Where the Left Is Coming From

John L. Perry
Friday, Nov. 11, 2005

Out of the Cold War communist scare, incubated by McCarthyism, has evolved a virulent strain of mutant political virus – leftover leftists masquerading as innocent liberals.

Regardless of Joe McCarthy's hyperventilating, there really were some card-carrying communists he exposed – lurking among the far-more numerous non-communist lefties he slandered and terrified.

During the Cold War, the American left had a patron state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. After Ronald Reagan ran the Evil Empire out of business, the leftists in this country were forsaken with no puppeteer, no identity, no cause. They had no following other than themselves, and that was one sickly parade.

Red, pink, pale, whatever, the leftists went to ground under variations of camouflage. Many unerringly sought refuge in assorted safe havens, such as university faculties, newspaper editorial rooms, television opinion pulpits (both taxpayer- and shareholder-funded), Hollywood smut studios and tax-exempt political-action front groups.

In their hiding they clutched to their bosoms the one enduring, radical possession that motivated them way back there in "the bad old, good old days." It never left their consciousness. It fuels them today.

Ashamed of America

Far more than their slavish adoration of the Soviet Union as the very model of a modern major socialist state there was – all along – their rancid embarrassment by and consequent hatred of their own native land, the greatest of all aberrations among nation states, this United States of America.

They had been willing to give their all to destroy, and if not destroy then betray, this country. Today, with all that residual frustrated fury still festering within them, and passed along to their willing ideological heirs, they are even more determined to destroy what they did not create, and could never have created: this nation under God.

To draw a true bead on them, it helps to remember what was going on back in the 1930s-to-1980s. That was when there actually were such things as "Communist Party discipline" and Americans who lived covertly under it or tagged along beside it, too timid or too wise to risk overt recruitment.

Those ranks of pseudo-intellectual, ersatz proletarians were splintered into two principal sub-sets of subversives: the Marxists who marched lock-step with Joseph Stalin and those who sided with his hated rival, Leon Trotsky, who was booted out of the Bolshevik pantheon. Trotsky fled to Mexico, where Stalin dispatched an assassin to plant the point of a pick ax in his brain.

A No-Brainer

Differences between Stalinists and Trotskyites were significant. Stalin believed, or at least conned an awful lot of people into believing he believed, that given enough time "socialism in one country" (that would be his Russia of course) would somehow segue into a stateless state of workers' paradise – the famous "withering away."

But Marxism didn't exactly work out that way. Instead of atrophying, the state under Stalinist rule grew ever bigger, ever crueler. Some wither. Some paradise. The Marxist god not only failed; it wound up as the biggest ideological and political bankruptcy in recorded history.

While all that was going on, and before Trotsky felt the pick ax fall, he was preaching a related but significantly opposing doctrine. Like Joe Stalin, V.I. Lenin, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, he wanted a "better world" (if you bought what "better" was). Trotsky, however, chose a particular route: Before things could get better, he reasoned, they must first get worse. At least he was honest about what "worse" was.

Leon's Little Helpers

If you accepted Trotsky's world view, then it fell to reason that the duty of all good Marxists was to do everything in their power to help make things worse – and the worse, the better.

With the Communist Party of the U.S.A. in tatters, along with the Soviet master-state, there was very little wiggle room within the Marxist camp in the United States to advocate old-fashion, down-home, Uncle Joe type communism.

Old-line commies couldn't very well ply their trade openly in America anymore (thanks, ironically, to both McCarthy and Reagan). There was simply no longer a public taste in this country for all that crap.

Trotsky was dead and gone (they did manage to extract the pick ax and photograph it), but not the Trotskyite philosophy.

Waiting to Sprout

And there was enough covert, fertile environment in which the Trotskyite seeds could lie dormant until the demise of the old Democratic Party in the early Clinton Era and its capture and replacement by what is today a European-style, crypto-socialist Democratic Party.

Its stellar players are two of California's finest: Sen. Barbara Boxer and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, both inheritors of the Trotskyite mantle.

Is this an assertion that these two lovelies are communists? Or that they ever were, whether card-carrying or fellow-traveling?

No, it's not. That would be naughty, even McCarthy-like, for only they know for a certainty what they ever were or maybe still are.

What's important is that – knowingly or instinctively or accidentally – they are the primary practitioners on the American political stage of the resurrected Trotskyite philosophy.

How to Tell

Here is the red-paper litmus test: Can you think of any one thing either of them has propounded, any single act of political consequence either has taken that could not in all honesty be described as contributing to making things worse for America?

What is their equivalent of a Great Satan state? Certainly not the People's Republic of China, certainly not the Democratic People's Republic of (North) Korea, certainly not Fidel Castro's communist Cuba, certainly not Syria or Iran. Just the U.S. of A.

Who is their Public Enemy Number One? Not Osama bin Laden, not whoever at the moment is running the al-Q'aeda shop in Iraq, not that nut of a dictator in North Korea, not the dictator about to lose his job in Syria, not the radical Islamist puppet president of Iran, not Fidel. Just George W. Bush.

Other biggies of the new Democratic Party, within and outside Congress, along with their billionaire-funded TV propaganda groups, have joined Mesdames Boxer and Pelosi in practicing Trotskyism. Their obvious aim: Do all in their power to make things worse for America – so things can "get better."

League of Losers

Small wonder they have failed miserably at the voting booths to capture both houses of Congress, the White House and most of the governorships across the continent. Now they are about to lose even a hand-hold on the Supreme Court, which was their last, best hope.

Even if poor old Leon hadn't met up with a pick ax, Trotskyism would still have failed during and after the Cold War, just as Stalinist Marxism failed.

Today's permutation of Trotskyism will also fail, even under the tender guidance of the pro-Marxist new Democratic Party – especially under its guidance.

Their Political DNA

So enough already of referring to the likes of Boxer, Pelosi et al as "liberals." That's the cover that Cold War communists operated under. It's the camouflage that today's inheritors of the Trotskyite philosophy relish.

How happy they must be making Joe McCarthy, posthumously.

It's time these Typhoid Mary carriers of this mutant virus of Trotskyism were understood for, and called, what they really are – leftover lefties who just can't say farewell to the Marxist god that failed the whole sorry lot of them.

John L. Perry, a prize-winning newspaper editor and writer who served on White House staffs of two presidents, is a regular columnist for NewsMax.com.

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