Totalitarian Ideologies 101

We need to start teaching students to recognize totalitarianism so they can resist it.

Sheldon Bart | August 19, 2026

While we were looking the other way, it seemed, a new version of an old, toxic ideology drifted out of certain academic circles in Europe and into faculty lounges on this side of the Atlantic. In due course, it spread from the universities to K-12 schools. Now, a couple of generations later, candidates infected with the contagion have, with alarming frequency, been seeking and winning elections to municipal and state offices as well as the Congress of the United States.

Like the shapeshifters of science fiction, the scourge of communism has returned in a new and possibly more virulent guise, emphasizing race and gender rather than class. The ultimate goal remains the same—totalitarian control, this time around by the “woke” in place of the vanguard of the proletariat.

The equivalents of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin are with us today, in the committees of the Democratic Socialists of America and among the acolytes of Zohran Mamdani, biding their time. Given the clear and present danger, how can we protect ourselves and preserve our republic? And nothing less is at stake.

One thing we can and should do is inoculate the next generation against the contagion. Teaching civics is a good first step. But, in addition, every high school and college student should be required to take a course on totalitarian ideologies so they can recognize one when they see it.

Such a course would isolate the elements common to these ideologies and put them under a figurative microscope. Instructors today rely........

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