Well, that optimistic. The problem with people is, although they do tend to act in their own self interest, it’s way too easy for the government to convince them that it is in their best interest to get “free stuff” from said government.
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So true. It was why the Classical Liberals of the 19th Century were generally no friends of universal suffrage.
However, we have to learn to live with a little bit of socialism. Even in the best of circumstances, we’re not going to undo the Roosevelt (meagre) welfare state. Even looking like we are is the path to political suicide. (And there’s another argument for as much decentralized Federalism as possible: let the states experiment as they like. I think Kansas tried serious tax cuts a few years ago, for example. [ Kansas experiment - Wikipedia ]
Another way to think about it is this: was America in 1955 a socialist hellhole? Or was it a pretty decent society, on the path to being even better? I think it was the latter.
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Yes, the 50’s was a really good “interlude”.
If left to “let nature take its course”, it would have continued into a great future.
But the communists just couldn’t leave well enough alone, so everything started downhill in the 60’s, and here we are.
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Well … I think there were things going on ‘below the surface’ that had little to do with what ‘communists’ of any persuasion wanted to do.
I was part of that generation that grew up in the 50’s and became young adults in the 60’s. In a way, it was the very goodness of America that contributed to our corruption: we had learned in school that America was, effectively, perfect. Because she had God on her side, she had never lost a war. (Okay, we didn’t count the Korean tie-game.)
Then came the Civil Rights movement, with national TV showing Blacks being brutalized by the police – four little girls in an Alabama Church blown up by the the kKK. And then Vietnam, with all the ambiguities of a civil war where our enemies have a lot of popular support, and our friends are no saints. My Lai capped it all.
So … instead of a sober, … conservative … understanding that we are a nation sharing all of the defects of the intelligent chimpanzees that we are … one which, however, due to a wonderful accident of history and geography, was able to create what became the most admired nation in the world … instead of that, we acted as if we had been shown that our idol had feet of clay, and rejected the whole thing. If America was not Perfectly Good, she must be Evil.
It’s not that ‘communists’ – using that term as a blanket phrase for older radical leftists – didn’t want this to happen. But their efforts had almost nothing to do with what did happen. It would have happened had every communist in America dropped dead in 1955.
But we were just kids. We weren’t able to do much damage to America then. The Weathermen couldn’t even make a bomb that was not a mortal danger to themselves.
Thirty years later, and we were in charge of shaping the nation’s youth, and were able to do a million times more damage than our young selves had done. The evil pair who ran the Weathermen became ‘distinguished’ professors, and contaminated a whole generation with their disdain, if not outright hatred, of America.
It’s also a historic accident that America included a large percentage of people who did not really assimilate to the alien European culture in which, involuntarily, they found themselves, and this is central to understanding our problems. But, again, that’s another discussion.
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“It’s also a historic accident that America included a large percentage of people who did not really assimilate to the alien European culture in which, involuntarily, they found themselves, and this is central to understanding our problems.”
Please would you elaborate on this idea?
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Actually, Doug, you sound like me. 
Throw “hope” in there and you’ve got it.
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“Their efforts had almost nothing to do with what did happen”?? It had everything to do with it!
It was communist/leftist (whatever you want to call it) fronts, promulgating propaganda and “agitprop”, that influenced not only the subversive 60’s, but shaped the thinking and politics of every subsequent decade and generation. That’s exactly why, 30 years later, we did “a million times more damage” - 30 years and the brainwashing was complete.
The indoctrination and brainwashing that began in the 60’s (and before) continued and just got worse.
What Bill Ayres started in the 60’s came to fruition in the election of his equally leftist son as mayor of San Francisco. He may have been recalled, but the damage is done - he was just the icing on the cake.
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I agree with Liz. Let us remember The Little Red School House and Rules For Radicals.
Perhaps it doesn’t seem like Communists because they worked under various group names to promote what was necessary to bring their Marxist desires to fruition. They used legitimate groups by infiltrating the cause with Marxist ideas. They still do these things today.
But, Liz sort of wrote that already.
They have been at it for a long time…Progressively moving America into place for an Authoritarian regime, which may now be more like Fascism, and Global Authority as ultimate government.
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I believe you are mistaken. I won’t try to just say “I was there”, but I was there, and I can promise you, the Communist Party had no influence to speak of among the young people I was with.
Now … it’s true, the Commuist Party, and their deadly rivals, the Progressive Labor Party (sort-of Maoists, for a while), and their deadly rivals, the Socialist Workers Party (Trotskyists) jumped into the Leftist milieu with all four feet. But they didn’t create it.
These groups – not the CP – did make great progress for a while among the young Leftists. It’s what you can do if you have a dedicated, serious organization. (Hint, hint.)
The ‘New Left’, which is what they were, were scornful of Marxism, and – like today’s Left! – had contempt for the white working class, whom they say as racists and therefore – using the non-materialist moralism that drove them – evil people.
It is absolutely true that many of these people moved ‘Left’ – towards some form of orthodox Marxism of one flavor or another --as time went on.
I attended the 1967 SDS convention at Ann Arbor, Michigan where, for the first time, I heard the phrase ‘working class’ used without hoots of derisive laughter from the attendees.
And the Progressive Labor Party did an ‘entry’ into SDS, and made a lot of headway with their ‘Worker-Student Alliance’. They probably had a majority of delegates at the final convention of SDS, but the official SDS leadership was willing to destroy the organization – and they did – rather than let the PLP take over. This official leadership hastily adapted a sort of ersatz Marxism to fight the PLP, and then split among themselves later – some becoming the terrorist Weathermen (who wrote off the American working class in favor of ‘bringing the war home’), some becoming more or less orhodox Stalinists (still around, as the Revolutionary Communist Party, the flag burners), others tailing after China in a group called ‘The October League’, which quickly dissolved.
But there wasn’t any secret cabal of communists bringing the New Left to birth.
I’ve said this before, but I think the readiness of patriots to see secret conspiracies is like our ancestors’ trying to explain hurricanes and lightning as the actions of gods. I don’t mean to be insulting here!
But it’s a weakness. It leads to poeple thinking that, since there is a powerful, secret cabal that controls the press, the schools, the public opinion polls, the vote-counting – that we can do nothing. It leads to political passivity, to waiting for the political Apocalypse.
The reality is, we are potentially far stronger than our enemies, because they’re offering the American people the destruction of their way of life, and we’re offering them its preservation. But we have to organize. (Have I mentioned that before?)
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First from the Moderator: You’ve posted more than 20% of the replies here, is there anyone else you would like to hear from? There is a “share” button on it too.
Is anyone else getting these messages?
Here is what I contend; a Leftist by any other name still seeks power and control over the People, an oligarchy of which they will be part, the end of American principles and traditions, and the decline of our Constitutional Republic.
McCarthy called them Communists when they were Communists, Clinton renamed herself a Liberal Progressive. Obama admired and “sought out the Marxists.” They openly name themselves Socialists that admire Communist dictators. What passes for their name now…who cares? They support Fascist policies and a Global Reset, with America forking over billions and steadily declining in power… and they seek to imitate China’s ESG structure of control over its people.
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I suggest that as a participant in the movement of communist subversion, you perhaps failed to see the wood for the trees.
Isn’t there a danger that if you construct a similar movement against the Left, the same splinterings and antagonisms will occur?
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Well, I would be happy for someone to provide some concrete evidence that the CPUSA, or Soviet agents, were central to bringing the New Left to birth.
One problem is lazy thinking: if the word ‘communist’ just means ‘lefitsts I dislike’, then there is no analysis.
I want names, dates, examples. The CP did have a youth group back in the 60s … the WEB Dubois Clubs. A friend of mine – a hell of a nice guy – was head of it in Austin, at the University of Texas. Unfortunately, he was murdered. And not by a left winger.
But very few people in the Left paid any attention to the CP or its youth group. They were considered old timid fuddy-duddies.
Here’s the key thing: America – and all advanced, civilized countries – underwent huge social transformations in the 20th Century. It was true that the Communists, and other Marxists, were advocates of these transformations: Black rights, women’s rights. And conservatives were not.
But, even if the Communists had not existed, even if there had never been a single Marxist on the planet, these deep social transformations would have happened anyway.
Women would have got the vote. They would go from being homemakers, to being employees. We would have had female prime ministers and presidents. (When I did a mathematics course at university, in the mid-60s, there were about five young women among a couple of hundred young men. Now, I believe, half or more of mathematics majors are female. Nothing to do with the Reds.)
Same for the de-criminalization of homosexuality. Which wasn’t even a particularly big thing for Marxists. In fact, one prominent Marxist group – the Revolutionary Communist Party – considered homosexuality a ‘bourgeos vice’ which would be 'cured ’ – probably through the kind of re-education camps Fidel sent gays to in the mid-60s – after the Revolution. (They’ve changed their position now.)
Same for Blacks. America was going to move to legal racial equality, no matter what. It’s in the logic of the American founding – all men are created equal.
The Communists did play a certain indirect role here: after WWII, the US had to compete with the Soviet Union in the Third World. Blacks being denied the vote, and lynched, in the South was an embarrassment to it. This no doubt played a role in bringing the Federal government’s power
A joke, which is set in the USSR in the mid-50s: An American diplomat and a Soviet counterpart are being driven from Moscow to Leningrad, on the very poorly-maintained highway that linked these two cities. After a particualrly severe jolting, the American says, “Whoa … your roads sure need better maintenance.” The Soviet shoots back, “What about the Negroes of MIssissippi?”
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Just a point on splintering and antagonisms. The Right is as bad as the Left, unfortunately, if not more so. One of the things I have argued for is the necessity for unity unity unity. But there are lots of Big Egos on the Right, sadly.
Now … I don’t want to seem like I’m fawning on anyone but … it’s been my experience that the Big Egos, the I-must-be-Chief syndrome, is far stronger among males, than among females. The evolutionary psychos/Social Biologists no doubt have an explanation for this.
Whatever, it seems to true to me. So my ideal patriotic organization would have a mainly-female leadership. (For a related reason, it’s why if I still was brave enough to invest in the stock market, I would choose funds run by a woman. I think they’re less driven to be the ‘big dick’ among their peers, so to speak.)
And I’m aware of that Kipling poem about which sex is ‘the deadlier of the two’. Which is fine by me, so long as it’s directed towards our enemies.
What the hell, an excerpt:
"Man, a bear in most relations,
Worm and savage otherwise …
Man propounds negotiations,
Man accepts the compromise.
Very rarely will he squarely push the logic of the fact,
to its utlimate conclusion, in unmitgated act.
Fear, or foolishness impel him, ere he lay the wicked low,
to grant some form of trial, even to his fiercest foe.
Mirth obscene diverts his anger, doubt and pity oft perplex
Him in dealing with an issue -
to the scandal of The Sex!
But the Woman that God gave him,
every fibre of her frame
Proves her launched for one sole issue,
armed and engined for the same,
And to serve that single issue,
lest the generations fail,
The female of the species must be
deadlier than the male."
Now I’ve dropped myself in it! But I still think it’s true.
In any case, the More-Chiefs-than-Indians thing that exists among us means that for the moment, we have to concentrate on local groups. Eventually, yes, we must have a national organization … ideally led by someone who has such huge moral authority that the other would-be chiefs defer to him (or, preferably, her.)
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I haven’t gotten that one, but I got one that told me I had almost reached my limit on how many posts I could “like”!
And I agree with your thoughts on the Left - it’s not the name that matters, its the motive.
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Well, you have the personal experience, but it seems to me you can’t see the forest for the trees.
Leftist ideas certainly didn’t come from our own American heritage. You didn’t just wake up one day and have leftist ideas - you were influenced.
You don’t think communists were running “influence operations” here? There’s a famous interview of a Soviet defector from the 70’s, Yuri (I forget his last name). The whole “Long March through the Institutions”. Marcuse and Alinsky, etc.
They infiltrated not only the government, but the media and Hollywood, which has since become one giant “influence operation”.
As for your idea that women should be running things, I have to disagree on that, too.
Men have big egos and testosterone for a reason - to lead - boldly, firmly, and with strength.
We need fighters, and that’s what men are best at.
Of course there are always exceptions, and some women can do it, but I say, let men do what they’re best at - channeled wisely, masculinity is not toxic.
That doesn’t leave women out, let them do what they’re best at - “the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world”.
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Well, if you read Hitler’s Children you will learn the origins of the New Left. They are in Europe. (Not in the USSR.) You could also learn a lot about it by reading Roger Scruton’s Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left:
Plenty of names, dates, examples in both books.
I do not share your opinion of women. A Margaret Thatcher is very rare.
Kipling did not mean that women would be better political leaders than men. He meant a woman would be fierce in protecting her children, her home, her reasons for existing. The world is now over-governed and much of the over-governing is being done by women. Not to our greater good, I think you might agree.
No one knows what would have happened if …
Nothing is inevitable.
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Doug: There are disagreements among conservatives, and rivalry between conservatives, but conservatism being less an ideology concerned with theory and orthodoxy than an evolved system that has been found to work, the sort of splits and conflicts, the factionalism that arose out of Marxist idealism, will not afflict the conservative Right.
Do you perhaps still retain the kind of political emotion that made you a Communist in your youth - though you have long since changed your mind about the ideas? Are you nostalgic for those busy years of passion and certainty? Would you like to recover them - though the busy-ness would now be in the cause of freedom, tradition, patriotism, rule of law?
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Good point on the “overgoverning” being done by women! Reinforces my reply above.
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As so often, Liz, we see these issues the same way.
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Jill: you are probably right about my not having abandoned the passions of my youth. But … I promise you, I would far far rather be enjoying my semi-retirement doing lots of reading, tutoring bright kids, travelling.
It’s just that I see the US sinking. So I can’t. I want to turn what I leanred in the Left against them.
As for women vs men. Yes, we need to utilize the stereotypical strengths of both sexes. BUT … we also have the reality of the weaknesses of both sexes.
At the moment we need strong leaders, with cool heads, people who are intelligent and well-informed, and above all, put the Cause ahead of their personal self-gratification. People like George Washington.
I was half-teasing about wanting female leadership, but only half. However, it’s not a big deal, just a casual observation.
Which I’ll extend: we need to build strong local organizations. Now … I know from personal experience that this requires a lot of not-very-interesting routine work: getting on the telephone and ringing people to remind them of the next meeting; cooking a meal; sitting behind a table at the local shopping center; meeting and greeting newcomers at public meetings.
And it’s no doubt sexist to observe that women are better than men at this.
But it’s not a big issue.
However, I would make one point here: I don’t believe conservatives should go around saying anything that can be interpreted as “Woman’s place is in the home, taking care of children.” Whatever the biological truth, and social desirability, of that … it’s not where we are at now.
The social changes of the 20th Century in terms of the legal equality of the races and the sexes, are irreversible, for better or worse. I think for the better, but even if I didn’t, I would believe that it’s tactically foolish to argue for a return to the past, with respect to women’s role in the world.
Things have changed irrevocably. And … hey … as I look at who the majority of articulate contributors to this forum are … (unless they’re transgendered males) … I think I see proof for my thesis!
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