Politicians like Zohran Mamdani like to boast that they, like Obama, are the prophets of change.  In reality, they are puppets controlled by their puppet-masters, those in a long line of socialists leading back to Marx himself.  The nuances and tactics change, as when Lenin fundamentally altered Marx’s idea of the “revolt of the masses” and replaced it with top-down organizing based on violence and intimidation — a concept that Saul Alinsky popularized in America — but the essence of Marxism remains the same.

At its heart, Marxism focuses on seizing the capital and means of production from “the rich” and redistributing it, in theory, at least, to the working class.  In reality, the wealth is always seized and retained by the communist elite, thus replacing one class of capitalists — those who invest their hard earned money in productive ways for the benefit of society — with another, far more devious and ruthless, class of controllers who, like Mamdani, have never worked.

David Horowitz, once a Marxist himself, understands the nature of Marxism better than most.  When Marxists agitate “on behalf of” workers, blacks, women, or gays and the transgendered, it is never actually on their behalf; it is a means to gain power.  Socialists like Mamdani promise the moon, but how much do they provide?

For Marxists, as Horowitz writes in Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model (2008), “the issue is always the revolution.  In other words the cause — whether inner city blacks or women — is never the real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause which is the accumulation of power to make the revolution.”

In America, under theorists such as Herbert Marcuse, Duncan Kennedy, Derrick Bell, and Alinsky himself, Marxism adopted Antonio Gramsci’s strategy of  “the long march through the institutions”: the tactics of infiltrating and taking over the critical institutions of education, government, and media.

Those who have recently spent time in American universities know exactly what Gramsci intended.  Most departments in the humanities and social scientists, and even in science, engineering, and law, are now dominated by leftists who have substituted propaganda for teaching.  Professors now see their primary mission as to indoctrinate students in Marxist thinking rather than to teach their subject in an objective manner.  Conservative faculty, who are few to begin with, are driven from the universities by deans who deny promotion and university presses and journals that refuse to publish conservative work.

Eighty-four percent of Harvard arts and sciences faculty identified as “liberal” in 2022.  In 2024, that figure declined to 70%, though perhaps only because some feared criticism for their monolithic ideology.  Still, in 2024, no member of that faculty identified as “very conservative.”  In a 2025 editorial, Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield decried the lack of intellectual diversity at the university, but there appears to be no effort to implement his proposal for hiring conservatives.  To do so would threaten the “long march” toward Marxism that exists at that and many other institutions.

Similarly, leftist thinking dominates the media.  According to the Media Research Center, 94% of donations from those working for five major media outlets went to Democrats between 2008 and 2016.  That percentage — and the anti-Trump messaging that goes along with it — has almost certainly increased since 2016.  Perhaps this is why only 12% of Republicans now trust the media.  Leftists have all but taken over the national media, just as Marcuse proposed.

And now, especially with the election of three prominent Democrats in November 2025, the long march of Marxism through politics continues.  It’s crucial to understand that the Gramscian ideology that underlies American Marxism is fundamentally and irrevocably anti-democratic, even in situations where elections are allowed to take place.  Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential race, but she did not accept the result: She worked for years afterward, it seems, to undermine the first Trump presidency by pushing the “Russiagate” hoax.

Elections are a means to an end, but after they gain power, Marxists govern in a top-down fashion.  From Lenin to Castro to Pol Pot and Kim Jong-un to Maduro, no Marxist leader accepts the popular will once he gains power.  Nor will Marxists in America.  Even at the presidential level, when races are close, Marxists (otherwise known as “progressives”) will cheat to alter the result.  And in governing, they will impose their ideology on the populace, no matter how unpopular that ideology may be.

In part, Marxist ideology is largely economic.  It involves raising taxes in order to transfer wealth from the rich to the government.  But it also involves changing the culture, a point that Gramsci and Marcuse stressed to no end.  Marxists intend to gain control of the mind, and in order to do so, they must demolish those traditional institutions that guide the thinking of most Americans: the church, the family, patriotism, and the capitalist system.

“Demolish” is not too strong a word.  Marxist educators now employ sex education at a ridiculously young age, along with transgender coaching and “affirmation,” in an effort to demolish the family and eliminate the control of parents over their children.  Indeed, the role of parents in guiding the education of their children is now completely excluded in some school districts.  For that reason, some of the most bitter conflicts have been between parents and school boards and teachers.

Marxism is making its way through our nation’s institutions, and only a determined, peaceful resistance can stop it.  The 2025 elections, with the election of self-proclaimed socialists and liberals in the major races, may seem a low point for conservatives, but these elections may create an even more determined resistance.  The Marxist wolf is no longer hiding in progressive sheep’s clothing; he is out in the open, running as a “democratic socialist” (certainly an oxymoron if ever there was one, since Marxists are never truly democratic).  Now we see them for what they are: the progeny of Lenin, Stalin, and Castro, and now there is no excuse for refusing to oppose them.

Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture, including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).

Image via Max Pixel.