What Kind of Commie Am I?

The Chris Abraham Show

I Am Whatever Kind of Commie Kurt Vonnegut Was

Am I a commie? Yes—but not the kind they warned you about. Not the doctrinaire type. Not the utopian. Not the bureaucrat. I don’t want to flatten everyone to the same mediocrity. I don’t want to abolish excellence, or demand purity tests, or see the world through the lens of enforcement and compliance. I believe in decency, not dogma. I believe no one should suffer for being poor. I believe cruelty should never be efficient. I believe dignity is a right, not a commodity. That’s the kind of commie I am—and that’s exactly the kind of commie Kurt Vonnegut was.

Vonnegut’s politics weren’t ideological in the party-platform sense. He was a moralist, a satirist, and a deeply wounded humanist. His experience in World War II, especially surviving the firebombing of Dresden, left him with a permanent allergy to patriotic lies and institutional violence. In fiction and in life, he exposed systems that grind people into pulp—and mocked the bureaucrats who call that “order.”

But satire was just the method. The message was always moral. And his lodestar was Eugene V. Debs: American socialist, labor organizer, and five-time presidential candidate, who was sentenced to ten years in prison for saying working men shouldn’t be forced to kill other working men for the benefit of bankers. Vonnegut quoted Debs constantly. Not as a nostalgic nod, but with spiritual seriousness. If Vonnegut ever built a shrine, Debs would have been on it. Not Marx. Not Lenin. Debs. The man who said, “While there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” That’s not just a line. That’s the whole faith.

I came to see myself that way slowly. I didn’t grow up red. I wasn’t raised a socialist. I grew up American—meaning I was taught to believe that if you worked hard and followed the rules, you’d be okay. Then I saw what happened to the people who did everything right and still got buried. I watched friends lose jobs, homes, and futures. I watched war after war justified by noble slogans. I watched the language of justice get captured, repackaged, and sold back to us by corporate consultants.

By 2016, something had snapped. I didn’t become pro-Trump. I became anti-anti-Trump. Because the people yelling loudest about decency and democracy didn’t seem to care about wages, rent, insulin, or war. They cared about manners. About terminology. About signaling their virtue, not exercising it. I didn’t see a populist Left—I saw a managerial class obsessed with optics and terrified of the poor.

What I believe has never changed: healthcare is a right. Housing is a right. War is obscene. Empire is a scam. People matter. The working class matters. We should measure a society not by its rhetoric but by how it treats the weakest person in the room. If your politics can’t start there, I don’t care what team you’re on. That’s not my Left. That’s not my communism.

My kind of communism says: feed the hungry, house the vulnerable, end the wars, tell the truth, and don’t pretend cruelty is neutral. That’s not ideology. That’s human decency.

So yes, I’m a commie. A Vonnegut commie. A Debs commie. A plainspoken, anti-cruelty, anti-bullshit, solidarity-over-slogans, material-reality-first kind of commie. I don’t want your revolution. I want your empathy. I want to make things less brutal, and I want to start now.

Amen.