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Communists Within the Form

Paul Jacob suggests why plutocrat-​serving Democrats sound like revolutionary radicals these days.

“They’re not communists,” comedian Dave Smith recently told Tucker Carlson, referring to leading Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris. “They work for big business!”

Sure, but beside the point: they spew out commie talking points not as an excuse to overthrow the state and set up a communist one, but to overthrow the last vestiges of the Constitution — free-​speech rights, private property rights, the whole shebang — and consolidate power in the corporatist, neo-​mercantilist fascism that yearns to squelch all dissent.

National candidates talking “far left” allows gullible left-​leaners to back powerful insiders against the real outsiders, the churchgoers, the small business owners and entrepreneurs, free-​lance professionals and the like. 

The real revolution is what Garet Garrett, expanding upon Aristotle, called “revolution within the form.”

So, are Kamala Harris and Tim Walz just “useful idiots” preparing the way for the plutocrats’ totalitarian end game?

Would-​be Cackler-​in-​Chief aside, the Washington Free Beacon’s Alana Goodman posits that Walz may be an out-​and-​out communist:

  • “As a high school teacher in the 1990s, Democratic vice-​presidential candidate and Minnesota governor Tim Walz appeared to extol life under Chinese communism, telling his students that it is a system in which ‘everyone shares’ and gets free food and housing.”
  • “Walz’s rosy description of communism in China is similar to his recent controversial remark that ‘one person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.’ It also reflects his longstanding ties to the country.”
  • “After returning to the United States in the early 1990s, Walz started leading trips to China for American high school students, with support from the Chinese government. The trips were ‘arranged by a friend of Walz in China’s foreign affairs department,’ the Star-​Herald reported at the time. The Chinese government also provided some of the funding for the program.”

True-​believing communists in the old style? Or just woke, post-​Marxist totalitarians? 

It hardly matters when the point of what they say is not the dogma, but the performance, allowing them to revolt against us, and the constitutional order we rely upon.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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1 reply on “Communists Within the Form”

Sincere communists have quite typically been unwitting tools of those without communist aspirations. 

For much of my life, the political left would laugh “We don’t want D; we only want C!” as they intruded into our lives, only later to laugh “We don’t want E; we only want D!” and then “We don’t want F; we only want E!” By the time of the Obama Administration, almost no one bought the pretense that the left would ever willingly stop, short of control of everything; and the left largely abandoned that pretense, though they didn’t just come-​out and declare that they wanted indeed to have control of everything. 

Harris and Walz have spoken more freely of what they would grab, and have not even bothered to insist that they wouldn’t grab still more. What is plainly true of them is that they have no stopping principle short of logical exhaustion. (Do Harris and Walz actually believe that, with such power, they will improve the lot of the common man? I dunno, but in any case their respective narcissisms trump all else.) 

This intrusiveness would be grossly wrong even if the people who have selected Harris and Walz as their spokesmodels were perfectly sincere, and even if socialists could somehow solve the problem of economic calculation. But, in reality, the thinly disguised totalitarian socialism of Harris and of Walz is a stalking horse for a neo-​feudalism, with a ruling class that would, at least in the short term, live comparatively high on the hog and unchallenged, even as the more typical subjects of this order suffered ever worsening material conditions. 

Other countries have been there before. The left here doesn’t learn from their experiences; the left there doesn’t learn from their experiences. They fantasize that if X were virtuous enough, then X would be able to attain socialism and to make socialism work. The cycle will be repeated until-​and-​unless the educational system is wrested from would-​be rulers and useful idiots.

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