The Democrat Party’s nominee for mayor of New York City is Zohran Mamdani, a 33 year old anti-semitic Muslim who was born in Uganda but immigrated to the United States with his parents. His mother is a noted film director, his father a professor at Columbia University. His prosperous parents sent him to prestigious schools, including Bowdoin College, but he won the mayoral primary claiming to be a man of the people. He worked as a housing counselor and musician before winning a seat in the New York State Assembly. He then won the city primary by promising a bundle of left-wing goals such as affordable housing, free public buses, city owned grocery stores, raising taxes on corporations and white neighborhoods. As a self-proclaimed socialist he rather represents (and is significantly supported by) America’s millennials and indicates the power of Marxism in large sectors of the nation.
To better understand why so many Americans support socialists such as Mamdani and Senator Bernie Sanders, I read Nathan Robinson’s Why You Should Be a Socialist (New York: St. Martin’s Publishing Group, c. 2019; Kindle Edition). Robinson is a graduate of Yale Law School an founder/editor of a magazine, Current Affairs, who found his political compass in the “occupy wall street” movement and Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns. (Much of this book was first written as articles for his magazine). He writes to persuade us that the Left’s agenda is the only right one. Though he prefers to label himself a “democratic socialist” he could easily be taken for a communist, though he does express his distress over what happened in Russia, China, Cuba, Cambodia, Venezuela, etc. He’s a socialist, he says, because he’s outraged by injustices of various sorts—poverty, homelessness, children dying, unequal schools, racism, national borders—and cannot rest until they are rectified. He wants us to dream big dreams—admittedly utopian dreams—and then work to make the world a wonderful place.
Robinson devotes chapters to denouncing liberalism and conservatism, Neo-liberalism and free enterprise capitalism. Though reluctantly admitting much good has transpired in American history, overall things have turned out poorly for the poor. He thinks only socialism provides an ethical social philosophy. It “leads not just to substantive convictions, but to radical ideas about how the world ought to and can be. From its humanitarian sympathies, it derives a vision: it seeks a world in which people do not go to war; there are no class, racial, and gender hierarchies; there are no significant imbalances of power; there is no poverty coexisting alongside wealth; and everyone leads a pleasant and fulfilled life. That’s not the world we currently live in, which is unequal, violent, and full of poor people. Socialists will not rest until we have averted environmental catastrophe and eliminated suicide, malnourishment, and tyranny, whether that of the autocrat or of the boss. That’s ambitious, but it’s hardly some vague statement about loving the underdog” (p. 109).
There’s no transcendent or religious dimension to this book, no reason given as to why one should support Robinson’s agenda. He’s an outspoken atheist, acknowledging there’s no clue in the cosmos as to why we’re here or what we should do. So it’s ironic but enlightening to find Robinson quoting one of the most pessimistic philosophers in history, Arthur Schopenhauer, who, in The Basis of Morality, provides what passes for Robinson’s ethicalal foundation: “Boundless compassion for all living beings is the surest and most certain guarantee of pure moral conduct, and needs no casuistry. Whoever is filled with it will assuredly injure no one, do harm to no one, encroach on no man’s rights; he will rather have regard for every one, forgive every one, help every one as far as he can, and all his actions will bear the stamp of justice and loving-kindness.” In short, Schopenhauer cited an old East Indian prayer: ‘‘May all living beings be delivered from pain.’ Tastes differ; but in my opinion there is no more beautiful prayer than this.”
You Should Be a Socialist is not a deeply philosophical or persuasive treatise, but it is well-written and informative, giving insight into the reasons so many Americans (especially young, unmarried people like Robinson) support the position.
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Responding to the growing popularity and power of socialism and representing a goodly number of conservative women, Liz Wheeler has written Hide Your Children: Exposing the Marxists Behind the Attack on America’s Kids (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishers, c. 2023; Kindle Edition). Wheeler hosts a popular podcast but does serious research in order to give her presentation credibility. She writes because she believes the U.S., “its history, its founding ideals, and its moral fabric” are endangered. “The insanity aimed at our children in public schools, in science and medicine, from corporations, on social media, in government, and in entertainment is escalating. The left is waging a deliberate, relentless attack on our children” (p. x). Still more: “The left has torched the nuclear family as outdated and oppressive, redefined marriage, substituted the relativism of ‘gender’ in place of the reality of sex, restricted political free speech, vilified religion as a haven of bigotry, trashed our shared patriotic history, and denied that there is such a thing as objective truth. They have taught this at all levels of education—including elementary schools, high schools, and universities—across the country” (p. xi). We need to wake up and realize that this is being deliberately done by full-fledged Marxists.
They are not the Marxists who staged the Russian Revolution a century ago. They are modern Marxists implementing the ideas of Antonio Gramsci—an Italian who proposed slowly infiltrating institutions rather than staging armed upheavals. His theories weren’t well known in America until a Notre Dame professor, Joseph Buttigieg (the father of President Biden’s Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg) translated Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks 30 years ago. “Gramsci identified many pillars of culture that need to be attacked in order to tear down the norms on which the proletariat relies, but chief among them were religion, family, education, media, and law” (p. 5).
Wheeler believes American Marxists have successfully subverted the churches, the schools, the media, and law. Only the traditional, nuclear family still stands—and it is under vicious attack. Marx and Engles and most utopian socialists deeply disliked it, as did Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex and Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique, which quickly sold millions of copies and ignited a radical feminist movement that had far-reaching consequences. Frieden “decried marriage and motherhood” and urged women to escape their cages by pursuing careers and shunning traditional norms. Though she pretended to simply be an unhappy housewife, Frieden was in fact a radical agitator, a deeply committed Marxist. Women following her changed the country. Consequently: “In 1960, about 5 percent of American births were to unmarried women. Since then, that number has octupled to about 40 percent. It’s also true, as the Center for Children and Families notes, that, ’70% percent of gang members, high school dropouts, teen suicides, teen pregnancies and teen substance abusers come from single mother homes’” (p. 29).
One disturbing consequence of the war against the family is its impact upon men. “Toxic masculinity” has become an anathema to be hurled at men doing manly things. Thus the wife of California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, said that boys should never be urged “to be a man.” Compared to girls, today’s boys do poorly in schools, get lower grades, are less likely to attend college, and are more likely to drop out. Unmarried women now earn more than their male counterparts. Men are more likely to commit suicide, do drugs, and have a lower life-expectancy than women. No longer expected to marry and have children, no longer admired for protecting and providing for their wives, young men are confused and unsure where they fit into their world. “Marxists understand that masculinity is a problem, something that needs to be undermined. Destroy men, destroy their role as a protector—a defender of a wife, children, society—and you can then overthrow that society” (p. 39).
Homosexuals have clearly played a prominent role in subverting the traditional family. Linking hands with radical feminists they have successfully insisted we use “gender” rather than “sex” when referring to men and women, and they claim that “gender” is self-affirmed rather than biologically given. A spokesmen for this position, Gayle Rubin, “argues for gender ‘identities’ without essence—across a wide and fluid gender spectrum unrelated to biological sex. This is the basis of gender identity. Rubin says that ‘gender’ is merely a social construct, and therefore mutable, as changeable as we desire. Finally, Rubin encourages transgression, which is a fancy way of claiming that no sexual behavior is immoral as long as it is consensual. This area of Queer Theory is deeply disturbing, especially in its consequences for children, as we’ll soon see. Queer Theory is an offshoot of Marxist Critical Theory, and like Critical Race Theory, is a rejection of objective reality” (p. 59).
Public schools easily embrace critical theories in part because they follow the agenda of Paulo Freire, a Brazilian Marxist who exemplified today’s “woke” culture. In his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire proposed replacing traditional curricula—a “banking method” emphasizing memorization, grammar, mathematical formulae, etc.—with critical thinking in order to dismantle the status quo and prepare for a fairer world through revolution. Teachers should work alongside students, becoming “co-learners” rather than authorities, concerned more with changing the world than understanding it. “Freire wanted to reeducate children to view the world through the lens of Critical Theory, destroy objective reality, replace truth with relativism, divide society into an oppressor class versus an oppressed class, and agitate for Marxist revolution. Freire wanted to ‘awaken’ children’s ‘critical consciousness’ to see the world through a Marxist filter. American citizens who today accept ‘wokeness’ are in fact accepting Freire’s Marxist worldview” (p. 108). In many of our schools, his ideas take the form of “social justice” or “social-emotional learning” (SEL) emphases and pervade a variety of courses.
The current president of the California State Board of Education, Linda Darling-Hammond is one of the most influential educators in America who lectures across the nation, frequently citing Freire. The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal says she “is one of the most assigned authors in the education departments at leading universities.” She was an education advisor to Barack Obama and served on Joe Biden’s 2020 transition team. Equally significant is Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the nation’s second-largest teachers’ union. As was clear during the COVID panic, when she insisted public schools close, she is a powerful lobbyist who funds ($44 million a year) dozens of Democrat politicians. She’s “a middle-aged lesbian ‘married’ to a lesbian rabbi famous for her LGBTQ+ activism” (p. 114). She “openly pushes neo-Marxist agendas in schools” and represents everything Wheeler opposes. Yet another lesbian, Emily Drabinski, is the president of the American Library Association and routinely identifies as a Marxist. is an open, self-proclaimed Marxist. With women such as these shaping the educational philosophy of the public schools, it’s no surprise to find Wheeler promoting home-schooling.
To protect our children, Wheeler says we must first be realistic regarding the state of the schools. She cites the famous words of Ronald Reagan, who said, in 1961: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well-taught lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same. And if you and I don’t do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” If we admit that the Marxists have gained significant traction in the schools, we must fight them by recovering the philosophical foundations of our founding fathers—John Locke, Edmund Burke, Thomas Jefferson, et al.
More importantly, we must work to restore our Christian foundations. The real battle, Wheeler believes, is between good and evil. In 1878 Pope Leo XIII condemned socialism as a “deadly plague that is creeping into the very fibers of human society and leading it on to the verge of destruction.” Fifty years later Pope Pius XI said: “The evil we must combat is at its origin primarily an evil of the spiritual order. From this polluted source the monstrous emanations of the communistic system flow with satanic logic.” Indeed, he continued: “Communism is by its nature anti-religious. It considers religion as ‘the opiate of the people’ because the principles of religion which speak of a life beyond the grave dissuade the proletariat from the dream of a Soviet paradise which is of this world.” To combat communism we need to restore the “natural law” to its proper place, well embedded in the Christian tradition and markedly evident in the words of this nation’s Founders.
There’s lots to be done and lots of places where we can improve things. Simply going to church and practicing you faith is an important step! Healthy churches make for healthy communities. Homeschooling where possible or holding school boards accountable is also needed. Opposing various “social justice” programs is essential—whether in schools or corporations or government agencies. Be realistic but not pessimistic! There is in fact much that can be done and much to hope for. Concerned parents will benefit from Liz Wheeler’s data and arguments in Hide Your Children.
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Mark Levin thinks we are in the midst of a “counter-revolution” designed to overturn the 18th century American Revolution which gave us our constitutional republic, and makes his case in American Marxism (New York: Simon & Schuster, c. 2021; Kindle Edition). The current variety of Marxism enlists utopian dreamers who think they can create a wonderful world if only they gain power as well as discontented persons and groups motivated by envy and the desire to destroy whatever displeases them. Noting the presence of mobs led by Antifa and BLM, Levin takes to their philosophical architects—Rousseau, Hegel, Marx—who inspired American progressives a century ago. They were committed to the redistribution of wealth, and John Dewey clearly embodied them, exercising enormous influence over the nation’s government and schools. To him Marx rightly raised critical questions and set forth proper proposals regarding economics and politics. He believed that, as he wrote in Individualism, Old and New: “We are in for some kind of socialism, call it by whatever name we please,” because Marx’s theory of economic determinism shaped by class struggle “is now a fact, not a theory and a central planning should be the way forward. Dewey was a professor of education, and his Marxist notions are alive and well in today’s schools and universities.
Marx famously said: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” His followers look for opportunities to do so and today, in America, they frequently focus on racial tensions, declaring minorities suffer a variety of injustices. Following the precepts of Critical Race Theory (CRT), thinkers such as Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi view America as a country dominated by whites who exploit blacks. “Individual behavior is insignificant because everyone in America functions within a society of systemic racism, structural racism, and institutional racism” (p. 87). Any disparity (wealth, education, employment, crime) results solely from racism. Illustrating CRT is the 1619 Project, set forth in a series of essays in the New York Times, declaring that when slaves arrived in Virginia this nation was founded. The story of America is a story of oppressed people doing the work that made it. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the lead author of creator of the 1619 Project, without citing sources or interacting with scholarly historians, claims that virtually everything in this country—minimum wages, prisons, highways, you name it—is tainted by the legacy of slavery.
Equally rooted in Marxism is the radical environmentalism that shaped the “Green New Deal” legislation championed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her Democrat colleagues. Though overtly concerned with the natural world, its real intent was to establish “environmental justice” and socialism. This is clearly evident in a 2014 document called the Margarita Declaration on Climate Change that began with a statement by Venezuela’s late Marxist dictator, Hugo Chávez. Disregarding the plight of Venezuela under his rule, the declaration called us to live in “‘harmony with nature, guided by absolute and ecological sustainability limits,” establishing “a fair, egalitarian model that constructs sustainable economies” untethered to fossil fuels, and securing respect for “Mother Earth, the rights of women, children, adolescents, gender diversity, the impoverished, the vulnerable minority groups and the original indigenous peoples—A fair and egalitarian model that fosters the peaceful coexistence of our peoples’” (p. 164). Responding to such rhetoric, Ian Plimer, a distinguished Australian scientist, declares: “‘Climate change catastrophism is the biggest scientific fraud that has ever occurred. Much climate ‘science’ is political ideology dressed up as science’” (p. 173). (Years ago I abandoned the Sierra Club and similar environmental organizations when it became clear to me that they were more concerned with social change than conservation.)
Levin’s work certainly exposes many issues that should concern us and offers suggestions as to how we should react—especially in areas such as education.
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While reading contemporary treatises on the socialism, I found it interesting to explore Fulton J. Sheen’s Communism and the Conscience of the West, (first published in 1948 and recently re-issued by Cluny Press, c. 2022; Kindle Edition.) He believed: ‘The ideology of Communism rose out of the secularized remnants of a Western civilization whose soul was once Christian” (p. 10). Having abandoned the Christian Faith, it proposes a this-worldly faith. It “gave the European man a religion; a counterchurch to supplant a Church, a faith to fight the Faith; the inspired gospel of Marx for the abandoned Gospel of Mark; a god of earth for a God of Heaven, a new mystical body with its visible head not in Rome but in Moscow, infallible when he speaks ex cathedra on the subject of politics and economics; and also an invisible head too terrible to be named” (p. 167). Communism is not simply an economic or political position—it is a false religion that exercises great power Consequently the world is divided between between those who believe in “the absolute who is the God-man, and the absolute which is the man-God; the God who became man, and the man who makes himself God; brothers in Christ and comrades in Antichrist” (p. 19).
Sheen sketches the historical roots of Communism, concluding that the “philosophy of dialectical materialism is nothing but a crazy quilt made up of patches of Hegel and Feuerbach sewed together to cover up the nakedness of its own ideas” (p. 73). As is evident in the many citations Sheen provides, Communists excel in criticism and destruction of the status quo but fail to create and maintain healthy societies. Its basic defect is its effort “to establish the impossible: a brotherhood of man without a fatherhood of God” (p. 95). To do Marx and Engels vigorously assailed the family as the basic (and only truly natural) unit of society. Sadly enough, Sheen lamented, the same philosophy is at work in America, evident in divorce, living together rather than marrying, and choosing to not have children. In this arena, the ideology off the Communists has gained control of America’s conscience.
The answer to the Communist threat, Sheen says, is found in the Church. Nations rise and fall, as do civilizations. But the Church continually rises again from the ashes, proclaiming its eternal Truth, that Jesus ever lives and the Kingdom of God is the only thing worth living for.