I spent years studying American communism. Here’s what I learned | Maurice Isserman

I was struck by the mystery of why so many intelligent and admirable people remained so loyal for so long to a fundamentally flawed movement

I'll leave it to future historians to puzzle out the reasons why, but in the second decade of the 21st century, in the unlikely setting of the most thoroughly capitalist country in world history, large numbers of Americans, mostly young, displayed a new interest in socialist ideas, values and policy proposals, and in turn in the often neglected history of socialism and communism in the United States.

Having written three books early in my scholarly career dealing with one or another aspect of the tangled history of American communism, the last appearing in 1990, I figured I'd said all I had to say on the subject, and turned to other topics. Enough time had passed by the time of the 2010s socialist revival that the several score ageing communists and ex-communists whom I'd interviewed for my early books were now long dead.

Maurice Isserman teaches history at Hamilton College. His most recent book is Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism