On the surface, Donald Trump’s Secretary of State and the disgruntled ex-staffers and consultants who circulate around groups like Third Way and the Democratic Leadership Council’s old network would seem to have nothing in common.
Rubio wants Cuba’s government overthrown and its assets sold off to the highest bidder. The centrist Democrats mostly just want their party to stop nominating people who sound like Bernie Sanders. But watch what each camp has done in the last few weeks, and there’s a certain family resemblance that becomes hard to miss.
Both are waging war on the same thing: the growing appeal of socialism and the working-class political movement that keeps gravitating toward it.
Start with the State Department. On July 20, Rubio released a 100-page report titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” accusing the government in Havana of a seven-decade campaign of “espionage and subversion” that has supposedly infiltrated the “highest reaches” of the U.S. government and helped grow a “wave” of left-wing terrorism in the U.S. Rubio declared that for years “the Cuban regime has been the leading sponsor of radical leftism and Third Worldism in the United States.”
Everything from the national uprising following the killing of George Floyd to anti-ICE demonstrations to Gaza solidarity actions “can be linked, in some way, shape, or form, to Cuban influence,” according to the report. It rehashes old tropes that anything progressive or which challenges the status quo is a communist plot—be it Black liberation, civil rights, fighting for peace, or demanding cuts to military spending.
The document is not serious political analysis; it is the opening argument in a case for regime change, one Rubio has made explicit before: Removing Cuba’s government is his stated precondition for lifting the U.S. blockade under the Helms-Burton Act. The attack lands at a time when Cuba is already under intense pressure. Just weeks ago, Cuba’s National Assembly approved emergency market reforms to its socialist model in an effort to survive an oil blockade that has left the island in the dark and short of food, fuel, and medicine.
It’s not just MAGA’s foreign policy that’s targeting socialists, their domestic agenda is, too. The anti-Cuba broadside comes from the same administration that has spent the summer making “communism” its top midterm election message, with Trump telling reporters that progressives “use the word social democrat because it sounds so nice, but it’s really communism you’re talking about,” and Speaker Mike Johnson warning that “mini-Mamdanis” threaten to take the country “down this dark road of death to communism.”
It’s the propaganda operation that gave us Trump’s Mount Rushmore declaration that Americans must choose between loyalty to “Karl Marx” and loyalty to their country, and his Independence Day comparison of communism to a cancer that has to be “cut out fast.”
Domestic red-baiting and the drive to strangle Cuban socialism are two tracks of a single strategy: Blunt the rising appeal of the left at home while making sure there is no living, breathing example of socialism abroad.
Meanwhile, a second front against socialism has opened up, and this one runs straight through the Democratic Party’s own donor and consultant apparatus. As candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America keep winning primaries, most recently in New York and Colorado, and DSA’s own membership passed 120,000 on Independence Day, the reaction from party centrists has not been to ask why voters are moving left. Instead, they want to call the exterminator.
Democratic Party strategist and former Andrew Cuomo chief of staff Melissa DeRosa called socialist candidates “parasites” who “cannot win on their own by creating their own party” and are trying to “latch onto the Democratic Party and feed off of it, with the overall goal of taking it over and killing it.”
Jamie Metzl, a Clinton-era official, went further. Appearing before a conservative audience on Fox and Friends, he told Democratic leaders that DSA is “a radical extremist movement trying to take over the Democratic Party” that wants to “seize the means of production” and “eradicate police and prisons.” Sounding like Trump on the Fourth of July, Metzl said socialists are “dangerous extremist radicals who are against American democracy.”
Notice what is missing from both complaints: any acknowledgment that the DSA candidates won. Voters chose them, in contested primaries, over establishment favorites. What DeRosa and Metzl are describing as a hostile takeover is, in plain terms, democracy functioning as designed, despite the distorting role played by big money. It’s an instinct People’s World has tracked before in the “anybody but Bernie” crowd and in Third Way’s advice that Democrats should become more like Republicans.
This is the faction of the Democratic Party whose supporters are often eager to blame the “sectarian left,” or Marxists, or democratic socialists for supposedly jeopardizing unity and opening the path for Republican victories with demands too detached from reality. That’s certainly been the case at times, but when ideas like taxing the rich or terminating support for the genocidal war in Gaza start becoming majority opinion, it’s the big business Dems who are the ones willing to lose an election rather than let the left grow.
The numbers make the case. A March survey carried out by Fox News found that 49% of all voters, including 72% of Democrats and 60% of independents, agree that capitalism is working “not very well” or “not at all.” A Marquette Law School poll found that DSA holds higher favorability ratings than most sitting congressional Democrats. And national polls again and again show that cost of living and affordability issues—the bread and butter of left politics and platforms—are the most important topics for people in this country.
None of this squares with the “parasite” narrative. It looks more like a corporate-linked establishment that would rather ignore or manage public preferences for progressive policies than accept them.
Third Way—whose ideological ancestors include the old DLC, which urged Bill Clinton to run from the right in the 1990s on themes like “welfare reform” and “reinventing government”—last year counseled Democrats to stop “demonizing wealth and corporations” and to shrink the influence of small donors relative to bigger ones.
And rather than challenge the open racism and white supremacy peddled by the GOP, they urged universities to “prioritize respectful, constructive dialogue among students and faculty with diverse ideological perspectives to lower the temperature around anti-DEI sentiment.”
Columnist James Kirchick, writing for The Atlantic, is urging Democrats to “reach back into their own history, to the early years of the Cold War,” when leftists were purged from mainstream politics in the U.S. Encouraging nothing less than a McCarthyite witch-hunt with a liberal bent, Kirchick said the Democratic Party must prohibit socialists from joining and throw out those “already honeycombed within it.”
The threat that all these Democrats are organizing against is not Trump; it is their own voters.
That’s the point worth taking in. MAGA Republicans and corporate Democrats are not converging on anti-socialism by accident. Trump and Rubio’s dual-track anti-communism serves an empire that wants Cuba’s resources and a domestic order free of a serious left opposition. The centrist Democrats’ war on their own left flank, meanwhile, serves a donor base that wants the party safely tethered to Wall Street and unbothered by demands for Medicare for All, stronger unions, or higher taxes on the wealthy.
But both wars share a common enemy: a working-class politics that questions who owns things and who decides. Socialism, or even some milder form of social democracy, poses a danger to corporate power and the comfortable arrangement both parties’ establishments have with it.
Whether it is Rubio drafting the case for regime change in Havana or a Clinton-era operative demanding Hakeem Jeffries crack down on DSA, the message is the same: The threat isn’t fascism, it’s the growing belief among ordinary people that there might be a better way to organize society and the economy.
MAGA and the corporate wing of the Democratic Party are, in this narrow but crucial sense, on the same side. Recognizing that is a step toward building a movement neither of them can stop.
As with all People’s World opinion articles, the views expressed here are those of the author.
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