Many conservatives have been surprised to witness socialism making a comeback among today’s youth. From the fact that longtime socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders is a 2020 front-runner, to the polls showing growing millennial support for communism, statism is cool again.
These developments don’t exactly come as a shock to me. I’m a conservative, but my most recent relationship was with a Democratic Party campaigner who politically identifies as a communist. He is an American citizen whose parents are from Cuba, and he strongly supports the communist Cuban government. For the sake of this article, I will refer to him as Carl.
Carl and I first met because, in the spirit of open-mindedness, I try to regularly attend my college’s democratic socialist “night schools,” where different members present papers or history lessons about the socialist movement. I’ve occasionally even brought the group snacks. The most active members are very well-read Marxists. These Marxists generally believe that socialism is a stepping stone on the way to a communist society, which is why many of them actively participate in neoliberal, Democratic, and socialist campaigns.
Carl and I connected over our mutual annoyance for the politically correct, social justice warrior language police that have taken over the Democratic Party. He believes that stamping out all politically incorrect humor and banning popular comedians is ineffective, and amounts to little more than an elitist slight to the working class. In this, we have a lot in common — except for that part where the end goal of his movement is to literally seize all capital and police the people who would threaten the new, “good” communist government.
After we started dating, we would frequently be asked, both separately and together, questions along the lines of “how do you two get along?” Sometimes even by people we barely knew.
Everyone was floored that we were able to be friends, let alone have a romantic relationship. Very liberal classmates who previously had no desire to talk to me were suddenly polite and even friendly, as if me dating someone who was left-wing made me a more palatable Republican in some way. This wasn’t new for me.
I’ve dated two other men who identified as socialists and volunteered their time for left-wing political candidates. In all three of these relationships, I experienced the same soft sexism from my liberal partners.
They justified dating me because they believed I would one day see the light, vote how they do, and join their movement. To them, I was a nice, naive girl, who couldn’t actually be an evil capitalist, merely a confused fool tricked by the free market.
Carl treated my belief in free market capitalism as a phase, something that I had to move past on my way to socialism and then ultimately communism. My Catholic faith and beliefs about human rights, justice, and charity he conflated with government redistribution of wealth and centralized control of the economy. Carl couldn’t accept that I believed all humans have a neighborly duty to take care of one another without believing in socialist healthcare.
Carl routinely sent me article links and book recommendations. I happily sat through his presentations about the power of unions and reorganizing the economy. Learning about the opposing viewpoint was illuminating. However, it was only illuminating for me, since Carl was not interested in any of my perspectives, research, historical data, or economic theories.
He dismissed any evidence that communism was harmful as mere propaganda. Cuba’s healthcare is great, he insisted. The only people who left the island weren’t “true Cubans,” they were capitalists who couldn’t bear to lose their manipulative, profit-making businesses. The oppression that has always reigned supreme in communist countries such as the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba is radically over-dramatized, he would claim.
In fact, the way he talked about “fake news” sounded similar to the way many conservatives use the term, just inveighed in the opposite direction. The disagreements in our relationship showed me the severity of our information crisis. None of us can seem to agree on what the facts are, or in many cases, even agree on common terms to describe a situation.
Every conversation we had about politics would end with Carl agreeing with my line of reasoning but either rejecting my conclusion or the source of my facts. We believed one another to be a good, caring person worthy of love. Yet, his attitude towards my political philosophy felt infantilizing, and I was, to say the least, skeptical about his ideology.
Our policy disagreements aren’t what ultimately ended our relationship, and we never truly got into an all-out fight over politics. But I now believe that over the long term, our fundamental differences were untenable. They would have eventually bred disaster for any couple.
Patricia Patnode (@IdealPatricia) is a conservative college student and outreach director for Lone Conservative.
