How the Marxists Finally Win

Glenn Greenwald has a typically thoughtful post up today on the zealous course our Neo-Conservative leadership pursues in the Middle East and notes how everything happening there fits their vision of "success." I have only one thing to add. We should not forget how "neo-conservatism" got its start in the post-WWII intellectual battles among communists/socialists and their "I can be as bad-ass as you" academic opponents. Who we call Neo-Conservatives were actually in both camps but came together through disillusionment, hubris, and, from both camps, enormous egos that God couldn't lift. Their rhetoric and tactics are straight from the pages of Lenin, Trotsky, and lesser lights, and their authoritarian/totalitarian bent would be a dream come true for the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks alike. Democracy and separation of powers? Nyet. Power concentrated in a small executive council composed of men (men) who know better than anyone else, whom history will judge as seeing more clearly, lionized by a Pravda media spouting the day's party line, even if it's 180 degrees opposite what it was yesterday or supports something they condemned opponents for the day before that. I taught Soviet government and history for over a decade. Little these guys have done has surprised me. (That's why I have no confidence in any vote tallies that they can influence at the source or negate once counted in November. Voter participation was always 99.9% in the USSR.) Little they will do will surprise me. And we'll end up the same way the Soviet Union did. The Marxists will end up beating us by supplying us with the means for our own suicide. That's called reality, something neither the Soviet leadership nor our leadership had much acquaintance with. But don't worry. It won't make our history books.