Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal offered a deeply reported analysis of the young socialists who are fueling the Democratic Party’s lurch to the left in the past years, tracing it back to economic anxieties of the Great Recession. There’s an eye-opening description of a meeting of communists in Philadelphia:
On a recent evening, 15 comrades from the Northwest Philadelphia cell of the Revolutionary Communists of America gathered for their weekly meeting in a classroom at Thomas Jefferson University.
The mostly 20- and 30-somethings had eschewed the Mao caps and Che Guevara T-shirts of previous generations. Soon, though, terms like “ruling class,” “parasitic,” “bourgeoisie” and “dialectic” were bandied about the room as they settled into an earnest discussion of the assigned reading, an article entitled “Morality and the Class Struggle.” References to the 2008 crisis were also plentiful. Several members invoked it when explaining what prompted them to ditch “the milquetoast” left, as one called it.
Zach Bickel, 34, blamed the crisis for taking his father’s job and causing his community in central Pennsylvania to be “whittled away.”
“The system never really recovered from 2008,” said Nico Melton, 25, who claimed to have become disillusioned while studying at the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania, the capitalist bastion that is Trump’s alma mater. Melton was one of just a few members when the cell was formed about a year ago.
At times, the meeting felt like a support group—in this case, for people suffering from the modern economy. Communism, they acknowledged, hadn’t worked anywhere in the world it had been attempted—at least not yet.
Now, I just want you to take a moment to savor the off-the-charts arrogance to look at the entire evil history of communism, with its gulags, secret police, invasions, wholesale suppression of dissent and free speech, political prisoners, forced labor camps, the Holodomor, the Great Purge, the Cultural Revolution in China, the Cambodian genocide, and modern-day North Korea . . . and then to conclude, “Yes, but we can make it work better. It will be different when we do it!”
Every previous group of communists has been equally convinced that this time, everything will turn out differently, concentrating massive amounts of power in the state won’t lead to the corruption of those running it, the stifling of dissent will be for the greater good, the state punishment of those who disagree will be fair and not abusive, and a worker’s paradise is just a five-year plan away. It would be funny if it didn’t represent such willful blindness, and if people like this weren’t gaining more strength in the modern Democratic Party.