Here is Bruce Thornton writing at Front Page Mag:
But the danger is still as real as ever.
Karl Marx famously said that historical facts and personages are repeated, first as tragedy, then as farce. But Marx could not have foreseen that the ideology he birthed would experience a third phase as well: therapeutic parody. The juvenile hysteria, tantrums, inflated “resistance,” and pointless vandalism of the left-wing Democrats are signs of leftism’s last phase. But that doesn’t make the left any less dangerous.
The “tragedy” wrought by the left is evident in its blood-stained history. The 100 million people murdered by purges and engineered famines were the victims of regimes founded on gulags, show-trials, lies, persecution, “re-education,” and censorship. Their deaths are one of history’s greatest tragedies. No more successful were the attempts to give collectivism “a human face” by creating the “soft despotism” of technocratic bureaucracies and agencies embodied in the EU and American progressivism, both increasingly sclerotic, ineffective, and desperate.
. . .
The election of Donald Trump is the rude, brash, blustering, in-your-face wages of elitist hypocrisy. The political enormity of his victory has completed the transformation of “late New Leftism” into therapeutic parody. Now the narcissism of the teen-ager is the sum total of leftist ideology, all its exploded ideas and clichéd slogans reduced to Band-Aids for the wounded psyches of some of the richest, best-fed, freest ingrates in human history.
Today’s therapeutic left is a parody of old-school leftism. The old left took their bad ideas seriously as justifications for brutal action and personal risk. In 1843 Karl Marx warned the Prussian government, “We are ruthless and ask no quarter from you. When our turn comes we shall not disguise our terrorism.” Vladimir Lenin in 1908 asked, “Do you think we can be victors without the most severe revolutionary terror?” And his mass murders of kulaks and clergy showed he meant it.
Read more: FrontPageMag.com
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