Western views on communism.

Growing up in Canada, I’ve spent most of my life consuming media that critiques and opposes communism.

After watching a New York Times documentary on the January 6th Capitol riots, I began thinking about how extreme political polarization in the United States reached this point and why radical economic and political views spark such strong reactions.

To better understand this, we first need to define what it means to be American. At its core, the American identity is built on individualism and “The American Dream”; it’s the belief that through hard work, anyone can own land, start a business, and keep everything they’ve earned through their own blood, sweat, and tears.

This makes sense; it’s a great incentive to fuel a country and stimulate economic growth. Moreover, from an individual’s perspective, if you work hard, what you work for is your private property to keep. This right to own property and assets is viewed as a sacred freedom.

Traditional communism directly opposes this by doing away with private property and favouring collective ownership, meaning everything you work for is owned by everyone.

You can see the appeal of this collective mindset on a micro scale; think of a standard family dynamic. Parents provide income and labor while children receive support regardless of their economic output; in the end, everyone is still happy, parents live a fruitful and rewarding life while children grow up to become contributing members of society. It all works out.

However, from another lens, this “what’s yours is mine” system is a direct attack on the American identity of individualism and personal freedoms. For anyone who firmly believes in that mindset, the rule is simple: you work hard for what you get, no free-riding.

The Cold War also played an important role in villainizing communism. During the 1950s, many US policymakers feared the infiltration of Soviet Union communist spies. This led to many campaigns (McCarthyism) of political repression and unfair investigations of people accused of being communists.

This created an atmosphere of forced conformity where many people (actors, writers, government workers, etc.) were afraid to speak out for fear of being blacklisted. This idea that communism was the ultimate villain and that just talking about it could ruin your life existed for so long and forced such social conformity that even to this day, it is framed as the antagonist in Western narratives.

While I am not here to express my beliefs on where I sit on the economic scale (Capitalism vs. Communism) or the political spectrum (Democracy vs. Authoritarianism), I wanted to explore why anti-communist sentiment remains such a deeply rooted reaction across North America.

References

Martin, R. (2026) Red Scare, Britannica.com. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Red-Scare-politics.

The New York Times (2021) Day of rage: How trump supporters took the U.s. capitol | visual investigations. Youtube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWJVMoe7OY0