Marxism's Mad Men

Remember "Democratic Socialism?" In the dim and distant past B.T. (Before Trump), there was a curmudgeonly senator from Vermont who dared challenge the Democratic Party establishment and the coronation of Herself, Hillary Clinton, as the standard bearer and heir-presumptive to the One, Emperor Barack Obama The Petulant. Bernie Sanders was his name, and Democratic Socialism was his game.

Sanders got squashed like a bug by the Party machine, and while he tried to keep himself relevant, his star was eclipsed by the young, media savvy Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. AOC and several other neoMarxists found each other, dubbed themselves The Squad, and folded identity politics into Bernie's brain-dead reiteration of a universally failed and murderously destructive political ideology.

I delved into the effort to rehabilitate socialism, both as a word and as an ideology, back in 2016.

"Mad Men," in case you haven't seen the show, is a reference both to the television series and to the moniker that the advertising agencies, which traditionally clustered on New York City's Madison Avenue, gave themselves.

The gag then was that "Democratic Socialism" was a very different animal than the form implemented in places such as the Soviet Union and elsewhere. A brief dip into the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) exposed the truth - it was just the same old abolition of private ownership of business, creatively phrased, prettily packaged, and buried behind "of the moment" bullet points like socialized medicine, defunding the police, Green New Deal, and so forth. When I first delved into the DSA's vision, I came across their plans for the economy, which started with abolition of corporations in favor of "employee ownership," with the government providing business capital where needed (i.e. everywhere).

The influence of The Squad appears to have hit a peak, and people have started to tune out the endless scolding from that pack of hypocrites. Ditto for "woke" and cancel culture - people are finally saying "no" to the endless and ever-more-outlandish demands.

The leftists remain undeterred, however. They've moved their battlefront and their focus from twenty-somethings and colleges to primary and secondary education, where there's no escaping the coercive public education monopoly, and where minds are far more malleable and imprintable. They sought to quietly impose Critical Race Theory radicalism into core education curricula, but when the word got out, parents got pissed, and Glen Youngkin victories started to thwart that effort.

They're taking a new tack.

"Socialism" has been fuzzed up and made deliberately vague, in order to make it harder to rebut (as in "that's not real socialism!" or "that's not Democratic Socialism!"). Something that's too vague can, however, also be hard to anchor to. Rehabbing "socialism" hasn't won them as many hearts and minds as they hoped for, so they're doubling down. The beginnings of a more overt rebranding effort emerged in the wake of the George Floyd riots. The opportunists who fulfilled Eric Hoffer's aphorism in taking over and corrupting the Black Lives Matter movement

proudly and overtly embraced Marxism.

Now, the College Board, which is a monopoly gate-keeper on the high-school-to-college road, has stealthily introduced an AP African American Studies that is at its core an indoctrination in Marxism.

It reflects the new and improved Marxism 2.0, which sows discord along racial and other identity lines rather than across economic lines, and seeks to conflate support for minorities and opposition to racism with support for Marxism and opposition to capitalism.

Oppressed Oppressors

There is great irony in trying to make the black community Marxist, given that the practical reality of Marxism's various forms (socialism, communism, etc.) are at their core State ownership of individuals' work product. One may believe one's self free in a society where the State avails itself of your productive work in order to give some of it back to you (on terms decided by an elite few), but if you do not control the fruits of your labor, you are a slave to the State.

We are witnessing a growing theme in our culture: the systemic elimination of choice. Big Business and Big Education are setting ever-more-onerous rules, narrowing pathways, and eliminating alternate routes in the advancement of a particular, illiberal, Leftist agenda that is almost as coercive, practically, as that which a government unhindered by such as our Constitution would impose.

The DSA avow that "working people should run both the economy and society democratically." Ask yourself, though, what sort of "democracy" preordains answers, winners, and outcomes. One look at the socialistic dictatorships of the past century tells the tale. How much "democracy" do/did the people of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the German Democratic Republic, or the Lao People’s Democratic Republic have? How many choices were they given at election time?

Democratic Socialism is a single-choice, single-outcome ideology masquerading as a "popular will of the masses" movement. It would replace the disfavored "elites" with a different set of rules, rules who'd have far more power and control over our lives. The game plan is to remove "Marxism" from the list of Bad Words, and to "other" those who criticize Marxism as deplorables or ultra-MAGAs... or racists or sexists or fill-in-the-blank-phobes.

For it is absolutely no coincidence that Marxism and Woke or Social Justice or whatever label you want to assign to today's self-appointed cultural arbiters are synchronous. Good luck finding liberty lovers who embrace woke ideology - the two are incompatible, and the latter is wholly intertwined... and indeed inherent to... neoMarxism. It is all of a piece, they are one and the same.

Once we come to terms with this reality, we have a clearer insight as to why cultural progressives are also socialists or communists or fascists. We are less likely to be surprised that the framework for AP African American Studies is actually an indoctrination in Marxism and a repudiation of capitalism. That these studies are intended to undermine individual liberty and a free society should be considered a gross affront to black Americans. And to all Americans. That they have to resort to subterfuge, concealment, misdirection, name games, word play, equivocation, insults, and outright lies to insert this agenda into educational curricula and corporate cultures tells us how toxic and offensive it is.

---

Thank you for reading! If you enjoy The Roots of Liberty, please subscribe (if you have already, thank you!), and  please recommend the blog to your friends. Social media has proven wholly unreliable in sharing my posts, subscribing is mightier than the shadow-banners, and subscriptions motivate my productivity.

If you really like The Roots of Liberty and want to help keep it rolling, please consider becoming a paying subscriber here at Substack, or at a lighter level as contributor to the blog via Patreon. I’ve started offering an expanded serialization of my short book, “End the War On Drugs,” every Sunday, for my paid subscribers.

Chapter 1 - A Catastrophic Failure
Chapter 2 - A Brief History
Chapter 3 - A Society Rooted in Individual Liberty
Chapter 4 - Use vs Abuse

Thank you, again, for your support!

Peter.