EXCLUSIVE: A REPUBLIC IN PERIL
by Joseph Kuhns
Americans seem to sense at a very deep level that something has gone very wrong with our country. But most people cannot put their finger on exactly what it is.
I will state right at the beginning of this essay what I believe is the explanation for the social and political chaos enveloping the nation and society. It is the rise of the extreme Left, the Marxist Left, in our society. They have become very influential, and even dominant in many of our vital cultural institutions, especially our education system. This is true on all levels of education, but especially in higher education. They are also influential in journalism, mass media, and Hollywood. And most ominously, the left wing of the Democratic Party clearly dominates the party and its policies.
But from the very start, I want to emphasize one thing. I am not talking about ordinary American liberals, or even moderate Democrats. I am talking about the extreme Left, the Marxist Left, or in our current parlance, the “Woke-Left”.
Where did this phenomenon come from and what are its goals? In explaining it, since I myself have never been a part of this movement, I will defer to a man who was a key member of the extreme Left earlier in his life but then had a conversion to conservatism.
As he related in his book, “Radical Son”, David Horowitz came from a family of leftists. His parents were members of the Communist Party USA. He grew up in a social world populated by leftists. For those like me who lived in the 1960's and 1970's, Horowitz was a memorable character. He was central to the anti-Vietnam War movement while I was in college in the 1960's. All of the people in the movement were avidly reading an anti-war magazine called Ramparts, which was available on newsstands. David Horowitz was one of the two editors of Ramparts.
But in the mid 1970's, shortly after the fall of Viet Nam and all Indochina to the Communists, he had a complete change of heart, abandoned the Marxist Left, and gradually became a conservative. Today, Horowitz makes his life's work trying to expose to the American people the threat to our country from the extreme Left. To do this, he founded the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Horowitz makes clear in his writing one very essential fact. The American Extreme Left hates the United States of America and wants to destroy it. It is to this goal that their efforts are directed. This is hard for many ordinary people to come to grips with, but it is true.
Many Americans naturally assumed that after the fall of the Soviet Union and other communist countries, surely American communists would recognize their errors and quietly abandon their communist views. No, Horowitz said, they would not abandon their ideas. They would instead be energized by no longer having to defend the actions of the Soviet Union, which had become like an albatross hanging round their necks. Gus Hall, the head of the American Communist Party for many years, when asked to explain the fall of Soviet and Eastern European Communism, said that there was nothing wrong with his communist ideas. The Soviets had just implemented them incorrectly.
And for those people who would be tempted to say that this hatred for America is a figment of right wing fantasy, or that it might only have been true decades ago, I would point to the present-day activities of Antifa; young leftist radicals who will violently attack those who disagree them on anything. They commonly dress all in black, often carrying flags or wearing clothing emblazoned with the communist hammer and sickle emblem.
When Mark Bray, the author of a book on Antifa was asked during an interview just who the Antifa people were, he replied “anarchists, socialists, and communists”.
In July of this year we witnessed young Americans in Washington DC and other places publicly hauling down and burning American flags during pro-Hamas demonstrations. If that doesn't indicate hatred for our country, what does?
But while they may not have given up communist ideas, most of them did make one change. They no longer publicly call themselves “communists”. Now they are “progressives”. It sounds so much better and less threatening.
I am going to engage now in a mental exercise. I am going to put myself in the place of these radical leftists and ask a simple question. If I were a member of the political far Left and had as my goal to destroy the United States of America, how would I go about doing it? What methods would I use? Let us begin.
1. To start, I would look for the key institutions, ideas, and beliefs that make the America a viable nation, then subvert, and corrupt them however I could. I would look at the civilization that America was a part of and then denigrate and discredit it in every possible way.
Unlike most countries, America is not a nation based in “blood and soil”. It is a country of people whose roots are in many foreign countries, continents, and cultures. The dominant culture is rooted in European or western civilization, but we have people from all cultures and countries. The forging of the country required that immigrants assimilate into the dominant culture, becoming familiar with and eventually adopting its major ways and tenets. That does not mean that they must completely abandon and forget the culture they came from, but rather that they become in every sense a part of their new society by learning its culture and language. We need them to feel a part of America and come to identify with their new country regardless of their ethnic or racial background.
So in my efforts to tear down the US, I would ruthlessly denigrate everything about America, its ideals, its history, its culture, its traditions, and its constitution.
2. I would want to see Americans divided and fighting with each other on the basis of race and ethnicity. Rather than celebrating a common identity, I would want Americans to see themselves instead as primarily members of this or that racial group or other identity group and in an adversarial relationship with other groups within society. I would want as many people as possible to view themselves as victims, and to wallow endlessly in that feeling of victimhood. I would endlessly expound on racial injustices from the past, but never, never talk about the enormous progress made by the country in addressing these evils.
Specifically, I would first do everything I could to promote “Identity Politics”. For identity politics indoctrinates the individual to identify not with the country but with his small part of the whole. If you belong to an ethnic, racial, or religious minority, you would be encouraged to see yourself primarily as a member of that group instead of as an American.
To facilitate this, I would make “critical race theory” central to the whole effort. Critical race theory takes the traditional Communist (Marxist) theory of history and applies it to domestic race relations. You may recall that the Marxist paradigm of history is based on the ideas of class warfare and class oppression. Humanity is divided into an oppressor class, the capitalists, and an oppressed class, the proletariat or workers. All of human history is a tale of the struggle between these two groups. According to Marx's law of history, in the end the workers inevitably win and the capitalists are defeated and suppressed. The final goal of all human history is the creation of the ideal society, a utopia, here in this world. Everyone will be equal. There will be no injustice or suffering. It will be the perfect society.
A core aspect of Marxist thought is that people are not looked upon and judged as individuals but only as members of a social class. If you a member of the upper class (capitalists) or the working class, then that is how you are to be considered, judged, and treated.
This was the basic social and political doctrine which informed the political program of the Soviet Union and all communist countries, as well as communists world-wide, including those in the US. A very stark historical example of this thinking is the advice given by Martin Latsis, one of the first heads of the Soviet Secret Police, when in 1918 he advised his men on how to decide whom to arrest as enemies of the Soviet state. He said “In your investigations don't look for documents and pieces of evidence about what the defendant has done, whether in deed or in speaking or acting against Soviet authority. The first question you should ask him is what class he comes from, what are his roots....”(1)
In other words, everyone was to be judged according to what group in society he came from, and not by his character or personal traits, or even if he had ever done anything wrong.
And people were to be arrested accordingly.
What the Woke Left in America today does is to appropriate the Marxist class warfare doctrine directly to domestic race relations. The white race is the “oppressor” and non-whites or “people of color” are all the “oppressed”. If you are white, you are bad by virtue of this fact. Your only salvation is to admit you are an oppressor and a racist, apologize for your whiteness, renounce your “white privilege”, and become an “ally” of the oppressed.
So people are to be penalized for past American racism based on the color of their skin, despite the fact that they personally had nothing to do with it. There are a flood of reports from schools across the nation of white students being told by their teachers that “whiteness” and white people are bad.
By doing this, they fundamentally undermine this country.
3. All societies have a cultural basis. That entails a foundation of ideas, attitudes, and ways of looking at the world and reality. It also entails a web of customs which hold a society together. The foundation of American society is western civilization which developed over the centuries in Europe.
And like all civilizations, ours has concepts of accepted truth. In line with these truths there are accepted barriers and behavioral lines which should not be crossed.
If my goal was to destroy the United States of America as a coherent, functioning society, I would undermine these cultural ideas which form the basis of our society. I would attack all boundaries and behavioral norms. I would first attack all of society's sexual norms, and aim especially at children. I would make sure children were exposed to teaching on sex of every variety starting at a young age. They would be exposed to it in school, in entertainment, in libraries. When traditional sexual norms are attacked and undermined, eventually the family is undermined. This does tremendous damage to any society.
It is in this light, I believe, that we have to consider our society's latest insanity du jour: transgenderism.
Transgenderism is one of the Left's latest obsessions, and in particular, the Left emphasizes pushing the idea on children. Why? They will say they want to “support” children with gender dysphoria by “affirming their gender identity”. But if you look at their actions in schools and gender clinics, you begin to realize that the welfare of the children is not the goal. In fact, they couldn't care less about the children. So besides profit for gender clinics, what is the larger goal?
I believe that an indication may be found in a book written by NYU professor Michael Rechtenwald. Previously a left-leaning professor, he was forced to take leave from NYU because he took a stand against the political cancel culture at his school. In his subsequent book “Springtime for Snowflakes”, he identified transgenderism as a manifestation of the philosophy of Postmodernism.
This is a philosophy which denies there is any absolute truth or objective reality. Relativism is the overriding truth. Each person has his own truth. Thus if I feel and say I am female despite being born a male with the XY chromosome in every cell of my body, then that is my “truth” and nobody has any right to dispute me. Nobody's truth is any more valid than any other person's truth. Everyone must indulge my delusion about being a woman. In this bazaar template for society, feelings are given far more weight than scientifically provable facts.
The insanity doesn't stop there. If I “identify” as a cat, then that is what I am, according to this insane ideology. And everyone has the obligation to treat me as a cat. Thus the phenomenon of “furries,” kids who identify as animals and demand others recognize and treat them as such, even to the point of being allowed to use litter boxes as toilets. (This is actually happening in some places.)
Forces on the Left not only go along with this; they actively promote it, particularly to children and for what reason? A society cannot sustain itself when it adopts a philosophy which requires that unreality be accepted as reality, where feelings take precedence over facts.
Western philosophy, based on Greek rationalism and Judeo-Christian thought, declares that there is an objective reality and objective truth which can be rationally determined. A society which buys into irrationality will come apart and collapse. After all, if people can be persuaded to believe that a woman really becomes a man because she feels like a man, and that a child is a cat because he or she identifies as a cat, then they can be persuaded to believe just about anything, no matter how absurd. Rational debate becomes impossible. What better way to undermine a society?
4. If I wanted to destroy this country, I would attack its Judeo-Christian religious foundation. I would not publicly and directly attack religious doctrine. Instead I would seek to enact policies which fly in the face of most religious belief or sentiment.
