Comrade Kamala? It’s Not As Crazy As It Sounds

The dreary Kamala Harris has taken to calling Donald Trump “fascist,” most recently in an interview this week with a popular radio host. She is not the only one—Gen. Mark Milley, who headed the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Trump’s presidency, has done the same—but this is the kind of silliness that the ruling class tells itself about any right-of-center politician who threatens their settled picture of the world. They say it of Viktor Orbán and other European leaders of the untamed Right. They said it of Trump in 2016 too, of course; somehow, America got through his presidency without brownshirts taking to the streets, or grabbing the Sudetenland. 

To be fair, a number of MAGA online partisans call Harris a “communist.” At first glance, it’s risible to associate the nasal San Francisco dingbat with the same philosophy that drove Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. It’s true at second glance too: Harris is a vacuous front woman for the American establishment. When you have proudly accepted the endorsement of the arch-neoconservative Dick Cheney, one of the chief architects of the Iraq War, you can be many things—hypocrite and warmonger come to mind—but devotee of Marxism is not one of them.

That said, reading Bard College historian Sean McMeekin’s new book, To Overthrow The World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism left me with the unshakable feeling that the MAGA shriekers are more correct about Kamala than one might think. They exaggerate, surely, but despite the absence of Chardonnay gulags, the unsettling truth is that they have a point. This claim requires unpacking.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once said that though there are many strands of Communism in the world, what they all have in common is a hatred of the existing social order. Along these lines, McMeekin writes:

As long as people dream of brotherhood between men, of equal rights for women or for racial or ethnic minorities, or, in the current jargon, of “social justice,” some version of Communism will retain broad popular appeal, enticing young idealists—along with ambitious older politicians who may or may not share in the idealism but are tempted by the promise of an all-encompassing state granting them vast power over their subjects—to champion its cause. 

Can anyone deny that this is what the mainstream democratic Left now stands for, both in North America and in Europe? The conservative Polish statesman and philosopher Ryszard Legutko has explained how apparatchiks of Eastern Europe’s failed Communist regimes remade themselves into faithful left-wing Eurocrats, without having to change their fundamental stripes. Similarly, in America, the social justice movement derisively called “wokeness” has transformed the left-liberal Democratic Party and many of its elite backers into a cabal of authoritarian utopians who advocate a softer form of totalitarianism.

McMeekin quotes the anarchist theoretician Mikhail Bakunin saying Marx’s ideal could work only “by means of the dictatorial power of [a] learned minority, which supposedly expresses the will of the people.” Along these lines, the Polish ex-communist Czesław Miłosz once said that intellectuals are drawn to Communism because it allows them to tell everybody else what to do. True, they do not have dictatorial power, but one cannot fail to look closely at Harris and her progressive cohorts without seeing their contempt for ordinary Americans and the country’s history and traditions. 

In 2021, Harris made a statement on Columbus Day, the once-uncontroversial holiday marking the European explorer’s discovery of the New World, by condemning the violence and subjugation Europeans wrought on native peoples. In 2019, she endorsed The New York Times’s 1619 Project, an absurdly ahistorical ideological attempt to delegitimize the constitutional foundation of the United States by claiming that America was founded for the purpose of enslaving Africans. 

Though nobody can assert that the European conquest of the New World was entirely unproblematic from a moral point of view, the bizarre fact remains that Harris is now running to be president of a country whose roots—both in the early modern Era of Exploration and the establishment of the United States—she regards as poisonous weeds. 

Harris’s unpatriotic contempt for the American founding doesn’t come from nowhere. Since the so-called Great Awokening began around 2012, progressive activists have increasingly sought to delegitimize historical American figures of European origin, and have even resorted to violence to erase their presence in statues and monuments. It began with Confederate generals, but spread to the Founding Fathers and other American greats. Just this week in Chicago, someone defaced a statue of Illinois native Abraham Lincoln,  preserver of the Union and liberator of the slaves. 

For years, in statement after statement, Harris has endorsed “equity,” as distinct from the more familiar “equality”. Equality means equality of opportunity; equity means equality of outcome. To the progressive mind, any unequal result is evidence of bigotry. This, for instance, is why the left-wing state of Oregon abolished in 2020 requirements that its high school graduates show proficiency in reading and mathematics. Too many students of color reached the end of their high school careers unable to read or compute; therefore, minimal standards must be racist. This is Communist-style social leveling, straight up. 

The progressive mania to saturate every institution with “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) has brought horrific results. Over the past several years, as the U.S. military has embraced DEI, a number of military personnel have shared with me their frustration and anger over how race, sex, and gender have come to be more important than professional competence within the armed forces. 

What’s more, DEI ideology has thoroughly penetrated military institutions. One active-duty officer who graduated from the elite military academy West Point recently told me at length how soldiers like him are forced to sit through, for example, lectures on transgenderism that can best be understood as ideological indoctrination. The U.S. Navy, suffering a recruitment crisis, has turned to a sailor who moonlights as a drag queen in an effort to appeal to young Americans (it’s not working). A university study last year found that the US military has turned into “a vast DEI bureaucracy.” 

America used to produce a military that prioritized fighting wars. Now, under progressive leadership, it has produced a military that seems at least as focused on fighting the culture war against Americans who dissent from a left-wing ideal of “social justice.” It is well understood by historians that the Soviet Red Army suffered massive casualties in World War II because Stalin prioritized ideological purity over basic competence. Kamala Harris is not Josef Stalin, heaven knows, but the emphasis on politics over professionalism in the military can only ever degrade America’s war-fighting capacity.

In the postwar decades, America’s university system has been one of its greatest strengths. But under the long march of the social justice militants through educational institutions, the universities have become factories churning out frightened conformists who are afraid to debate or advance real scholarship. The examples are legion, but it’s worth reading this new, long report in The New York Times about how the University of Michigan has spent a staggering $250 million on DEI programs, with nothing to show for it except the creation of a vast authoritarian bureaucracy that has transformed the campus into a cesspit of fear, grievance, and alienation.

Communism destroyed the universities of Russia and the European countries where it was in power. But even the Soviets knew better, in general, than to compel scientific and technological education to conform to ideological categories. Not American progressives, who have wrecked the reputations of venerable institutions like the journals Nature and Scientific American by remaking them around DEI ideology. They have done the same thing to established standards of scientific education and practice. 

To cite but one example, medical science has been captured by DEI to a shocking degree. The U.S. Supreme Court will be hearing this term a case on transgender health care that has revealed deep ideological corruption in medical standards concerning trans medical interventions on children. Rachel Levine, a senior transgender official in the Biden-Harris administration, lobbied WPATH, the international medical association governing trans medicine standards, to remove all obstacles to full sex-change treatment for kids.

Indeed, it is on the matter of sex and sexuality that the contemporary Left, even in its dilettantish bourgeois avatars like Kamala Harris, has been the most revolutionary. Three years ago, European leaders howled in protest when the Hungarian government passed a law protecting Hungarian children from gender ideology and sexual propaganda. The Biden-Harris ambassador in Budapest never misses an opportunity to bash the Hungarians for what he considers to be their backward stance on LGBT matters.

The Hungarians know from their history what they are dealing with. During the short-lived 1919 Hungarian Soviet dictatorship of Bela Kún, Marxist intellectual Gyorgy Lukács laid the groundwork for the most significant revolution of the twentieth century. Sean McMeekin writes:

As commissar of culture in 1919, he took a more radical line than Lunacharsky had in Russia, introducing sex education as early as primary school. His aim was overturning “bourgeois” morals on monogamy, premarital sex, and female chastity. Drawing on the lessons of the Hundred Days, Lukács argued, in History and Class Consciousness (1922), that Communism could “come into existence only as a conscious transformation of the whole of society.” Or, as Lukács recalled in a memoir essay, he had come to see “revolutionary destruction as the one and only solution to the cultural contradictions of the epoch.” Embraced and embellished by the avant-garde Marxists of the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt University (the “Frankfurt School”), Lukács’s ideas later helped inform the “sexual revolution” that swept across the Western world in the 1960s, by way of Frankfurt School disciples such as Herbert Marcuse and Charles Reich. 

The introduction into mass society of something that had never existed anywhere before—same-sex marriage—could only have been possible because of the Sexual Revolution four or five decades earlier. Same-sex marriage was the necessary precursor to the normalization of transgenderism. In 2015, shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court constitutionally mandated gay marriage, a university scholar who studies the family told me that the real turning point was not gay marriage, but transgenderism.

If trans ideology becomes mainstream, it will destroy our civilization, he said. Why? Because, he went on, the gender binary is so fundamental to our social reality that it has never been seriously challenged, and we have constructed an entire civilization assuming its reality. If we deny it, we will remove the bolts from civilization’s structure in ways we cannot predict. 

What he didn’t say, but might have done, is that a people who can be convinced that male and female are nothing but socially defined categories having nothing to do with biology can be convinced of anything. That’s where we are today. Not only has the Biden-Harris administration said that trans rights are “the civil rights issue of our time,” but Harris in 2019 came out in favor of offering state-funded sex change operations for trans-identified inmates, including illegal migrants. 

The list could go on, but the point is clear. The Austrian economist F.A. Hayek once called “the prevailing belief in ‘social justice’ … probably the gravest threat to most other values of a free civilization.” Why? Because it is, said Hayek, “a quasireligious superstition” that stops at nothing to enslave free people by its dictates. 

McMeekin said that the purest manifestation of Communism was the Khmer Rouge dictatorship of Pol Pot, which commandeered Cambodia in the 1970s, and turned that country into a killing field. The historian writes:

What was singular in Cambodia was the all-encompassing “year zero” ambition of the Khmer Rouge. Here Communism was reduced to its essentials, as a negation of everything existing, a war of the young on the old, a social leveling of society down to equality in abject poverty and misery.

McMeekin quotes a 1974 warning from Kenneth Quinn, a U.S. State Department analyst, who said that the Khmer Rouge intended to achieve perfect social justice by 

“stripping away … the traditional bases, structures and forces which have guided an individual’s life,” from parental authority, religion, and royal tradition to even things such as “traditional songs and dances,” unit “he is left an atomized, isolated individual unit; and then rebuilding him according to party doctrine and substituting a series of new values.” To achieve this, the Khmer Rouge would destroy everything that made up Cambodian tradition and civilization, which was all “anathema that must be destroyed.”

Pol Pot achieved that through mass murder. Kamala Harris and her fellow progressive elites are getting there far more gently and gradually—but the goal is the same: to rebuild humanity and human nature according to utopian progressive ideals. To object is to draw down the outrage and condemnation of the Left. In a 2021 essay in New Criterion, the eminent geopolitics journalist Robert D. Kaplan quoted Solzhenitsyn on how elite left-wing social pressure paved the way for the Soviet catastrophe:

For a long time now it has been dangerous to stand in the way of revolution, and risk-free to assist it. Those who have renounced all traditional Russian values, the revolutionary horde, the locusts from the abyss, vilify and blaspheme and no one dares challenge them. A left-wing newspaper can print the most subversive of articles, a left-wing speaker can deliver the most incendiary of speeches—but just try pointing out the dangers of such utterances and the whole leftist camp will raise a howl of denunciation.

The subtitle of McMeekin’s new book is “The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism”. What does he mean by that second rise? Communism did not, in fact, fall into history’s dustbin with the collapse of the Soviet model and Soviet empire. The heirs to Mao in China have reinvented it as a form of Communist Party-led fascism (‘fascism’ defined as the joining of corporate power with state power, as distinct from the classical communist concept of all power belonging to the state). 

McMeekin says that “most of the Western world is now converging instead on a hybrid Chinese Communist model of statist governance and social life.” Social media is increasingly controlled. Elon Musk is now the No. 1 villain to progressive elites in North America and Europe. After Musk bought the social media giant, he revealed internal documents from the previous ownership showing that Twitter was “not only collaborating with the White House and other government agencies to censor or ban certain accounts and information, but was actually paid $3.4 million by the FBI to share confidential user information.” 

We now know, he continues, that social media companies, “often on orders from the US government,” have been keeping track of and censoring dissident viewpoints on matters like Russian policy, claims of election fraud, and COVID mandates. Indeed, the historian calls the COVID interlude a trial run for imposing mass social control on a population. The Canadian removal of banking liberty from truckers protesting vaccine mandates set a precedent; in 2023, British populist politician Nigel Farage discovered that his own London private bank cut ties with him over his political beliefs. The only thing standing in the way of a Chinese-style social credit system coming to Western democracies is the willingness of progressive politicians to impose one, and the ability of the masses to resist. 

Says McMeekin, of our soft totalitarian present and future:

Because modern-day thought commissars often work in the private sector (or for companies aligned with state intelligence), these new Western forms of social control may be more insidious than the cruder methods of physical intimidation and violence deployed by the NKVD, the Stasi, and Mao’s Red Guards: many victims deprived of their jobs, funds, reputation, or basic civil right may not even know who their accusers are. Far from dead, Communism as a governing template seems only to be getting started.

When Donald Trump, along with his MAGA meme lords, condemn the Democratic presidential nominee as a Communist and deem her “Comrade Kamala,” they might seem like the demagogic opposite of Bakhunin’s “learned minority” that seeks the power to revolutionize free societies. But those crude partisans see something real that the more sophisticated among us do not.