Seeming to refer to Democrats
“Either the Communists win and destroy America, or we destroy the Communists,”
The other day I was in a fancy restaurant in Berkeley telling a Trump-administration survivor my (radical) interpretation of the Nixon administration. I noticed that a white-haired, well-dressed lady was sitting next to us with evident interest. I worried.
When she and her husband got up, she put her hand on my shoulder. I worried even more. Then she said: “I heard everything you said, I was there, and it’s all true.” Bless you, ma’am! May the Goldwater voter be always with us.
History heard an amazing echo of itself the other day when Trump, responding to his indictment, said—as reported by the New York Times:
“Either the Communists win and destroy America, or we destroy the Communists,” the former president said in Georgia, seeming to refer to Democrats.
“Seeming to refer to Democrats.” There’s… a lot to unpack there. Trump has just taken the great tradition of 20th-century American anti-progressivism to its logical and correct extreme—when that extreme is no longer remotely plausible.
This is genius, if a kind of doomed and impossible genius—the equivalent of Defoe’s pamphlet Shortest Way with the Dissenters, which purported to suggest that early 17th-century Anglicans should deal with Puritans the way Mary Tudor wanted to handle their Protestant ancestors in the mid-16th century. But by the age of Queen Anne, Philip II was no longer in the building—so future Englishmen would indeed have to see their “fair monarchy, dwindled into a Republick.”
The difference is—Defoe didn’t mean it. Maybe Trump does. Are you sure he doesn’t? Over the last fifty years, a lot of people could have made a lot of money counting Donald Trump out. But in the end, they didn’t.
Maybe Trump knows something. Maybe he knows nothing. Maybe he knows more than he knows. “Or we destroy the Communists.” “Seemingly referring to Democrats.”
As I like to say, “communist” is just a euphemism for “progressive.” Certainly the relation between these two terms has always been what the kids call sus. Search for “progressive” in any issue of The Communist, the official magazine of the CPUSA, before you decide what that word meant then and means now:
“Lenin Memorial Issue.” If these usages are not the same, across 90 years, and the one did not even evolve into the other—how did something else replace Earl Browder’s “progressives,” with something else that was unrelated but just used the same word—as different, say, as largemouth bass from Chilean sea bass? That different? Come on…
Progressivism is the state religion of the institutional ruling class. Progressivism is not some alien pest imported from Moscow. It is deeply American. It is just the latest rebirth of New England Puritanism or mainline Protestantism.
The whole Moscow connection is incriminating not because it shows that American progressivism is a nefarious foreign plot of barbarous Asian tribes, but because it illustrates the true morbidity of the progressive faith. Unleashed on these barbarous tribes, with little natural immunity, progressivism made smallpox look like pimples.
Here in the home range of the organism, Anglo-America, which is to progressivism as “Dutch” elm disease is to China, resistance is more prevalent. But leftism is never a symbiote. When it has nothing to destroy, it turns on itself. Even the pure Chinese elm is scarred, stunted and deformed by these horrible, fungus-spreading little beetles.
The West has just taken longer to corrode—always rusting, never burning. To rise among this tremendous trend, this multi-century disaster, will take an anti-hero of no less stature—a kind of man that appears only once in centuries, a man out of time, who nonetheless appears perfectly suited to his time—I refer, of course, to Trump.
The king is above the law
In a way there is an accidental genius in the affair of the beautiful mind paper boxes.