The Lingering Miasma of Marxism
No matter how many times it’s defeated, the politics of resentment always has an audience.
Marxists are an insidiously clever bunch. They know that the power they want can never be achieved via the ballot box, so they decided long ago to spread left-wing cultural ideas about the evils of Western society by winning over and corrupting the youth. The greatest of philosophers, Socrates, was put to death under the same charge. That accusation was definitely a false one, but Socrates happily drank the poison, although some spiteful gossips said that he was just glad to get away from his shrewish wife Xanthippe.
Never mind. Our universities, media, entertainment industry, and most of our cultural institutions were infiltrated by extreme leftists long ago, challenging the culture but never actually achieving total victory. The left has never acknowledged defeat, however, and has continued to spread its false message via newspapers, Hollywood, and the universities. The inevitable decline of their old communist message has never discouraged the left. New slogans like “war against racism” and “white supremacy” always give them hope. Twisting young minds ditto.
The message is a simple one, so simple minds can absorb it: The system is rigged against you. In other words, capitalism is a system designed by the rich to exploit you for their own profit. It sounds disempowering, but it is effective. Ironically, this bull has worked in Europe, mostly in Britain. There is an underclass in Europe that is totally welfare dependent, permanently unemployed, and without aspirations. Their children are mostly dropouts and on drugs. (Sounds a bit like certain American groups.)
The first to spot the welfare trap was Patrick Moynihan, who advised President Richard Nixon to apply “benign neglect.” President Bill Clinton also realized the downside of welfare and did something about it. Not that it changed anything, so far as the lefty message was concerned. They called the strategy the “long march through the institutions,” and cartoonish leftist figures like Herbert Marcuse became cultural heroes for a while, especially during the Vietnam War.
I have always considered it a farce—-phonies like Marcuse and other such lefties living in sun-drenched California, preaching and teaching the young what a fascist country this was. I remember being restrained by Bill Buckley when the son of Ken Galbraith, the economist, said something outrageous against Uncle Sam. In Gstaad, of all places, where the elite meet to eat and ski.
Having witnessed the communist effort to take over in Greece through force of arms back in 1944, I got into trouble at the prep schools I went to once in America. In history class at Lawrenceville, I defended Franco’s and Salazar’s dictatorships in Spain and Portugal. Mr. Emery, a very nice teacher, saw my point, but most others thought me a fascist. After the Stalinist horrors in Russia and Eastern Europe, I could not comprehend how anyone could believe left-wing ideology.
Years later, just as the Vietnam War was heating up, the Fiat chairman Gianni Agnelli took me to lunch at New York’s Pavilion with America’s most famous political columnist, Walter Lippmann. Lippmann was more than a celebrity, he was an institution. Writing for the great Herald Tribune and syndicated, he reached an audience of more than 10 million in about 100 newspapers. When abroad, he was treated like an American president, received by de Gaulle, the Brit royals, and the Soviet dictators. For the first and last time in my life, I never got a word in, nor did I try.
Lippmann took himself very seriously, and never even bothered to say hello once we were introduced by Gianni—we were only three for lunch—but, more than 60 years later, I remember how he got everything right about the future. He was then very old and retired. He dismissed Vietnam as a losing cause just as LBJ began to pour in troops in 1965. He declared democracy asks too much of its citizens, when in fact they know nothing: “Man is not Aristotelian.” And the most important observation, something I remember because he had written it long before the lunch and I had read it: “A typical voter is like a deaf spectator in the back row of a theatre. One who arrives in the middle of the third act and will leave before the last curtain, having stayed long enough to decide who is the hero and who is the villain of the piece.”
The exophthalmic Lippmann’s words about democracy and voters were music to Marxist ears for obvious reasons. Ignorance fuels leftist causes. Back in the halcyon days of 1965, journalists were not as yet all leftist propagandists, and had not yet been elevated to Olympian heights by besmirching a great president with the phony charges of Watergate.
Sixty-odd years later, the Marxist stench is polluting our institutions like the Smithsonian, while radicals in Congress are calling for more migrants to ensure a shift in American foreign policy. The Democratic Party is openly being taken over by extreme leftists like Hasan Piker and his ilk, farcical cartoon figures looming in its future. The radical DSA is becoming the soul of the Democratic Party. The path to lunacy is there for everyone to see, but Lippmann’s theory about voters has me worried. What happens if these lefty clowns get away with their lies and end up running the country?
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