They say one man's trash is another man's treasure, and while most people are happy that Communism rests in the ash heap of history, a Daily Kos blogger opined this past Wednesday that it didn't deserve such a sad fate, at least in America.
"gjohnsit" remarked that many idealistic young adults are abandoning the Democratic Party because it's "center-right" rather than left-wing, and wondered, "How did we arrive at this point?" He contends that the crucial developments were two purges of Communism and other hard-left groups from American political life:
...We destroyed our leftist anarchist groups during the First Red Scare [right after World War I] using methods such as "entrapment, police brutality, prolonged incommunicado detention, and violations of due process in court"...We then destroyed the communist and communist-leaning groups 30 years later through methods only slightly less brutal.
Communism didn't die in America because Americans rejected it. It was murdered...
The consequences of this killing, as "gjohnsit" sees them:
...When you cut off the left side of political debate, the center naturally drifts to the right. Moderates will continue to be in the center, but the center had moved...
Leon Trotsky once said that communism was the politics of hope, and fascism was the politics of despair. While that was probably an exaggeration, he does have a point.
Communist speakers tend to preach about a better future for humanity, so much so that conservatives accuse them of being utopians.
Extreme conservatives talk about people we should be afraid of.
Communists talk about breaking chains and freedom.
Extreme conservatives talk about fearing God and protecting us from dangerous ideas...
While the right has "cultivated its extremists," far-left arguments, "gjohnsit" laments, no longer circulate among "a younger generation...disgusted with the broken status quo of our political system" -- a generation therefore deprived of hearing from lefty ideologues who would "speak their inspiring (if sometimes misguided) words of a better future (i.e. the exact thing that those kids will want to hear)."
