Castro’s prison survivors prove nothing about the American politicians McClain calls “Democratic Socialists.” In a Fox News Opinion column, Rep. Lisa McClain, chair of the House Republican Conference, rounded up refugees from Cuba, Venezuela, the Soviet Union, and China, sat them down at the Capitol, and used their suffering to argue that any American who calls themselves a “Democratic Socialist” is on the road to the gulag. The move works only if you skip a step — the one that runs from Cuba to Denmark.
The suffering she collected is real. Castro was a catastrophe. Chávez consolidated authoritarian power. The twentieth-century communist regimes — Russia, China, Cambodia, Cuba — killed tens of millions, crushed the workers they claimed to liberate, and abolished the civil society that lets citizens resist. I’m not here to relitigate it. The archives are open. The verdict is in.
But the piece requires one move to work, and that move is the conflation. McClain didn’t bring the survivors to testify about child allowances or sectoral wage boards or the child tax credit. She brought them to testify about their countries. The countries collapsed because the institutions that limit power got destroyed — independent courts, free press, plural parties, working trade unions. That is the lesson the survivors keep repeating, if you read them rather than McClain’s summary of them. It is not “be afraid of anyone who calls themselves a socialist.” It is: build the institutions that stop power from getting out of control.
That is where the conflation gets embarrassing. Democratic socialism and communism are not the same thing, and pretending they are is a tell. The democratic-socialist tradition is the tradition that defeated communism in Europe, peacefully, at the ballot box: in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia, in Poland, in East Germany. Václav Havel, the Czech playwright who became president after the Velvet Revolution, was not a Leninist. He was a dissident whose whole program was rebuilding civil society. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Poland’s first non-communist prime minister in 1989, was a Catholic social democrat. Charter 77, the Czechoslovak dissident manifesto, was signed by social democrats, liberals, and Catholics together. None of them flew the hammer and sickle.
The fork in the European left runs back more than a century. The Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917 and chose the one-party state. The European socialist parties — Bernstein in Germany, Branting in Sweden, Stauning in Denmark, Gerhardsen in Norway — looked at the same capitalism Marx had diagnosed and chose the other road. They kept the elections. They kept the free press. They kept the right to vote the bastards out. They built universal healthcare, free universities, sectoral wage bargaining, and the whole welfare state — and they did it without the camps. Social Democrats have governed Sweden for most of the last century, openly, through elections, repeatedly sent back to opposition by voters and returned. Social Democrats ran the Danish government as recently as this year.
If McClain’s argument were right, Denmark should look like Caracas by now. It does not. The Danes have free press, independent courts, and an unemployment insurance system generous enough to let a worker quit a bad job and retrain for a better one. Norwegians too. They have not seized the means of production. They have not banned the opposition. They have not built a camp. The millions of people who have lived their entire lives under democratic-socialist governments in Scandinavia are not refugees. They have parental leave and stable grocery stores and the same right to criticize their government that McClain has. Castro promised those things too, before the consolidation. The Nordics have been delivering them, voting cycle after voting cycle, without consolidating anything. That is what “democratic” is doing in the phrase “Democratic Socialist.” It is doing some work.
McClain is welcome to disagree on policy. Child allowances, sectoral wage boards, cooperative ownership, public health insurance — there’s a real argument on each. But she doesn’t get to wave at the gulag and call it a day. The survivors she gathered weren’t asked about those policies. They were asked about their countries. The countries collapsed because the institutions that limit power got destroyed. That is the lesson.
Notice which way her own party is going on those institutions. The Republican Party of 2026 is not exactly racing to rebuild the structures the survivors would name. Press freedom — when reporters can be prosecuted for protecting their sources. Voting rights when federal oversight gets gutted. Civil-service independence when political appointees fire career officials by the thousands. The rule of law when the executive branch decides which court rulings to obey. These are not the strong suits of the moment. If you took the survivors’ actual lesson seriously, you’d spend less time hunting reds under the bed and more time shoring up the things that stop any party from doing what Castro and Chávez did.
Here is the awkward part for McClain’s column. Most of the institutions the survivors would tell you to build already exist in this country. We just don’t call them what they are. Social Security is universal social insurance. Medicare is single-payer healthcare for everyone over sixty-five. The public library is the quietly radical institution that’s been there the whole time. The credit union in your wallet is a cooperative. The Bank of North Dakota, profitable throughout its century-long history, is a state-owned bank in the reddest state in the union. Alaska sends part of its oil revenue to every household as a dividend. Rural electric co-ops serve forty-two million Americans across fifty-six percent of the landmass. Credit unions serve a hundred and forty-five million. We expanded the child tax credit in 2021 and child poverty in this country fell nearly in half for the one year the expansion existed; we let it lapse, and the poverty came right back. None of those were gulags. Every one of them is the kind of institution a refugee from communism, asked about American life, would recognize as what stops power from getting out of control.
The recipe at the end of McClain’s column is: be wary of politicians with the wrong label. The recipe at the end of mine is more boring: build the institutions. The co-op. The sectoral wage board. The child allowance. The public option. The credit union. They exist. They work. They are not Cuba.
The honest part is admitting they are harder to build here. American union density sits around ten percent; across Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland it runs fifty to sixty-five percent. Our parties can’t deliver members the way European parties can, and the racial divisions have been weaponized against working-class solidarity for a century — most decisively when the parties split over civil rights in the 1960s, and neither has put the working class back together since. The machinery under the policy is what we are missing, and that is the slower work.
McClain wants you scared of the label so you never notice the institutions. The menu is bigger than two items, and “Democratic Socialist” and “communist” are not on the same plate.
McClain’s column would land better if she tried it.