The new hotness – or just old and busted?

Wrote this 5 years ago, but since the New York Times cheered Marx’s birthday yeaterday, I figured May Day 2018 was a good time to re-post it!

The left thinks that they are winning…and they are – in the sense that Charlie Sheen was “winning” as he lost his mind and immersed himself in drugs and hookers a while back. For an ideology that has been incredibly patient over the past 100 years while insinuating itself millimeter by millimeter into American society, Obama’s re-election now has it swinging for the fences. The evidence is in Obama’s “progressive” inauguration speech – he’s taken off the transparent mask now and is out in the open.

The “progressive” movement thinks that is has integrated itself into the American republic to the point that it now has a patina of legitimacy on its skin. It now seems to think that it is also safe to come out of the shadows and for the first time in a very long time, the discredited philosophy of Marxism is attempting to go mainstream. Hardly a surprising trend given the exalted status good old Karl is seeing through puff pieces like this in the New York Times: “A Young Publisher Takes Marx Into the Mainstream” and this from the Guardian in the UK: “Why the ideas of Karl Marx are more relevant than ever in the 21st century”.

Stacey McCain notes that it doesn’t take much to get glowing praise in the NYT as long as you are a Bolshevik. The Jacobin website gets an “estimated” 250,000 views a month – little ole TRNL gets around 160,000 a month, The Other McCain over 300,000 a month and Ace of Spades HQ gets over 300,000 a day – and yet none of us have never had a puff piece in any major outlet, much less the Times or the Guardian. For the record, the Guardian is a leftist rag and the New York Times is the home of communist China loving Tom Friedman (a theater critic turned political expert), Malthusian economist Paul Krugman and to add icing on the cake – was home to the noted Pulitzer Prize winning Soviet apologist, Walter Duranty, who covered up Stalin’s “man-caused disaster” famine in the Ukraine and the forced resettlement of the Ukrainian people as punishment for dissent.

The arrogance of Obama and his retinue has caused the “progressive” movement to believe that this is the end of its opposition – but this appears to be less of a national consensus and more of an urban phenomenon. Marxism plays well in cities and universities where people are forced to live in a bubble and count on collective services for things like sanitation, security and transportation – but this is driven due to population density, not to ideological superiority. What works in New York City does not work in small town America or the vast majority of the suburban and rural areas of the US. That is why collective policies like those of “gun control” may make some sense in urban centers but will never be accepted in the South, the Midwest or the west in states like Utah, Montana or Wyoming – because they just do not make sense there.

It is sort of paradoxical that Marx’s initial thoughts on social and political order were cast against a backdrop of labor in an agrarian society versus the concentration of power brought about by factories and industrialization and yet today, those adopting Marxism are espousing the superiority of the concentrated power of the organized state against the independence exemplified in rural areas of America. The “180 Degree Rule” is in full effect.

Yet to listen to the “unbiased” punditry crow in unified orgasmic approval about Chairman Maobama’s collectivist paradise and then deign to offer unsolicited advice to the Republican Party (and the conservatives in it) is a little hard to take. They do so even as they shed crocodile tears over the demise of conservatism, so it would be easy to feel overwhelmed, just accept it and give up.

But we can’t – and we can’t for one simple reason.

We actually can destroy them. Their arrogance is the key to their demise. Their overreach is the fatal flaw.

Proverbs Chapter 16, verse 18 says: “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”

Marxism, for all the “My Little Pony” treatment it is getting, is inexorably and historically linked to autocracy, tyranny, repression and deprivation. While voluntary collectivism does work – people selectively band together all the time to solve problems of mutual concern – Socialism, Marxism and communism have never existed in the history of the world without authoritarian rule and that is something in direct contradiction to the very reasons for the founding of America.

It seems that we can never have a conversation about the right spectrum of politics without invoking the evils of fascism, Nazism, nationalism or anarchy…but if that can be considered a valid methodology, when we speak of the left, we must also discuss how Chairman Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” killed over 45 million Chinese in less than four years and how Stalin killed an estimated 7-10 million Ukrainians in the Holodomor (the Great Famine) in one year (1932/1933).

Somehow, I doubt that all these people went to their deaths by choice for the glory of the state – and there is no way a totalitarian leader starves or kills 55 million people if those people have a means to protect themselves, i.e. guns. Perhaps the best window to this idiocy is presented by Friedrich A. Hayek in his seminal works The Road to Serfdom (published in 1944) and Individualism and Economic Order (published in 1948). Hayek witnessed in real time the rise of collectivism in England in the post-WWII years and his conclusions have proven uncannily accurate in the 68 years hence.

I believe that we should grant the arrogant Marxist elites their wish.

Marxism does deserve a second look.

And if we do it right, that second look will guarantee its destruction.