I have spent much of my career around self-described communists, democratic socialists, admirers of Bernie Sanders, and professors who think Lenin and Stalin were not sufficiently progressive.
After so many faculty meetings, one begins to recognize that there are really only shades of red.
The American experiment never depended on producing perfect citizens. It depended on understanding that no political system could substitute for moral renewal.
Now, as younger voters embrace self-proclaimed socialists in places like New York, Americans naturally wonder what such movements would mean if they gained real political power. Mayor Mamdani has suggested that no problem is too large or too small for government intervention.
So let us conduct a thought experiment.
Suppose Karl Marx was right.
Suppose the wealthiest families accumulated their fortunes only through exploitation, political favoritism, monopoly, corruption, or violence. Suppose the rich become rich only by taking advantage of everyone else.
Even if we grant Marx that premise, where does it lead?
I know what you are thinking. Professor Anderson, have you lost your mind? Has much learning driven you mad?
Stay with me. I am asking the question socialists cannot answer.
When politicians promise that government will solve every problem, regulate every industry, subsidize every need, and redistribute every inequality, they demand extraordinary trust in political power.
Listen carefully to their rhetoric. No problem is supposedly too large or too small to be solved by expanding government authority into every corner of life.
But why should that follow?
Why would anyone embrace a philosophy that treats people as corrupt when they gather in families, businesses, churches, or private institutions, but assumes those same people become altruistic lovers of mankind when they enter government?
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If concentrated wealth corrupts those who possess it, why would concentrating even more wealth and power in the state eliminate corruption?
The irony is as dense as a room full of critical-theory PhDs.
The democratic socialist says: Give me vast power so that you can be free.
You cannot have it both ways.
History supplies a remarkably consistent answer.
The French Revolution condemned aristocratic privilege. The Russian Revolution condemned the bourgeoisie and the czar. Communist revolutions throughout Asia and Latin America began by identifying corruption among wealthy or politically connected elites.
Some of those criticisms contained elements of truth.
Wealth has often been accumulated through injustice. Powerful families have oppressed the weak. Cronyism, favoritism, and corruption recur in every fallen society.
But the proposed socialist solution creates an even greater danger.
The revolutionary insists that the wealthy possess too much power. He therefore proposes creating an institution with vastly more power.
The wealthy may possess billions of dollars. The state can confiscate trillions.
The wealthy may own companies. The state claims authority over entire industries.
The wealthy may influence markets. The state commands armies, police forces, intelligence agencies, prosecutors, regulators, prisons, and courts.
If fallen human beings abuse power, why would giving some of them virtually unlimited political power solve the problem?
It never has.
Communist governments repeatedly follow the same pattern. They begin with promises of justice, equality, affordable housing, free education, medical care, and security for the poor.
They end with repression, stagnation, censorship, secret police, totalitarianism, and ruling classes whose privileges exceed those of the elites they replaced.
They also tend to end with rivers of blood.
Even if Marx correctly recognized that human beings exploit one another, he made one catastrophic mistake: He assumed that this tendency disappears when those same human beings become government officials.
Governments are not composed of angels. They are composed of people. And people do not become virtuous because they receive a government paycheck.
The contrast would be funny if the consequences were not so severe. Those who claim to distrust evil billionaires place extraordinary trust in politicians who possess powers no billionaire could dream of exercising.
If corruption follows power, why assume government is immune?
I have seen the same contradiction among the radical left-wing faculty that dominate our state universities. They condemn oppression, nepotism, cronyism, and abuses of authority.
Then they acquire power.
They promote their friends, punish dissenters, and censor everything to the right of Mao.
America’s founders confronted this problem directly. They understood that power corrupts because they understood something deeper: Human nature is fallen.
James Madison famously observed that if men were angels, no government would be necessary. Because men are not angels, government itself must be restrained.
The Constitution reflects that insight through divided powers, federalism, checks and balances, and limits on government authority.
The goal was not to create perfect rulers.
It was to prevent any ruler from accumulating too much power.
Yet the founders recognized something else modern politics forgets.
Political institutions cannot cure the human heart.
John Adams warned that the Constitution was made only for “a moral and religious people” and was wholly inadequate for any other.
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His point was not that Christians are incapable of sin. Free government depends upon citizens capable of self-government. When individuals cannot govern themselves morally, the state expands to govern them externally.
That is the lesson America risks forgetting as we celebrate 250 years of independence.
Our greatest danger is not simply expanding government or growing inequality. It is believing political power can redeem fallen humanity.
It cannot. Marx’s solution is doomed to repeated and bloody failure.
Whether oppression comes from wealthy corporations or an all-powerful bureaucracy, the underlying problem remains the same. Human beings misuse power because human hearts are corrupted by sin.
Democratic socialists now promise young voters the end of the wealthy and an endless supply of free goods. At the same time, they exploit constitutional forms to entrench their power, excuse election abuses, and stretch the 14th Amendment far beyond its authors’ intent.
The American experiment never depended on producing perfect citizens. It depended on understanding that no political system could substitute for moral renewal.
But if Americans abandon what is good and holy in sufficient numbers, checks and balances alone will not save us from socialist exploitation.
Christianity offers an answer that reaches beneath economics and politics to the human heart.
Jesus told Nicodemus in John 3 that he must be born again.
The gospel does not merely redistribute wealth. It transforms rich and poor alike. It teaches generosity instead of greed, service instead of domination, and humility instead of pride — out of love for God, not fear of government.
Without that transformation, every revolution produces a new ruling class.
Perhaps America’s greatest achievement after 250 years has not been discovering the perfect political system. It has been recognizing that no political system can save us. Christ can.
Only redeemed people can preserve a free republic. And redeemed people are not created by the state. They are created by the saving work of Jesus Christ.
