One of the greatest mistakes ever made was to think that Communism had died with the fall of the USSR. Whittaker Chambers said that Communism will never die because it is a religion; rationally, there is no basis for it and it obviously has not and can never succeed. But that’s not what its true believers are looking for, and they have made the decision to believe it and work for it without ceasing.
One of the reasons Communism has gotten so far so fast in the last few years is that people stopped acknowledging that it still existed.
I believe that communism and slavery triumphed in the cold war, rather than freedom and capitalism. What the communists changed is that they abandoned Stalinism (the Third International) and accepted a hybrid version of Troktskyism (the Fourth International). Also, they co-opted modern advertising and persuasion techniques.