice: Well, that is it for this triumvirate of words on Civics 101. I'm off to go read some Marx, Engels, Hegel, Locke and Machiavelli. This episode was made by me. Nick Capodice with you, Hannah McCarthy. Thank you. Our staff includes Marina Henke, Rebecca LaVoy, and Taylor Quimby. Music [00:30:00] in this episode from Epidemic Sound, blue Dot sessions and the wondrous Chris Zabriskie. Civics 101 is a production of NPR New Hampshire Public Radio. All right.