When History Stops Being a Warning by Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff The blue wave that swept across America this week has left me deeply uncomfortable. Not because the Democrats won. That’s democracy. People go to the polls, cast their votes, and sometimes the result is one we don’t particularly like. I can live with that, even when I profoundly disagree with the political direction the voters have chosen. What I find much harder to live with is the enthusiasm surrounding the victories, the almost gleeful celebration of political developments that remind me of things I have seen before. At least five members of the Democratic Socialists of America, an organization with a caucus that openly calls itself Marxist-Leninist, are on their way to Congress, and when she won her primary in June, one of them, Claire Valdez of New York, said: “We have declared that this movement is durable.” I believe her. And I cannot help wondering whether those celebrating have any idea why people like me find this so troubling. I spent four formative years in America during the Reagan era, when communism was not some distant historical curiosity. We learned about it in school. We watched the news from Moscow and Eastern Europe. We knew about the Berlin Wall, about people risking their lives to escape communist countries, and about the fundamental difference between a society in which the individual was free and one in which the state determined the limits of that freedom. In November 1988, I stood in East Berlin. I had crossed from West Berlin into a world that could hardly have been more different, and what I saw confirmed everything I had learned. I still vividly remember bustling West Berlin, the Kurfürstendamm with its sparkling lights in the dark November nights, and then, on the other side of Checkpoint Charlie, the drabness, the grayness and the palpable despair of a destroyed society. I decided then and there that I did not want to live in a society governed by socialism. Not now, not ever. I have never forgotten that experience. Nor have I forgotten Iran. I was there during the Iranian Revolution of 1979, as a child of seven. I watched a country undergo an ideological transformation, and only years later did I learn how it had come about, with leftists and Khomeini’s followers united in their opposition to the Shah. Their common enemy brought them together, but it did not mean they shared the same vision for Iran’s future. By 1983 the Communist Tudeh party was banned and its leaders were in prison, and in 1988 — the same year I stood in East Berlin — thousands of political prisoners were executed, leftists among them. These experiences shaped my political convictions long before I had ever heard of Friedrich A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, or Murray Rothbard. When I eventually encountered their writings, I found an understanding of individual liberty that made perfect sense to me. Hayek, in particular, understood liberty as freedom from arbitrary coercion, with government constrained by the rule of law rather than empowered to direct people’s lives according to some grand political vision. Having witnessed what happens when those constraints disappear and the individual becomes subordinate to an ideology, his arguments resonated with me immediately. That is why I find the current enthusiasm so difficult to understand. America has been home to generations of people who fled communism, religious persecution, and authoritarian governments. They came because America represented something different. It offered the possibility of living without the state or a religious authority dictating every aspect of their lives. And yet I now watch Americans celebrating political ideas and alliances without asking the questions whose answers history has already taught us. I am not suggesting that every Democrat is a communist, or that every Democratic victory is a step toward totalitarianism. That would be far too simplistic. What concerns me is the growing acceptance of socialist ideas, the attraction of communism among some on the left, and the willingness to overlook fundamental ideological differences in pursuit of political power. Perhaps what troubles me most is the apparent absence of historical memory. We seem increasingly willing to judge political movements by what they promise rather than by what comparable movements have done when given power. And that brings me to the question I cannot shake. What happens when people no longer recognize the warning signs? What happens when they celebrate political developments without considering where those developments might lead? And what happens when they finally recognize the danger, only to discover that reversing course has become extraordinarily difficult? I am not angry that Americans voted differently from how I would have liked. What I feel is apprehension about what lies ahead, rooted in experiences I cannot simply set aside. Having seen East Berlin and lived through the Iranian Revolution, I know how profoundly political systems can change and how easily freedoms once taken for granted can disappear. For much of my life, America represented the place to which people could flee when freedom disappeared elsewhere. But what happens if America itself ceases to be that place? Where will people go then?