President Trump Personifies Resistance to Marxist Revolution

Writing in the online Australian journal of ideas, Quillette, Yoram Hazony provides us with a persuasive account of the recent rebirth of Marxism in the West, an ominous explanation of how it was midwifed into life by a progressive liberalism that falsely claims to be the best defense against it, and a grim prediction of how it will likely triumph unless . . . well, unless something very improbable occurs. His article is a densely argued chain of logical relationships and consequences. I can give only a brief and unsatisfactory summary of it below which will inevitably be infected by my own opinions. So you should read the whole of it here.

That said, Yazony begins with the undeniable reality that the liberalism that has dominated American life since the 1960s — my own 1997 coinage was Liberaldom — is now surrendering its strongholds such as the New York Times and the Ivy League to a rising Marxism. This Marxism, shorn of its earlier antique economic jargon, goes under several aliases such as “anti-Racism” and “progressivism,” but it retains its essential political categories under new names so that, for instance, its bourgeois/proletarian divide becomes an oppressor/oppressed one but still provides the dynamic for social conflict and revolution. Marxism has many flaws, but its insight that all societies have injustices that lead to conflicts is (a) true, (b) appealing to many people (precisely because all societies have discontented people in them), and (c) an ideological puzzle to liberalism, which views politics not as endless group conflict (until the inevitable Marxist revolution occurs and ushers in a society without conflict) but rather as a doctrine about securing rights for individuals. But when people exercise rights, they create new freedoms and inequalities, which in Marxist logic means new injustices and conflicts. And that in turn leads to what Yazony calls “the endless dance of liberalism and Marxism,” in which liberalism repeatedly yields to Marxism’s ever-germinating complaints about these divisions . . . until we reach the present moment, when liberalism demands the wilder dreams that Marxism proposed a decade ago.

About the Author

John O’Sullivan

John O’Sullivan is a senior fellow at National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.

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Writing in the online Australian journal of ideas, Quillette, Yoram Hazony provides us with a persuasive account of the recent rebirth of Marxism in the West, an ominous explanation of how it was midwifed into life by a progressive liberalism that falsely claims to be the best defense against it, and a grim prediction of how it will likely triumph unless . . . well, unless something very improbable occurs. His article is a densely argued chain of logical relationships and consequences. I can give only a brief and unsatisfactory summary of it below which will inevitably be infected by my own opinions. So you should read the whole of it here.

That said, Yazony begins with the undeniable reality that the liberalism that has dominated American life since the 1960s — my own 1997 coinage was Liberaldom — is now surrendering its strongholds such as the New York Times and the Ivy League to a rising Marxism. This Marxism, shorn of its earlier antique economic jargon, goes under several aliases such as “anti-Racism” and “progressivism,” but it retains its essential political categories under new names so that, for instance, its bourgeois/proletarian divide becomes an oppressor/oppressed one but still provides the dynamic for social conflict and revolution. Marxism has many flaws, but its insight that all societies have injustices that lead to conflicts is (a) true, (b) appealing to many people (precisely because all societies have discontented people in them), and (c) an ideological puzzle to liberalism, which views politics not as endless group conflict (until the inevitable Marxist revolution occurs and ushers in a society without conflict) but rather as a doctrine about securing rights for individuals. But when people exercise rights, they create new freedoms and inequalities, which in Marxist logic means new injustices and conflicts. And that in turn leads to what Yazony calls “the endless dance of liberalism and Marxism,” in which liberalism repeatedly yields to Marxism’s ever-germinating complaints about these divisions . . . until we reach the present moment, when liberalism demands the wilder dreams that Marxism proposed a decade ago.