In a recent issue of COMMENTARY, the journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum proposed an intriguing theory to explain why there remains even a shred of doubt about Vladimir Putin’s destructive goals and methods. Over a generation has passed since the Soviet Union’s crimson banner was furled forever, she noted. Soviet society, its geopolitical objectives, and the zero-sum competition that defined the Cold War are today faint memories. More importantly, living recollections of the institution in which Putin spent his formative years, the KGB, has faded from Western consciousness. Applebaum postulated that this “great forgetting,” as she dubbed it, is accompanied by a sort of perverse nostalgia for the communist world’s grim architecture, its colorless streets bereft of oppressive commercialism, and even its politics. The most notable example of this phenomenon was the ascension of the barely reconstructed Marxist, Jeremy Corbyn, to lead the Labour Party in Britain. The United Kingdom isn’t the only victorious power in the Cold War that is flirting with the rehabilitation of ideals it vanquished in the greatest ideological struggle of the 20th Century.

A septuagenarian Brooklynite from the hinterlands of Vermont seems an odd avatar for the perpetual angst of youth, a demographic that has always been fond of the idea that paradise on earth can be purchased with other people’s money. Bernie Sanders, a perennial backbencher in the Senate, would have likely remained obscure but for Hillary Clinton’s uninspiring candidacy. That does not give American political analysts license to dismiss what Sanders represents. The self-described democratic socialist is on a mission to revitalize the kind of communitarianism that was discredited in the United States with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Democrats of all ages, polls suggest, are today friendlier toward socialism than capitalism. As Reason Magazine pollster Emily Ekins discovered, however, the demographic most amenable toward the socialist program, millennial voters, really don’t know what it is. The young are the vanguard of Applebaum’s “great forgetting.”

Ekins offered a bit of solace for the fretful when she observed that support for socialism peaks in college. Conservatives should resist the temptation to wag fingers at the younger generation’s inclination to toy with Soviet ideas. Increasingly, it is their movement that finds itself seduced by the appeal of another value once cherished in the Kremlin and exported out of Moscow to every corner of the globe: the corrosive notion of class consciousness.

An internecine feud within the conservative movement, loudly and assertively defined by its instigators as that of one class against another, is not a particularly new phenomenon. The great divide in American politics on both sides of the aisle has for decades, if not centuries, been characterized by the squabble between urban cosmopolitans and rural traditionalists. Until recently, the factional struggle within the conservative movement was only occasionally typified by often subtle notes of class struggle. It was only four years ago that it seemed as though conservatives had wholly rejected classism. Making a virtue of the base vice envy was a tactic embraced almost exclusively by Democrats in 2012 and was, thus, rejected by their Republican counterparts. The president’s reelection team bombarded the economically anxious white working-class voter with messaging designed to reinforce the notion that Mitt Romney — a “vulture capitalist” with multiple homes and even a car elevator — was incapable of understanding or caring about their lot in life.

In general, Republicans rejected this message even if Americans as a whole did not. “Conflict between rich and poor now eclipses racial strain and friction between immigrants and the native-born as the greatest source of tension in American society,” the New York Times reported at the dawn of 2012. A Democratic president, who perversely weaponized the adverse conditions over which he had presided, nurtured this nagging sense of grievance. This bitterness was reinforced by the self-evident reality that the vaunted “recovery” was, for them, imperceptible. They knew that their struggles were alien to Americans at the upper end of the income spectrum, and they resented it. Four long years later, the perception that the benefits of the recovery are not being equally felt remains as potent as ever. Even self-described Republicans are starting to succumb to the allure of class consciousness.

Anyone who argues politics for a living invariably encounters the conservative insurgent voter for whom argumentation is nowhere near as compelling as biographical authenticity. This proto-Marxian sort of suspicion of intellectualism is typical on the left, but it was once a rarely observed condition on the right. It is a predisposition that invalidates reasoned claims based only on the subjectively assessed biases of the individual making the argument. It is a point of view that accuses those with whom it is in conflict of rank prejudice or snobbery. It presumes that there cannot be genuine disagreement over issues and that all of one’s critics are, at best, the pitiable representatives of a lumpenproletariat that “just doesn’t get it.” This manner of tribalism on the right is, at the moment, most often observed in supporters of Donald Trump, against whom any argument is viewed as an admission of allegiance to a suspect group of counterrevolutionary coastal elites. “If this column — and others like it — come to inspire no more refined response than, ‘well you would say that because you belong to your group,’ then reasoned argument will be buried, never to be heard from again,” warned National Review’s Charles Cooke, denouncing this predilection among the celebrity presidential candidate’s supporters.

There is a segment of the conservative commentariat that is beside itself over the Republican Party’s refusal to heed the red flags flown by campaigns like those of Mike Huckabee in 2008, Rick Santorum in 2012, and, today, Donald Trump. Theirs is a brand of populism that appeals to a voting demographic that does not feel it has a home in either major American political party. These commentators fret that, unless the GOP develops a working-class agenda, the party will tear itself apart. Surely, any nationally viable American political institution cannot afford to write off vast swaths of the electorate.But it would be equally destructive to validate toxic class consciousness as a noble political value. That is a philosophy rooted in bitterness and jealousy. After conservative elected leaders have delivered blow after resounding blow to the labor movement, it would be a tragedy for conservative voters to resurrect its most effective weapon.

For all the time pundits and voters alike spend bemoaning the lengthy campaign cycle in the United States, there is a lot to say in its favor. Its chief benefit might be to force partisans to make the same arguments repeatedly and to a point at which they become distilled and refined into their most basic form. With the first votes about to be cast, the central source of division within the Republican electorate is becoming clear. It isn’t immigration or foreign policy that is so fracturing the Republican Party, but that deadly element exported in quantity by the COMINTERN so many decades ago: class division. Like so much about the international communist movement, we have forgotten how dangerous that stuff is. It looks like we will have to relearn that lesson the hard way.