Same Marxist Song, Different Marxist Words . . .

Or, the Marxist apple never falls very far from the socialist tree.

It has been rightly said that you can vote your way into socialism, but you can never vote your way out of it.

After Stalin became the leader of the old USSR, he held an election. Stalin proclaimed that it was the first truly democratic election in the history of the world. The people of the USSR voted 99.8% for Stalin - obviously a free, fair election. Not that we ever have to worry about unfair elections, correct? Amazingly enough, no Soviet election ever resulted in less than a 99% plurality.

That’s the glory of the communist experience. No need to wonder how pesky elections are going to turn out. You know the results even before you vote! It seems Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) agrees, at least in part. She once said that if Republicans would just get rid of all those bothersome conservatives, elections wouldn’t matter so much. I’m sure Stalin would have agreed.

What has kept Marxism, at least to a major extent, from really taking hold here? One reason is that the US has a strong family orientation, a robust middle class and upward mobility. It’s difficult to tell fairly well-off folks that they’d be a lot better if they just let the government decide how much money they should get, and that government can run their lives much better than they can themselves.

Classic Marxist theory butts heads with the economic benefits US citizenship, particularly the middle class, have received from capitalism. So American Marxists have begun to move away from classic Marxism into hiding new definitions of it within other theories. It’s a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing attempt to slip Marxism in through the side door.

Let’s review: classic Marxism divided society into two immutable classes: the Proletariat (oppressed workers) and the Bourgeoisie (capitalist oppressors). Marx said that capitalists would always be oppressors because they would never give up their power to the masses. Consequently, capitalism was a flawed system and must be destroyed - it could not be reformed.

Again, our large middle class and upward mobility gives the lie to that statement, and our home-grown Marxists realize it. The cries for submitting to the Great Collective and allowing the Masterminds (the Marxists, of course) to run all of our economic lives has pretty much fallen on deaf ears.

So Marxism has taken on a new, more appealing-to-wokesters veneer in order to try to sneak its camel’s nose under the tent: critical race theory (CRT). This new, better, get your clothes cleaner than classic Marxism, cleverly replaces class with race. It preys on one of the woke mob’s greatest hits: white guilt.

Here’s the crafty way they’ve tried to position Marxism as ‘racial justice:’ CRT (and its enabling mechanism, DEI) posits that there are two racial groups within America: whites (oppressors) and non-whites (oppressed). CRT teaches that whites are intrinsically racist - it’s in their DNA. They (whites) will always oppress non-whites - there’s nothing whites can do about it. You can tell whether a person is an oppressor or oppressed simply by looking at the color of their skin. Since skin color is immutable, there is no way for whites to stop being oppressors. Therefore, government needs to level the playing field by punishing whites for their oppression. This, of course, can only be done if capitalism is replaced with socialism. Now, some nay-sayers might say this is intrinsically racist. But no! say the woke minions. It’s racist if you don’t agree that all whites are racist.

Organizations such as the national Black Lives Matter group are openly Marxist - their web site says so unashamedly. They espouse this theory with full throat, while taking donations and using them to enrich their personal portfolios, of course. That’s one of the little-realized results of Marxism that the great believers in socialism don’t understand: the people at the top are always rich, while those below are always struggling.

You have almost certainly heard some liberals replacing the word ‘equality’ with ‘equity.’ Quite simply, what they’re saying is that there can never be equality of opportunity as long as whites are allowed to exist unchecked. The only way for true equity to exist is through governmental action. Money must be taken from whites and given to non-whites. Unless non-whites have the same amount of money as whites, they will always be oppressed. Equity takes everything: merit, hard work, the family (government becomes in loco parentis), and anything associated with western civilization, and replaces it with complete governmental control.

CRT is an attempt to put a Marxist wolf into an anti-racist sheep’s clothing. It pretends it’s trying to help minorities. It’s not. It’s trying to make everyone in the US, regardless of skin color, become a slave to the government. When non-whites must depend on government’s largess for their daily bread, they have no hope of advancing. Under equity, the concept of upward mobility is lost forever. It’s a pernicious attempt to turn the US into a socialist country. It pretends it’s meant to advance people of color, when it is in fact a way to re-enslave them. And to enslave whites along with them, as the socialist leaders get rich while turning the US into another Venezuela.

CRT is just one facet of the Marxist mantra being peddled to vulnerable minorities. Another is a speculative screed called the ‘1619 Project.’ This rewriting of history was the brainchild of one Nikole Hannah-Jones, a racist who has blamed whites for virtually every ill on earth since at least her time as a Sophomore in college. It is absolutely stunning that this author received the Pulitzer Prize for this fantasy, even as real historians skewered its exaggerated underpinnings.

The 1619 project posits that the reason the United States came into existence was to build a nation of slave owners. She goes on to say that the reason the American Revolution was fought was to keep slavery as an institution.

She’s a little off in her understanding of slavery in UK law. If the colonists were fighting Great Britain to maintain slavery, one would assume that Great Britain had previously outlawed slavery. The only problem is that Great Britain didn’t outlaw slavery until 1833. Unless my less-than-perfect memory fails me, the American Revolution ended some sixty years before that date. OK, sure, they ended their slave trade in 1807, but they didn’t abolish slavery until 26 years later. But even using the earlier year, Ms. Hannah-Jones is off by twenty-four years. And for this she gets a Pulitzer Prize?

And here’s the kicker, folks. Both of these eminently flawed, Marxist creeds are being slipped into public education. Unless parents fight back, these two conjectures, often hidden in other curricula, will be taught to public school students. Protecting these hidden agendas from being exposed and expunged is the main reason the teacher’s unions are fighting so hard to keep parents from having a say in public education.

In my college years, I once penned a fanciful comparison of two version of a poem by Sir Alfred Lord Tennyson. Why there were two versions of the poem I have no idea; the differences contained minor word changes coupled with some different capitalization. My instructor at the time had told us he wanted us to stretch the boundaries of rationality and push ourselves to think creatively. Which I did, juxtaposing each version of the poem with changes that had been occurring in Tennyson’s life. I considered it a masterpiece of imaginative speculation.

Here’s what my professor said in response to my clever flight of fancy: “This is much ado about very little, and questionable at best, but I have read published criticisms that are worse.”

He gave me an ‘A’ for the paper. If I would have just kept going in the same fanciful vein, perhaps I could have received a Pulitzer as well.

Maybe, in an attempt to be awarded a Pulitzer, I will write a new founding document that would exalt something called ‘freedom’ and its fellow-traveler ‘liberty.’ That document could lead to establishing a new form of government where all men are created equal, and every person has a chance to succeed. Where oppressive government is replaced with one modeled after John Locke’s belief that the people should control the government, and not vice-versa.

I think I’ll come up with a catchy name for it. How does the ‘Declaration of Independence’ sound?