Hans Sennholz, “How Communist Has America Become?” (1965)

Hans Sennholz’s essay builds on a Cold War-era semantic reversal. It does not argue that America has become a Soviet satellite; it argues that “communism,” as Marx and Engels used the term, described a policy program now partly lodged in American institutions. The Manifesto’s ten points supply his opening measure of comparison, and President Johnson’s Great Society appears as the contemporary agenda completing that trend.

most of the Communist Manifesto has been realized during the last third of a century

Sennholz therefore separates patriotism from political economy. American liberals, he concedes, may cherish civil rights, representative government, and national independence; they are not necessarily party Communists. But if they weaken property rights and endorse planning, they participate in the same institutional direction. His central distinction is between motive and mechanism: one may be anti-Soviet while still embracing collectivist instruments.

the economic objective — the planned economy — may be the same

The article’s second section moves from policy resemblance to philosophical affinity. Sennholz identifies “ontological materialism” as the common ground between Marxism and much modern liberal thought: the belief that material production drives social, political, and spiritual change. He reads W. W. Rostow’s stages of growth as a softer version of historical materialism, then turns to Alvin H. Hanson’s claim that capitalism has failed. For Sennholz, the liberal case against markets rests on a contradiction: factories, cities, technology, and transportation are achievements of the market order, not reasons to abolish it.

the market economy no longer works

This claim is, for him, the hinge of interventionism. Once liberals accept that capitalism naturally yields depression, exploitation, monopoly, and war, they can oppose Communism only inconsistently. Labor leaders, antitrust officials, and welfare-state economists become vulnerable because they share parts of the communist critique while rejecting its revolutionary conclusion.

How can you answer dialectical materialism if you yourself adhere to the tenets of materialism?

Section III explains the New Left as liberalism’s own offspring. Sennholz argues that “middle-of-the-road” intervention is unstable: it attacks the market, imposes controls, then worsens the very conditions it claims to cure, driving the more intelligent liberal toward a more consistent collectivism. Radicalism is thus not an external infection but the logical result of compromised anti-capitalism.

American "Liberalism" breeds its own radicalism because of its philosophical and political commitment to the causes of collectivism

The final section makes the essay’s documentary case. Sennholz shifts from youthful radicals to democratic socialists, especially Norman Thomas, to argue that the New Deal had already absorbed socialist “immediate demands” and stripped them of their socialist label. The Great Society then becomes his main exhibit. He places the 1964 Socialist Party platform beside Johnson-era policy: war on poverty, public works, low-cost housing, higher minimum wages, federal employment services, Appalachian development, expanded education, broader Social Security, and socialized medicine. The list is meant to show not coincidence but political inheritance.

“The reasoning behind this is that the welfare state has incorporated a great many socialist ‘immediate demands.’”

Sennholz presses the causal question directly. Since socialist programs long preceded the Great Society, he treats Johnson’s reforms as the latest stage in an older collectivist project. His attention to proposed public ownership of natural resources, utilities, communications, and the central banking system sharpens the warning: welfare policy is not merely redistribution but preparation for control over production and exchange.

What reasonable man can deny the affinity of the Socialist Party Platform and the programs of President Johnson's Great Society?

The work presents a mid-1960s conservative-libertarian critique of the welfare state. Its core conceptual moves are to restore the broader Marx-Engels meaning of communism, make property rights the test of liberty, treat planning as socialism’s institutional essence, and read moderation as a transitional form rather than a safeguard. Its argument depends on redescription: “liberal,” “moderate,” “socialist,” and “Great Society” become different public names for a single movement away from private property and toward state direction.

Socialism is making giant strides