American Progressivism is the ideological successor to Soviet Communism. America fought and won a Cold War against communism, but the threat was never really vanquished. It took root internally within the secular utopian movements of the 18th Century, and was clearly defined with the formation of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) in 1901.
Eugene V. Debs, co-founder of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), was a five-time presidential nominee for the SPA. Debs has been quoted by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a declared Democratic Socialist.
After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the SPA split into the Communist Labor Party and the Communist Party of America. In 1921, they reunited as the Communist Party USA (CPUSA).
The CPUSA’s strategy was to unionize or recruit American workers as part of a worldwide labor revolt intended to overthrow the capitalist system. When unionization did not achieve the desired results, the CPUSA adopted new methods including subversion, disinformation, and propaganda.
The transition of communist thought from a strictly materialist framework to a focus on cultural and social identity was a strategic adaptation. Communists recognized the West could not be defeated militarily nor economically, but would have to be conquered from within.
Communists have patiently executed the long game or Long March. They are satisfied with incremental victories. I liken it to a frog that is cooked alive in a pot of slow-boiling water. The frog is not even aware of what is happening. Likewise, the American people were mostly unaware that communism was slowly baking into our culture and society.
In the 1920s and 30s, Italian communist Antonio Gramsci argued that radicals should adopt a war of position whereby intellectual elites would infiltrate society’s institutions to dismantle the ‘hegemonic narrative’ and replace it with a revolutionary counter-narrative.
Post World War II, the Soviet Union launched a campaign of subversion within the United States. In the 1950s, they sought to infiltrate the Republican Party. The plan failed because of the party’s inflexible opposition to communism.
The Soviets then turned their attention to the Democrat Party which they successfully targeted at the grassroots level. Local Democrat clubs recruited teachers, lawyers, writers, doctors, and other professionals who were left-leaning figures in their respective communities. Communist propaganda was disseminated at the monthly club meetings.
In the 1960s, the CPUSA officially broke from the Soviet focus on the working class and followed influential figures like sociologist C. Wright Mills, who argued that the young intelligentsia (students and professors) were the new agents of radical change.
Public schools, colleges, and universities became fertile ground for indoctrination and rebellion.
The Long March
Following the failure of violent 1960s radical groups like the Weather Underground, the CPUSA adopted a strategy called the Long March through the Institutions. Instead of setting off bombs, radicals such as former Weatherman Bill Ayers, earned PhDs and infiltrated the faculties of higher education, where they indoctrinated subsequent generations. By 1989, communist professors had successfully transitioned from “beleaguered outsiders to academic insiders”.
Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, hosted a fund raiser for Barack Obama at their home in 1995. Obama later said that Ayers was just a guy in the neighborhood.
The term Long March was coined by German socialist Rudi Dutschke, a disciple of Herbert Marcuse, in recognition of Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution or Long March in China. Because a nation’s culture stems directly from its academic institutions, the Long March directs its focus toward the entire educational system, from elementary schools to universities. It is the springboard that launches thousands of dutiful Trotskyites into society, where socialism then becomes deeply rooted.
As previously noted, the Long March (or Local Trench Warfare) began decades ago at the grassroots level. The targets were local centers of power such as school boards, public agencies, and district attorney offices. (Leftwing billionaire George Soros and his affiliated political action committees have spent over $50 million to elect dozens of social justice district attorneys across the United States.)
After loosely integrating these local power centers into a statewide and national network, the communists were well-positioned to target state and federal offices.
The objective of the Long March is the total dismantling of the American republic’s foundations, including the nuclear family, private property, the rule of law, and Western traditions. Proponents of this strategy believe that the American system is systemically racist, and therefore must be overthrown rather than reformed.
Over the past century, communism has successfully infiltrated every aspect of American life. This was a methodical, incremental, surreptitious, premeditated subversion that went unnoticed by average Americans. Those who tried to warn us -- patriots like Joseph McCarthy and Barry Goldwater -- were dismissed and disparaged as un-American or fascist.
The Tools of Revolution
Identity politics has become the primary tool of modern revolution. By utilizing frameworks like Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), Progressive activists seek to dismantle the foundational principles of the American republic and replace them with an authoritarian system.
Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin instituted DEI programs to enforce actual equality (or equity) among the various minorities within the Russian federation. It was a dismal failure and fostered only irreparable dissent and division.
Critical Theory, as taught at the Frankfurt School, was first implemented in the 1920s to promote Marxism in the West. Founders of the ideology, such as Richard Delgado, explicitly identified themselves as Marxists who developed their core principles in a framework influenced by both Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci.
CRT, a variant of Critical Theory, emerged as a race-based offshoot of the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) movement. In 1989, a group of minority and female law faculty (and students) decided to strike out on their own during a CLS convention in Madison, Wisconsin. They formally named and founded CRT to focus specifically on race as the primary axis of oppression.
Like traditional Marxism, CRT seeks to overturn, rather than reform, the existing social order. It specifically questions the foundations of the classical liberal order including equality theory, Enlightenment rationalism, and constitutional law, viewing them as tools of white supremacy. For point of reference, Bill Maher would be considered a classical liberal; clearly at odds with the neo-liberals who currently run the Democrat Party.
Colleges and universities are administered by political commissars who enforce ideological conformity and identity-based quotas. To avoid legal challenges, DEI administrators simply change their title or redefine their duties.
Critical Pedagogy is a version of CRT, taught in schools of education, that trains student teachers how to present their curriculum within the scope of social justice theory. At teacher prep schools, academic faculty currently report a six-to-one ratio of liberal to conservative professors, while administrators show a 12-to-one ratio, creating a highly radicalized classroom environment that is more indoctrination than education.
Subversive professors of the 1960s, such as Maxine Greene at Columbia, actively prepared their students to become the militant professors of the 1980s. Teaching (and journalism) became the top occupations sought by members of the New Left. These individuals maintained their ideological commitments throughout their professional lives, eventually forming the most extremist cohort of the professoriate.
The New Left Social Order
Identity became the superior catalyst of revolutionary change when leftists realized that economic classes are fluid, while race, sex*, and national origin are immutable.
* We have seen in more recent times that sex is changeable as people on the left can’t seem to define who is a woman.
Cultural Marxism functions as a mutation that substitutes culture for economy and social identities for the proletariat. Instead of the bourgeoisie, the villains are now heterosexists, cis-genders, and the white patriarchy. The goal remains the same, which is the overthrow of the existing social order.
Mamdani-backed socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier, who recently won the primary for New York’s 13th Congressional District, is co-founder of the antisemitic Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) coalition. Its mission statement calls for the destruction of Western (white) civilization including Israel.
Woke communism seeks to establish a world order, without boundaries, that enforces equal outcomes through means of social justice, CRT, and DEI.
Culture of Censorship and Repressive Tolerance
The New Left introduced the concept of repressive tolerance, which has evolved into modern-day cancel culture, where dissenting views are censored and those who express them are driven from public and academic life.
Repressive tolerance was developed by Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse. In a 1969 essay, Marcuse presented a theoretical justification for silencing opposing views that impede revolutionary progress. It operates on the premise that because false consciousness has become the dominant state of mind in Western society, true tolerance requires the withdrawal of tolerance from regressive (or conservative) movements, and the promotion of progressive ones. It attempts to rationally explain how the Left is able to promote tolerance while being intolerant of opposing views.
It sounds like a Kamala Harris word salad. To the point, repressive tolerance is intolerant -- and irrational.
The Ascendency of Democratic Socialism
A person asked me once, “Why do you call Bernie Sanders a socialist? He’s a Democratic Socialist.”
No, he’s a socialist who calls himself a democrat. It’s all window dressing. Democracy and socialism are two opposing ideas. Granted, Joseph Stalin said that Soviet-style communism was the purest form of democracy. It depends, however, on your definition of democracy. Weaponizing the language is a political tool the Left has mastered. When a word, term, or phrase no longer supports the narrative, it is simply canceled or redefined.
The Left has persistently and errantly tagged President Trump and MAGA as fascists. For many people, the terms fascism, socialism, communism, and Marxism are interchangeable.
I have noted previously that fascism and communism are subsets of socialism. The Nazis were socialists. Hitler hated capitalism but he also hated classic Marxism (or communism). You might say he was a neo-Marxist who substituted class warfare with race warfare.
In comparison, the broader scope of socialism is a hybrid ideology that targets class, race, nationality, ethnicity, orientation, and gender. A perfect description of the Democrat Party.
Although progressivism was a necessary ingredient in advancing the revolution, it is now yielding to the ascendency of democratic socialism.
In her review of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, Amanda Busse wrote:
“... fascism under Benito Mussolini and Nazism under Adolf Hitler came from the same intellectual source as Progressivism, the birth-mother of American liberalism. The term “liberal fascism” comes from a speech made by author H. G. Wells when he told a group of Young Liberals at Oxford that Progressives must become “liberal fascists” and “enlightened Nazis.”
President Trump calls them communists and they represent the greatest threat to our nation in 250 years.
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