Sandinista Jim Himes
In 1988 Harvard senior Jim Himes packed a notebook and flew to revolutionary Nicaragua. He returned with his honors thesis: The Sandinista Defense Committees and the Transformation of Political Culture in Nicaragua. Thirty-five years later Congressman Jim Himes voted NO when the House was asked to denounce the horrors of socialism.
| Socialism does not fail because it is poorly staffed. It fails because it requires a concentration of power that, sooner or later, treats the neighbor as an informant and the citizen as a problem to be managed. |
The Thesis
Harvard’s catalog lists the paper as a 1988 A.B. honors thesis by James Andrew Himes. He spent two months in Nicaragua studying the Comités de Defensa Sandinista — the CDS — block committees built by the Sandinista Front after it took power in 1979.
The Front had promised political pluralism, a mixed economy, and non-alignment. After Somoza fell, the moderates were pushed aside. The Sandinistas kept the army and the police. The CDS filled the neighborhoods. On paper they ran literacy drives and food distribution. In practice they watched the block. Neighbors were rewarded for reporting neighbors. Many of Himes’ interview subjects asked to remain anonymous. Why anonymous? It is how people talk when their neighbors can punish them.
Read the thesis, Part 1 (PDF) · Part 2 (PDF)
What Happened Next
Daniel Ortega led the Sandinistas then. He leads Nicaragua now. In March 2022, Alma Guillermo Prieto wrote in The New Yorker that Ortega and Rosario Murillo had crushed civil society and jailed their former comrades. The title was “The Revolution Eats Itself in Nicaragua.”
Hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans have left. Recent counts put about 13 percent of the population living abroad; the outflow sped up after the 2018 crackdown. Nicaraguans who reached the United States often still will not speak on the record. They have relatives at home. Independent surveys in the Ortega years find that most people feel watched in their own streets. The heirs of the CDS still run that system.
The pattern is clear. Socialism promises equality while delivering a monopoly of force. Once the party owns the army, the police, the food line, and the neighborhood list, opposition disappears.
The Vote
On February 2, 2023, the House considered H. Con. Res. 9, “Denouncing the horrors of socialism.” It said socialist ideology “necessitates a concentration of power that has time and time again collapsed into Communist regimes, totalitarian rule, and brutal dictatorships.” It named the dictators, including Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, the Kims, Daniel Ortega, Hugo Chávez, and Nicolás Maduro. It named the crimes that have driven so many Latinos to the United States, and the death toll; more than 100 million. It resolved that Congress denounces socialism in all its forms and opposes socialist policies in the United States.
The resolution passed 328–86, with 14 members voting present. Every Republican who voted, voted yes. A majority of voting Democrats joined them. Jim Himes voted Nay. He declined to state that the system which produced Ortega, Castro, and Maduro is a horror.
Celebrated by Communists and Socialists
When Himes beat Republican Chris Shays in 2008, the Communist Party USA’s paper did not treat it as a loss. People’s Weekly World reported on the Party’s New Haven anniversary gathering that December: “Folks pounded the pavement in Bridgeport, Conn., to defeat the last standing congressional Republican, Chris Shays. His replacement, newly elected Jim Himes, is vowing to take the people’s agenda forward.” That is their sentence, not his. Connecticut’s Working Families Party put him on a fusion line. The socialist Council for a Livable World contributed to the race. While not proving secret party membership, it does show that the organized left saw Himes as a man it could live with.
Why It Matters Here
“Democratic socialism” is not Nordic socialism. Nordic social democracy is a market economy with a large welfare state, sitting on the cultural capital of high-trust, high-work societies. Classical socialism is something else: public ownership of the commanding heights, political monopoly justified as class justice, and the systematic weakening of the private associations that stand between the citizen and the party. It is how the plan is enforced. You can only plan a society if you can see the building blocks of society — the people. You can only see those blocks if someone is reporting on those blocks.
Fairfield County is not Managua. It is one of the most successful capitalist landscapes on earth — property rights, open trade, and the rule that a family’s house is not the party’s business. Himes does not have to nationalize a bank to do damage. He only has to keep protecting socialism.
That 1988 Harvard student gets credit for actually going to see a revolution instead of only talking about one. The congressman has had four decades to watch Ortega jail old comrades and empty the country. He has had Nicaraguans living among us who will not use their names. He had a resolution that asked only for moral clarity. He voted no. Ideas travel farther than armies. The least a member of Congress can do is vote as if he noticed.
Dr. Michael Goldstein is running against Sandinista Jim. He is a strong Republican who understands the danger of socialism and its inevitable slide into communism. That is why he is committed to preserving the freedom and liberty promised in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Connecticut is worth fighting for. America is worth fighting for. Support Republican candidates.
