It should be apparent by now that Communism never died. The Soviet Union died. Being a Communist, or a neocommunist, is not an intellectual anachronism at all — it is quite the fashion in the academy and our other institutions. Does Charles not realize, for example, that Obama’s friend Bill Ayers — who proudly calls himself “a small ‘c’ communist” — was in 2008 elected vice president for curriculum of the American Education Research Association, the nation’s largest organization of education professors and researchers? (See Sol Stern’s profile of Ayers and education, here). I’m not sure “pathetic” is the right word, but what is a perilous intellectual anachronism is the belief that the communist threat ended 18 years ago.
The Jones incident, moreover, does not indicate that “we had a communist in the U.S. government.” To the contrary, as I argued last night, we have a U.S. government in which Van Jones was quite consciously selected because his views are representative of the president who made him the “green jobs czar.” Van Jones isn’t Alger Hiss. There’s nothing covert about him. He didn’t snooker Obama into bringing him aboard. He is who he is, and that’s why Obama wanted him. Having a Communist in that job was perfect since the “green jobs” initiative is an important part of the hard Left’s agenda to use environmentalism as an additional justification for usurping command of the economy.
In fact, the death of the Soviet Union has actually been a boon for neocommunists. Now, Obama and his fellow travelers like Jones, Ayers, Wright, Klonsky, and ACORN, can spout all the same totalitarian, anti-American, central-planning ideas the hard Left has always pushed, but in the abstract — under such mushy labels as “social justice” and “green jobs.” That is, they are liberated from having to defend the Soviet Empire, which, until 1991, was a living, breathing, concrete example of how horrific these ideas are when put in practice.
Yes, the superficially attractive (to those unfamiliar with human nature or economics) but ultimately disastrous idea lives on in the academy, and now in Washington. And our wonderful media, of course, thinks it’s no big deal, or are even attracted to it, not recognizing it for what it is.
Geez Rand, corn ethanol subsidies are hardly collectivization of agriculture, turning everything into kolkhozs. That stupid idea has been around for several goverments, democratic and conservative. It is just a misguided farm subsidy. Here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005
Communism long ago became a vehicle for the misanthropes and sociopaths (is that redundant?) to seize power and destroy others.
It remains a vehicle for the totalitarian impulse in humans. If it didn’t exist, some other set of benificent claims would camoflage the totalitarian impulse.
The Tempter comes in the clothes of an Angel.
What makes you think the MSM doesn’t recognize the nature of Communism? I suspect, rather, that they think they’ll be the commissars. No one ever imagines themselves on the receiving end of their own social reforms.
But but it always seemed to worked in Star Trek.
What’s great about communism for its adherents is that because it’s an ideal, it can never be refuted in practice. The USSR? Cambodia? North Korea? Not failures of communism, because they were never truly communist, at least not in the minds of the fervent follower. Somehow they deviated, became degenerate shadows of what the true believer knows that real communism would be like if it were really tried somewhere. Never mind that Hayek argued very persuasively that every attempt at communism will always end up following this same path, with idealism crushed either metaphorically or occasionally very literally; tank treads being a favoured means for the latter.
I fear we’ll be fighting this scourge until the end of time. Hubris and ego are such that the world will always be full of people who are certain, down to the very fiber of their being, that they could right all the wrongs and fix all of the injustices if only they were given the power to do so. And even when those people actually do have the best of intentions and the purest of light beams out of them when they speak and they gently persuade the masses to cheerfully surrender their freedoms to the greater good–those people are the first ones to be disposed of by those who come after, the Stalins and the Pol Pots and the Kim Il Sungs. The idealist draws in and centralizes and concentrates power, and that same power attracts the bloody-minded sociopaths who lust not for peace and social justice, but for tyrannical control over others and endless self-aggrandizement.
I don’t lose sleep over Barack Obama as such. I think he believes his own BS at the end of the day. I think he really wants to be the prophet/messiah that the MSM built up during his campaign. I think that he thinks of himself as a good and just and wise man. What I worry about is what comes after. Four or eight years of more power to the federal level of government, and an ever-smaller sphere allowed to the private citizen. More and more authority delegated to anonymous, unaccountable bureaucrats. And then who comes next? What kind of person will look at all of that power in one place, and want it all for themselves? What will they be willing to do for that power? What lies will they tell without a trace of guilt? What arms will they twist, what deals will they broker to secure their position at the center of that web?
“What kind of person will look at all of that power in one place, and want it all for themselves? What will they be willing to do for that power? What lies will they tell without a trace of guilt? What arms will they twist, what deals will they broker to secure their position at the center of that web?”
For all you Heinlein readers out there, the scary thing is that person might be Nehemiah Scudder.
Considering how marxism has done in the real world, it’s about time that the academy was held responsible as to it’s relevance to same. It was the first institution the new left marxists began their “long march” through and has greased the path for all the others, including the culture.
If/when another transformative President ala Reagan takes office, I would hope his first order of business would be “reforming” the educational system to be sure it inculcates the tenants of a free society, as opposed to acting as a tax payer supported indoctrination center and think tank for the gramscian left.
Mr, Lagasse, I agree with you. Once established, a theocratic dictatorship might take centuries to remove. Unfortunately for everyone else, one of the places in which Mr. Scudder might arise is the USA. For example, of Western countries the only one ever to have had laws against the teaching of evolution is the USA.
Fletcher, theocracy and fascism have something very much in common: both are always “descending on” America yet somehow never arrive.
…at least, that was true until 2008.
Gah, the eeevil Christians.
Fletcher, you DESERVE Obama.
[libtard] No, we lived under a theocracy during the GWB years — Obama was our messiah and delivered us from it! [/libtard]