It gets crushed by the military and general population. Reform is the best and only option.

The United States is not trembling on the precipice of a communist revolution.

Uncle Sam commands the most powerful military in human history, and its rank-and-file exhibit few socialistic sympathies; U.S. precincts with military bases America’s civilian security forces — which is to say its roughly 665,000 police officers — are . Our nation’s most heavily armed private citizens, meanwhile, would by and large prefer a Hobbesian war of all against all to a Marxist government. Should America’s constitutional order ever give way to an extralegal power struggle, an overwhelming force of arms will be arrayed against the radical left.

If those contras would have superior firepower, they would also (almost certainly) have more popular support. Some 73 percent of U.S. voters identify . There is  about what voters mean when they choose such labels. But it seems safe to say that very few self-identified moderates intend to convey their support for a revolution to establish , but not anarcho-communism.

In fact, the U.S. electorate evinces a . When federal policy moves left on a given issue, public opinion tends to move right in response, and vice versa. Support for universal health care after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, while support for abortion rights  after the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

This fondness for stasis can’t be written off as false consciousness alone. America’s political economy condemns a minority of its population to unremunerative labor and/or penury. And our nation’s  bespeaks its profound social pathologies. Nevertheless, median real household income in the U.S. is about as high as it has ever been, having risen . That leaves the typical U.S. family more prosperous, at least by one plausible measure, than on the planet today (and 99-plus percent of all who have ever existed).

The most damning feature of the present economic order may be the threat it poses to Earth’s climate and ecosystems. And climate change does inspire public concern. But in a 2022  voters were nearly twice as likely to name “gas prices” as a top priority as they were to name any subject related to climate or the environment. This finding is consistent with the U.S. public’s broader political behavior. Much of the country consistently supports a party that is actively hostile to decarbonization. In blue America, meanwhile, voters have repeatedly , while self-avowed climate hawks have prioritized their , , and “over reducing carbon emissions.

In other words, the small minority of Americans who say decarbonization is their top political goal won’t reliably sacrifice their sentimental attachment to a particular piece of nature in service of that cause. It is therefore unlikely that they are prepared to sacrifice all the consolations of political stability — and/or their very lives — in support of an ecosocialist insurrection.

Given these realities, intraleft debates over revolutionary versus “reformist” theories of change always strike me as anachronistic cosplay, a bit like model U.N. for enthusiasts of the late-19th-century Social Democratic Party of Germany. Whether one is a stalwart communist or a squishy social democrat (like myself), the fundamental political task seems the same: to narrow the gap between utopia and reality through legislative reforms. Ideally, these reforms would also ease the path to more thoroughgoing progress by, say, strengthening the labor movement or other left-wing institutions. Extra-electoral political activity — from community organizing to civil disobedience to strikes — may be integral to securing such policy advances.

The basic project, however, is to minimize needless suffering within the constraints imposed by the existing constitutional order and political economy while simultaneously chipping away at those constraints. Any attempt to abruptly circumvent those strictures by challenging the government’s monopoly on violence will run into the buzz saw of the modern security state or the overwhelmingly counterrevolutionary sentiments of a prosperous and propertied American middle-class.

But some on the left disagree. Or at least they argue as if they do.

Such leftists disparage efforts to advance progressive goals through incremental reform on the grounds that doing so will not  or overcome that . Their rhetoric implies that some alternative, easily discerned course of action would meet that Herculean standard. But they rarely bother to specify their program in any detail, let alone subject it to the same scrutiny that they apply to proposals for reform.

One problem with such ultraleftism is that it is annoying. Another, more significant one is that the compulsion to denigrate the stakes of ordinary politics and the merits of actual reforms tends to blur the analytic vision of otherwise insightful intellectuals. There is value in understanding how our economy’s undergirding logic might circumscribe or subvert particular avenues of reform. Inattention to such dynamics can undermine policy design. Dyspeptic Marxist intellectuals can therefore serve as useful critics even if they wish to keep mundane “bourgeois” politics at arm’s length. If such thinkers allow their antipathy for reformists to distort their comprehension of reality, however, they lose their utility.