During the past year, the American people have witnessed leftists steamroll the national Democratic Party into adopting their radical agenda.
The Biden-Sanders unity agreement, released in late July, is a bold expression of socialist ideology the self-scribed "moderate" Joe Biden claimed he rejected during his quest to obtain the presidential nomination.
That manifesto, former U.S. Senator Phil Gramm observed, "envisions the socialism of an all-encompassing welfare state, with virtually every need a right, and every right guaranteed by taxpayer funding."
Many have been asking how these firebrands managed to seize control of the Democratic Party from old time liberals.
The succinct answer: It didn't happen overnight.
In fact, leftist power players who believe our nation's public institutions are evil and oppressive have been working for decades to destroy our cultural and civic norms.
That movement began to take root in the 1960s. The esteemed journalist, Theodore H. White, in his narrative history of American politics in action, The Making of the President 1968, published in 1969, described the fledging culture war thusly:
Within this new culture was not only much good and elegance and concern, but also new ingredients of hate, indulgence and all-staining cynicism. The marvel of American politics previously had been its ability to channel passion into peaceful choice of directions. In 1968, hate burst out of the channel, and hate, whether from student ideologues, unabashed white racists or black extremists, incubated further hate, loosing lunatics, gunmen, rock-throwers and club-wielders. Roosevelt, in 1933, declaimed that the "only thing we have to fear is fear itself, nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror." One might paraphrase this diagnosis and apply it to the politics of 1968 by saying that all we have to hate today is hate itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified hate.
When the leftist purveyors of hate realized their rioting caused a backlash that elected Richard Nixon president in 1968, they changed their tactics. They turned to peacefully invading the system they despised, to bring down the system.
The well-hidden efforts to radically change our way of life and to destroy our democracy, were detected and described by two academics, Rael and Erich Isaac, as early as 1980 in their book The Coercive Utopians: Social Deception by America's Power Players.
These smug utopians, described in the Isaacs book, believe our social construct is irredeemably corrupt, that human nature is malleable and, therefore, man will reach a state of perfection if they can impose their Marxist-inspired cultural, economic and environmental ideological formulas on society.
To eliminate our bourgeoise society's "false consciousness" these utopians have utilized the rhetoric of egalitarianism and social justice to convince many Americans that our nation is racist and wicked, and patriotism and nationalism are inherently evil.
To advance their cause, the Isaacs point out, these radicals bamboozled major foundations and federal, state and local governments to fund their think tanks, community action groups and training schools.
They infiltrated public employee unions, feminist and gay groups, the National Council of Churches, the Legal Service Corporation, the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, mainstream media outlets, government social agencies, universities, local schools and the Democratic Party.
Disciples in think tanks and academia developed revisionist and alternative textbooks that argue American History has been "nothing more than a litany of oppression, slavery and expectations."
Righteous indignation expressed in classrooms for two generations has led, historian Richard Ellis noted in The Dark Side of the Left, "to a stunning intolerance of diverse opinions [and] in the contemporary academic environment this intolerance, ironically sometimes manifests itself in the name of ‘diversity.'"
And as these emboldened Marxists have been seizing control of the Democratic Party and have been taking to the streets in our urban centers, why have there not been cries of outrage from old-line liberals who have historically championed "open debate" and "intellectual freedom"?
A few brave ones have come forward. One-hundred-and-fifty-three reputable liberals signed in August, a "letter on Justice and Open Debate," published in Harper's magazine, in "defense of rational thought and free expression against the ideological coercion of the left."
But most liberals are intimidated. Fearing they may be ostracized or fired, they remain silent or appease the utopian Marxists.
In a trenchant essay, "The Challenge of Marxism" (Quillette, August 16, 2020), Yoram Hazony, argues that the liberals have not yet found a way to persuasively challenge the Marxist's attempt at a "revolutionary reconstitution of society" that "cannot co-exist with Democratic government."
Hazony concludes that "liberals will have to choose between two alternatives: either they will submit to Marxists, and help them bring Democracy to an end. Or they will assemble a pro-Democracy Alliance with conservatives."
He makes a good point.
If there is not an offensive of like-minded Americans on the right and left, the implementation of coercive utopian programs will, as the Isaacs wrote in 1980, "accelerate the decline in our standard of living, erode our Democratic system, and may well result in the loss of genuine national independence."
George J. Marlin, a former executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is the author of "The American Catholic Voter: Two Hundred Years of Political Impact," and "Christian Persecutions in the Middle East: A 21st Century Tragedy." He is chairman of Aid to the Church in Need-USA. Mr. Marlin also writes for TheCatholicThing.org and the Long Island Business News. Read George J. Marlin's Reports — More Here.
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