Last month, Karen and I welcomed our sixth grandchild — a beautiful baby girl — into our family and into the world. Looking into her big blue eyes, we are filled with an inexpressible joy for another precious gift from God.
But holding her in my arms also makes me think about the country she and all our grandchildren will inherit.
I remain profoundly optimistic about our nation’s future. America is still the freest and most prosperous nation in the history of the world. Yet I am deeply concerned by one troubling development: ideas that history once discredited are finding new life among young Americans and an increasingly influential place within today’s Democratic Party.
I was born in 1959, two years after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into orbit and the Cold War entered one of its most dangerous chapters. My generation grew up practicing duck-and-cover drills in case of nuclear attack while half of Europe lived behind the Iron Curtain. We understood that freedom was neither inevitable nor free.
I watched America meet the Soviet threat with courage and confidence. From President John F. Kennedy’s declaration that we would “pay any price” for liberty to President Ronald Reagan’s command that Mikhail Gorbachev “tear down this wall,” presidents of both parties understood the moral stakes of confronting communism.
Communism ultimately collapsed because it denied the most essential of truths: our rights come not from government, but from God. When government claims ultimate authority over the individual, freedom inevitably gives way to coercion.
Communism’s record of death and destruction is carved into human history.
Josef Stalin’s forced collectivization starved millions, while millions more met death in the Soviet gulags. Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward produced the deadliest famine in recorded history, killing some 50 million people.
Castro imprisoned dissidents while generations of Cubans fled in search of freedom.
Hugo Chávez transformed one of Latin America’s wealthiest countries into an unmitigated economic and humanitarian disaster. Today, Nicaragua’s Marxist dictator Daniel Ortega openly declares there will be “no more elections.”
This is the inevitable outcome of socialism. Yet, despite the clear lessons of history, socialism is finding an audience among the American Left.
Far-Left candidates are gaining ground, winning elections, and shaping the direction of the Democratic Party. Politicians who once would have been dismissed as ideological outliers are increasingly treated as the party’s rising stars. In New York City, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) standard-bearer and Mayor Zohran Mamdani has publicly endorsed “seizing the means of production.” In Michigan, Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed — backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — has the Democratic establishment on the ropes. Across the country, progressive candidates are aggressively challenging longtime Democratic incumbents, while many of the party’s traditional moderates have retreated, accommodated, or simply lost influence.
The success of these candidates has come from selling government as the cure for every hardship to a generation that never learned the truth about communism and socialism.
DSA’s national program, which declares capitalism a failure and states that “complete victory will require building a new society from the ground up,” promises a utopian socialist future without bills for “food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation.”
Of course, they conveniently omit that bills do not disappear. Government can pay them only by seizing the payment from someone else.
As government acquires the power to provide everything, it acquires the power to decide everything.
Conservatism begins with a different understanding. We believe every man, woman, and child is endowed by our Creator with rights that no government gave and no government may rightfully take away. Government exists to protect those rights, and to preserve the conditions for families, churches, communities, and free citizens to flourish.
That conviction has produced results no central planner could match. Free enterprise has lifted billions from poverty, unleashed innovation that has improved countless lives, and made America a beacon of hope for generations.
There is a bitter irony in socialism’s renewed appeal. America has been so successful that many young people can scarcely imagine the misery that would result from its absence. They never waited in a bread line, feared a knock on their door in the middle of the night, or wondered whether speaking their minds might cost them their freedom. They inherited liberty without having witnessed the price that previous generations paid to preserve it.
When I think about my newest grandchild, I pray she inherits an America where faith remains free, where honest work is rewarded, and where government remembers that it serves the American people — not the other way around.
My generation watched communism lose its claim on the world because free people stood firm against it. This generation must now show the same confidence in the enduring truths that made America exceptional.
If we do, our grandchildren will inherit not merely a more prosperous nation, but a freer one.
That is the inheritance they deserve. And it is our responsibility to preserve it.
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Mike Pence served as the 48th Vice President of the United States. He is founder of Advancing American Freedom and author of “What Conservatives Believe: Rediscovering the Conservative Conscience.”
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