Classroom Discussion Guide for The Red New Deal
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Classroom Discussion Guide for The Red New Deal
Use this classroom discussion guide to help students engage with The Red New Deal and its first-hand account of life under real-world socialism in the USSR. The book raises questions about shortages, control, and restrictions, and how similar ideas appear today in modern democracies.
The prompts in this guide focus on themes such as censorship, “cancel culture,” and who controls public debate. They are designed to support structured, critical conversations about freedom, responsibility, and political power, rather than to endorse any single political position.
In brief
- Focus discussion on how The Red New Deal portrays censorship, “thought police,” and the treatment of people who question official narratives, policies, or fashionable ideologies.
- Invite students to analyze examples in the book, such as stories about shortages, propaganda, and everyday restrictions in the USSR, and how the author connects them to current debates about socialism and “free” benefits.
- Use the guide to connect classroom conversation to broader themes in the book, including government power, media influence, and the tension between promises of security or free services and the cost to personal freedom.
What to do
This guide centers on the book’s claim that nothing is truly free and that questioning dominant narratives serves the public good, even on sensitive topics. The Red New Deal contrasts official promises of equality and abundance under socialism with lived experiences of control, fear, and scarcity, and argues that silencing critics hides the real cost of those promises.
Classroom prompts can ask students to examine how the book describes media, party officials, and ideological enforcers who, in the author’s view, shape what can and cannot be said. For example, the text contrasts confident slogans about a bright socialist future with later recognition of failures, and asks whether people who raised doubts were treated as enemies instead of being heard.
You can also guide students to connect these arguments to moments of crisis and conflict described in the book, including national tragedies, disputed elections, and culture-war battles. Discussion can explore how suppressing questions, rewriting history, or cheering for another country’s misfortune is presented as evidence of deeper tensions about power, justice, and national identity.
What to keep in mind
The Red New Deal takes a critical stance toward socialism, communism, and what it calls woke ideology in schools and public life. It contrasts government-centered models of education and propaganda in the Soviet Union with parents’ resistance to feeling they are “co-parenting” with the state today, and links these concerns to recent electoral outcomes and policy debates.
The book also discusses fundamentals of government, drawing on ideas like Hobbes’ Leviathan to describe the state as a protector that imposes taxes to fund armies, police, courts, and jails. It notes that when disorder becomes unbearable, people may accept autocratic or extremist regimes, suggesting that predictable control can seem preferable to chaos, but at a high cost to individual freedom.
Because the text is explicitly critical of certain political figures, media outlets, and ideologies, this guide is best suited for classrooms prepared to handle strong viewpoints. Instructors may wish to frame activities as analysis of the author’s arguments and evidence, encouraging students to distinguish between description, opinion, and broader claims about freedom, security, and the role of government in people’s daily lives.