If we’re inclined to glide past the Marxist fingerprints all over America’s current turmoil, assuming its ideas will flare up for a while and then burn out, we’re not paying attention.
American institutions have stoked the coals of Karl Marx’s destructive ideology, fanning its flames until his notions have consumed our cultural pillars.
Far from being forgotten and irrelevant, Marx’s ideas pervade key institutions, from universities and schools, to mass media and popular entertainment, to major corporations and medicine, to the arts and sciences. They’ve even seeped into many churches and seminaries. Of course, they also define the Democratic Party, Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi no less than Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama.
I don’t mean such clunky ideas from “Das Kapital” as the dictatorship of the proletariat, the labor theory of value, or the withering away of the state. No, we’re talking about the substratum of assumptions about how the world works, underlying those discredited notions from bygone days.
The poisoned root of all of it is something called “dialectical materialism,” a concept Marx borrowed from Hegel that describes how material needs create social conflict. The two men saw the material world as distinct and independent from the spirit and mind, and maintained that attempting to combine the material and immaterial bred inconsistencies. For our purposes here, suffice it to say the “materialism” part disallows all things spiritual, and the “dialectical” part disallows all things fixed or permanent or unchanging.
So we’re left with nothing but atoms in endless flux, physical forces violently colliding in a grim world where might makes right and brutal will reigns supreme. If that sounds like the radical autonomous zone in Seattle, it’s no coincidence.
Cultural Marxism is increasingly defining the worldview within which all debates and decision-making take place, even for most of those who rightly fear and despise Marx. This philosophy is on an accelerating trajectory to deconstructing the American way of life from top to bottom, leaving no sphere of our daily lives untouched.
Beware the Marxist Cycle
Its deconstruction agenda takes three main forms: Marxism dehumanizes all persons, demoralizes all relationships, and decivilizes all institutions.
Dehumanizing all persons. No one is anything more than his or her DNA and appearance, plus whatever animal instincts he happens to feel at a given time. From this comes identity politics, racial and sexual polarization, group victimhood, and group guilt. This logically results in demoralizing relationships.
Demoralizing all relationships. Since individuals are mere meat in motion, and existence is mere randomness, morality as all the world religions have known it is gone. No two people can interact on the basis of objective right and wrong.
What’s right or good is instead the mere product of quantitative mass (how many persons want it) times qualitative intensity (how much emotion they express). Dignity, property, marital and family ties, marketplace exchanges, contracts and promises, tradition and heritage, vulnerability, duty, love, and life itself — all go to zero.
Decivilizing all institutions. People and relationships having thus been zeroed out. Institutions of whatever sort, including communities or nations, obviously cannot stand either. An institution is but an agreement or understanding entered into by people, meant to outlive them and endure through time, all of which is viewed as absurd and dissolves under the acid of dialectical materialism. All bets are off.
Civis, Latin for city, which gives rise to our ideas of civilization and civility, civics and the citizen, goes on the ash heap of history. Language, the institution enabling people in communities to communicate — even to seek and express truth — gets trashed as well. Truth is whatever one wants it to be. Plain speaking must bow to political correctness, itself a purely Marxist term.
Marxism Says Some Lives Matter More Than Others
It bears repeating that life is devalued to zero under this nightmare of deconstruction America is now experiencing. One can draw a connection to George Orwell’s anti-Marxist masterpiece “Animal Farm.” All animals are equal, says Napoleon the pig reassuringly. It’s just that some animals are more equal than others.
In the same way, we’re now being told some lives matter more than others by the leaders of a mass movement decivilizing our cities and seeking to incite a race war. It shouldn’t surprise us that one of those leaders has bluntly and proudly said on camera, “We’re trained Marxists.” Hearing that, do we shrug and make excuses for her since, after all, a lot of pain can accompany being black in this country?
Or are we shocked at the cynicism that would so disserve the very people her movement claims to champion? Are we surprised at the gullibility of so many of our fellow citizens of all colors who would trust a Marxist to do anything but defame and damage the United States of America at every opportunity?
If we’re not shocked, angered, and determined to turn back this and every attempt at deconstructing our country by the disciples and dupes of Marx, a hater of humanity and agent of evil, we are unworthy of our forebears’ sacrifices and our descendants’ hopes.
If we’re inclined to glide past the Marxist fingerprints all over America’s current turmoil, chalking it up to “wokeness” or “cancel culture” or “the left” or some other vague fad we assume will flare up for a while and then burn out, we’re not paying attention.
It was specifically Marx’s ideas, according to the “Black Book of Communism,” that took 100 million lives worldwide in the last century. How many more will they take in this one? That’s up to you and me. We can’t say we weren’t warned.