The Communist States of America

A preferred ploy of left-wing change agents is to ridicule critics when they point out the undeniable parallels between the goals of today’s “progressive” movement, to include the Democratic Party in general, and the goals of the early, and very much still alive, communist movement.

If, for instance, one mentions the historical fact that nearly every adult who, at any time, was in any position of influence over a young, soon-to-be-radicalized Barry Soetoro was an avowed communist, to include his own parents, then one is immediately mocked and dismissed as a neo-McCarthyite hack pining for the bygone days of the Red Scare. This is an evasive ad hominem strategy employed by those who are caught, for lack of a better word, red-handed.

To all this I say, if the jackboot fits, wear it. If it quacks like a commie and goose-steps like a commie, then a commie it is.

There are multiple layers within “progressivism’s” pseudo-utopian, truly dystopian Marxist philosophy. The left’s lust for redistributionist statism is well known. Less understood, however, is the progressive rush toward cultural Marxism.

Cultural Marxism entails, among other things, that secularist aspect of left-wing statist ideology that seeks, within society, to supplant traditional values, norms and mores with postmodern moral relativism. Cultural Marxists endeavor to scrub America of her Judeo-Christian, constitutional-republican founding principles and take, instead, a secular-statist Sharpie to our beloved U.S. Constitution.

Historian and U.S. military affairs expert William S. Lind describes cultural Marxism as “a branch of western Marxism, different from the Marxism-Leninism of the old Soviet Union. It is commonly known as ‘multiculturalism’ or, less formally, Political Correctness. From its beginning, the promoters of cultural Marxism have known they could be more effective if they concealed the Marxist nature of their work, hence the use of terms such as ‘multiculturalism.’”

Pastor, attorney and Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate Scott Lively is globally admired by liberty-loving traditionalists. Conversely, he’s universally reviled by cultural Marxists. He drills down a bit deeper: “Cultural Marxism is a variation of the Marxist strategy to build a utopian socialist order on the ashes of Christian civilization, but through subversion of the moral culture, especially the elimination of the natural family, rather than solely through destruction of capitalism.”

True though this may be, the ideological seeds of contemporary cultural Marxism nonetheless sprout from deep within the dead soil of historical communism. It is not economic redistributionism alone through which progressives seek to both “fundamentally transform America” and otherwise conquer the world, but, rather, and perhaps primarily, it is also through victory over the pejoratively tagged “social issues” (i.e., the sanctity of marriage, natural human sexuality and morality, ending the abortion holocaust, religious liberty, the Second Amendment and the like).

This is neither speculative nor hyperbolic. Both the historical record and the U.S. congressional record bear out this sinister reality. Regrettably, today’s “low-information voters,” as Rush Limbaugh calls them—to include the useful idiots within the GOP’s moderate and libertarian wings—are simply too lazy, shortsighted or both to learn the facts.

“Surrender on the ‘social issues’!” demands the GOP’s cultural Marxist-enabling kamikazes.

In 1963, U.S. Rep. A.S. Herlong Jr., D-Fla., read into the congressional record a list of “Current Communist Goals” as enumerated by Dr. Cleon Skousen in The Naked Communist, penned in 1958. I encourage you to read the whole list, but for now let’s focus on those goals that most closely align with the seditious agenda of America’s progressive movement. It’s actually most of them. Though Herlong was a Democrat, the list reads like today’s Democratic Party platform.

How far has fallen the party of the jackass:

• Develop the illusion that total disarmament by the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
• Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist [or, today, Islamic] affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
• Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist [or Islamic] domination.
• Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
• Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces.
• Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
• Do away with all loyalty oaths.
• Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
• Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
• Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
• Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing and policymaking positions.
• Gain control of key positions in radio, TV and motion pictures.
• Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. (An American communist cell was told to “eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms.”)
• Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them censorship and a violation of free speech and free press.
• Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio and TV.
• Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.”
• Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with social religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a “religious crutch.”
• Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of separation of church and state.
• Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs and a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
• Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the “common man.”
• Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the “big picture.”
• Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture—education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
• Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
• Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
• Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders that no one but psychiatrists can understand [or treat].
• Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose communist goals.
• Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
• Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition, that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use “united force” to solve economic, political or social problems.
• Internationalize the Panama Canal.
• Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over domestic problems. Give the World Court jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.

If achieving these specific communist goals was the final “progressive” step toward the larger goal of securing communist governance in America, then, tragically, progressives have realized that larger goal.

Look around. We are no longer the United States of America. We have become the Communist States of America.

Which means, for those who love liberty, revolution is once again at hand.

Matt Barber (@jmattbarber on Twitter) is an author, columnist, cultural analyst and an attorney concentrating in constitutional law. Having retired as an undefeated heavyweight professional boxer, Matt has taken his fight from the ring to the culture war.