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Stephen D Cook
Stephen D Cook is a retired US Army Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel with 25 years of service. He is a combat veteran decorated for both heroism and valor.
I served 25 years in the United States Army, much of it as a Green Beret, training, fighting, and leading men in places most Americans will never see. I swore an oath – not once, but repeatedly – to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That oath wasn’t a slogan. In basic training, we sang cadence calls about killing “commies” because the army of my era understood something visceral: communism wasn’t just another political flavor. It was the ideological opposite of everything that made this republic worth dying for.
I’ve been out for a decade now. I’m not young. But I’m not nostalgic, either. What I see today – the slow, steady erosion of the values that turned a ragtag collection of colonies into the world’s sole superpower – fills me with the same cold clarity I felt on missions where hesitation meant death. We are watching a soft-power insurgency unfold in our nation in plain sight. Not tanks in the streets, but classrooms, congressional chambers, city halls, and cultural enclaves where the language of “democratic socialism” masks a deeper drift toward the very system we once fought to contain.
And it’s being sold by people like Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen Bernie Sanders. They wrap themselves in the warm blanket of “socialism” while pushing policies and rhetoric that echo the opening acts of every failed communist experiment in history. AOC has said flatly that there isn’t a billionaire who actually earned their money. Sanders just reintroduced a five per cent annual wealth tax on America’s billionaires – framed as “making them pay their fair share,” but amounting to the steady confiscation of private property. They call it fairness. I call it the slow boil toward the abolition of the very incentives that built this nation.
Even at the local level, this ideology has captured real power. In New York City, Zohran Mamdani – a democratic socialist and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member – was elected and sworn in as the 112th mayor on January 1, 2026. In just his first months in office, Mamdani has aggressively pushed rent freezes for nearly one million rent-stabilized apartments through the Rent Guidelines Board, advanced plans for city-owned grocery stores as a “public option” to combat corporate profiteering, secured major expansions of free universal childcare, and proposed new taxes on luxury pied-à-terre properties and millionaires. His administration has launched “Organize NYC” to mobilize mass public testimony and activist pressure on city policy – essentially importing campaign-style organizing into governance. These are not abstract theories: they are concrete steps toward government control of housing, food, childcare, and wealth. Viral videos targeting billionaires and hedge funds have already prompted some businesses to relocate operations out of the city. This is what the shift looks like when socialist values move from congressional rhetoric to executive action in America’s largest metropolis.
Just this week, while unveiling yet another municipally run grocery store, Mayor Mamdani took direct aim at Ronald Reagan’s iconic warning. Reagan famously said the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Mamdani replied, “It’s a good quote, but I disagree. I think nine more terrifying words are actually ‘I worked all day and can’t feed my family.’” In other words, government is not the problem – it is the solution. This is the soft boil in action.
Let me be clear from the jump: I am not against debate. The First Amendment I swore to defend protects even foolish ideas. You can advocate socialism in the public square. But when those ideas harden into policy that contradicts the Constitution’s core protections – private property, individual liberty, limited government, and a Constitutional Republic form of governance – we cross from speech into subversion. And when combined with mass immigration that rejects assimilation, we risk losing the cultural cohesion that made the American experiment work.
America didn’t become the envy of the world by accident. It wasn’t luck, or geography alone, or some mystical national character. It was a deliberate system rooted in the Enlightenment principles baked into our founding documents.
The Constitution’s Fifth Amendment is unambiguous: no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process, and private property shall not be taken for public use without just compensation. The Framers understood that secure property rights unleash human ingenuity. When a man knows his labor, his risk, and his innovation will not be seized by the state or the mob, he builds, invents, and invests. Skeptics sometimes point out that today’s billionaires benefit from state-funded infrastructure – roads, courts, schools, and the like. Fair point: government does provide the basic rules of the game, the legal framework, and essential public goods that make commerce possible. But it is the individual who shoulders the personal financial risk, the years of uncertainty, the sleepless nights, and the very real possibility of total failure. Public roads didn’t invent the iPhone, scale Amazon, or revolutionize energy. Visionary risk-takers did – betting their own capital, reputation, and future on ideas that voluntary markets then rewarded with profits. That protected incentive is what turns infrastructure into progress. Private property isn’t greed – it’s the engine of prosperity that lifted billions globally out of poverty through American-led markets.
Assimilation was the other secret sauce. Wave after wave of immigrants – Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews, Asians – came here not to recreate the old country but to become Americans. They learned English, adopted our civic culture, intermarried, and bought into the idea that E Pluribus Unum meant one people under one set of rules. The result? A high-trust, high-mobility society capable of projecting power across oceans while innovating at home. That cohesion allowed us to win two world wars, stare down the Soviet Union, and dominate the global economy.
Capitalism – flawed, messy, but unmatched – rewarded merit. It wasn’t perfect: monopolies and excesses were checked by antitrust laws and democratic accountability, not central planning. But the system delivered: the US GDP per capita exploded, life expectancy soared, and even our poorest citizens live better than kings of old. This is not ideology: it is history.
Contrast that with the trends swallowing our institutions.
In education, from K-12 through universities, we’ve replaced civics with grievance. Faculty skew overwhelmingly left – often six-to-one or worse. Curricula hammer “equity” over equality, identity over individual merit, and systemic critiques of capitalism that sound lifted from Marx’s The Communist Manifesto. Recent polls paint a bleak picture: among Americans 18–29, 62 per cent hold a favorable view of socialism and 34 per cent of communism itself. A Heartland-Rasmussen survey found 53 per cent of young voters want a socialist president in 2028, with 76 percent supporting nationalization of major industries like health care, energy, and Big Tech.
This isn’t abstract. Elements within the Democratic Party openly champion it. The Squad and their allies push Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, rent control, and wealth taxes – framed as “socialism” but requiring exactly the state control of production Marx prescribed in the transitional phase. And now, with Mayor Mamdani in New York implementing the local version – rent freezes, public groceries, tax hikes on the successful – the blueprint is scaling from rhetoric to reality.
This rhetoric isn’t new. It mirrors the early stages of every 20th-century communist regime: vilifying the successful promise redistribution, and centralizing power. Marx and Engels were explicit in The Communist Manifesto: abolish private property, centralize credit and production in the state’s hands, use progressive taxation and inheritance abolition as weapons. The “dictatorship of the proletariat” was always the bridge. Democratic socialists insist they reject that path. History disagrees. Every time – Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela – the “soft” phase hardens into tyranny, poverty, and body counts in the tens of millions. As the millions of Venezuelans who fled Maduro’s regime can attest, the promises of equity collapse into empty shelves, authoritarian control, and mass exodus.
This ideological drift toward socialism is gaining dangerous traction precisely because America’s shared national identity is weakening. When assimilation falters, social cohesion erodes – and societies with low trust become far more susceptible to calls for centralized government control and redistribution. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam’s landmark 2007 study, “E Pluribus Unum,” found that in ethnically diverse communities, residents of all races tend to “hunker down.” Trust plummets – even in people of their own group – while altruism, community cooperation, and friendships decline. This is not an argument against ethnic diversity itself – America has always thrived by welcoming immigrants from every background who embrace our shared values – but against the failure to insist on that assimilation. In such fragmented environments, the natural bonds of mutual reliance break down. People increasingly look not to their neighbors or markets, but to a powerful central state to impose order, fairness, and resource distribution. This creates fertile ground for socialist rhetoric that promises equity through government force rather than through a united citizenry working together.
Compounding the problem is a policy-driven demographic experiment that rejects the melting pot. We’ve allowed – encouraged, even – large-scale immigration without demanding cultural buy-in. The result: parallel societies that drain resources and erode trust.
Look at Minnesota’s Somali community, the largest in the US Recent Center for Immigration Studies data shows 81 per cent of Somali-headed households receive some form of welfare, versus 21 per cent of native Minnesotan households. Fifty-four per cent are on food stamps; 73 per cent on Medicaid; 89 per cent of households with children get aid. Cash welfare use is 27 per cent. Crime data, age-adjusted, shows Somali-born young men incarcerated at roughly twice the rate of native-born Americans. High-profile fraud rings – hundreds of millions in Covid aid and SNAP scams – have involved dozens of Somali defendants. This isn’t ‘racism’: it’s the predictable outcome of clan-based refugee inflows into generous welfare systems without assimilation mandates.
Dearborn, Michigan, tells a similar story: concentrated Arab immigrant communities where political discourse often imports Middle Eastern grievances rather than American ones. These aren’t isolated anecdotes. Robert Putnam’s research showed diversity, without assimilation pressure, reduces social trust across the board. We are balkanizing.
Chain migration, refugee programs, and sanctuary policies exacerbate it. Earlier immigrants faced Ellis Island scrutiny and cultural expectation. Today’s system selects for numbers over compatibility, then subsidizes separation. The superpower that assimilated millions now imports low-trust norms and watches trust plummet.
This isn’t conspiracy. It’s the logical result of choices: open borders without vetting for values, academia captured by ideological uniformity, media that romanticizes “equity” while ignoring Venezuela’s collapse or Cuba’s prisons. Congressional socialists and now big-city mayors like Mamdani provide the political cover. The First Amendment protects their speech – but the Constitution does not require us to surrender our republic to it.
My oath bound me to defend against domestic enemies too. Cultural Marxism, identity politics, and unassimilated enclaves aren’t armed invaders, but they weaken the foundations: property rights, rule of law, and shared identity. When youth polls show more favorability for communism than capitalism in some cohorts, and when a democratic socialist runs New York City with rent freezes and public grocery stores, we are one generation from losing the republic by ballot box.
To the AOCs, Sanderses, Mamdani, and DSA activists: I ask you, as a man who buried brothers in the long fight against tyranny and totalitarianism, to look in the mirror. You claim moral superiority – caring for the poor, and fighting inequality. But intentions don’t rewrite economics or history.
Wealth isn’t a fixed pie. Billionaires didn’t ‘steal’ from workers: they created value that employed millions and generated tax revenue funding the very safety nets you expand. Confiscate it, and capital flees. Innovation stalls. Shortages follow – bread lines, empty shelves, the universal signature of central planning. Every socialist experiment ends the same: elites in dachas; masses in misery.
You say “democratic” socialism avoids the gulags. Yet your policies – wealth caps, nationalization, rent freezes, speech codes against “hate,” and activist governance – require coercion. Property taken without compensation violates the Fifth Amendment. Suppressing dissent to protect the revolution has always followed. Ask the Ukrainians starved by Stalin, the Cambodians killed by Pol Pot, the Venezuelans who fled Maduro’s regime.
America’s poor live with cars, air conditioning, and smartphones because markets work. Socialism’s ‘fairness’ has delivered mass graves. See the light: reform capitalism’s excesses through targeted policy – opportunity ladders, school choice, work requirements – not its destruction.
This is not a left-versus-right crusade. I am a constitutionalist, not a partisan. I could vote for a Democrat like Sen John Fetterman or former Rep Harold Ford Jr if they put the Republic and its founding principles first. But when the socialist wing rides their coattails – pushing wealth confiscation, rent freezes, and identity over assimilation – the constitutional guardrails are what matter, not the party label.
To my fellow veterans and constitutionalists: the fight isn’t over. With Memorial Day weekend fast approaching, let us honor those who paid the ultimate price by exercising the freedoms they defended with their lives – our right to free speech to call out this soft-power insurgency, and our right to vote in every election, no matter how seemingly small. No contest is inconsequential – local, state, or federal, primary or general. With mid-term elections on the horizon, every single vote will matter. Enforce assimilation – English fluency, civics tests, merit-based immigration. Defund ideological capture in schools. Demand politicians honor the oath we took. The Constitution is amendment-hard for a reason: it protects us from fleeting majorities chasing utopia.
We became a superpower by betting on the individual under law. Abandon that for class warfare, tax-the-rich experiments, and tribal enclaves, and we become just another failed state with better branding.
The darkness is optional. But only if we choose the light of the Founders now – before the boil turns irreversible.
This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.
