6/11/2023 0 Comments Liberal lunacy memeYes, communists consider themselves socialists - indeed, the only real socialists - but following the establishment of the Soviet Union and its terrorist tactics toward perceived enemies at home and abroad, self-identified socialists (e.g., those participating in parliamentary politics in democratic countries) have typically been anti-communist, often supporting Cold War defense policies aimed at restraining the expansion of communist countries. While communists have varied in theory and practice, they typically espouse the total abolition of private property, the establishment of a dictatorship run for the alleged benefit of workers by a party vanguard, and an aggressive international movement aimed at global hegemony prior to a distant phase of history when the state will “wither away.” ![]() For the most part, the socialists who rose to challenge capitalist parties and regimes in Europe (and, more gradually, in developing countries) in the 19th century were thoroughly democratic and pacific, though many did believe they could only reach their goals through revolution.Ĭommunism is a specific ideology based on the historical teachings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (influential 19th-century socialists) as applied by Russian revolutionary Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin, later succeeded by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong in China, Fidel Castro in Cuba, and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, among many others. Socialism is a very broad and diffuse group of ideologies rooted in a post-industrial-revolution reaction to economic inequality, disempowerment of workers, and the consolidation of political and economic power in a capital-ownership class. And another Republican member of Congress, Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, betrayed a lack of understanding of communism just last month in explaining that the Russians were invading Ukraine because, as a communist, Vladimir Putin “couldn’t feed his people” and needed Ukraine’s farmland. When Republicans lost two Senate seats and control of the upper chamber in Greene’s home state in January 2021, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem called the winning Democratic candidates communists. One of his favorite Republican acolytes, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, calls Democrats - all of them, not just some of them - communists all the time (most recently in her speech to a white-nationalist group, in which she referred to “Democrats, who are the Communist Party of the United States of America”). It’s not just Trump throwing the term around. ![]() ![]() ![]() Sure, for a generation, Republicans have been imprecisely calling Democrats “socialists,” though no more than a handful of Donkey Party members answer to that appellation, which in itself is as imprecise as “conservative” or “liberal.” But “communist” is actually pretty precise - and wildly inappropriate for anyone in either major U.S. But “communist?” Seriously? I hadn’t heard a Republican call a Democrat a commie since the high tide of McCarthyism - and even back then, the rare slur was associated with specific (if lunatic) allegations of subservience to an international Marxist-Leninist conspiracy operating out of Moscow. The day after the 2020 vice-presidential debate between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris, then-President Donald Trump did something that is hard to do: He actually shocked me with intemperate language, in this case referring to Harris as a “monster” and a “communist.” The “monster” business didn’t surprise me, actually, given Trump’s long history of personal insults to women. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin – not Biden, Harris, AOC or Sanders – are the icons of communism.
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