What follows is Part II of What to Do About the Big Lie? Part III will follow shortly.
On one hand, understanding the Big Lie and the Big Liar isn’t rocket science. But putting them under the microscope to dissect their anatomy is a practice the Right has never really felt comfortable pursuing for many years, at least with a view toward developing counter-strategies and regaining lost territory. (I’m not sure the GOP even thinks it has lost any.)
But in W Cleon Skousen’s (The Naked Communist) day it was considered de rigueur, which is why 1940s-50s viewpoints about Communism are so important to revisit now. They actually cut open the Beast back then. They laid out all the integral parts of communism revealing a separate universe, without any frills or equivocations. The communist worldview was genuinely laid naked.
And that is just what we need today, as a a way to develop counter strategies against them, especially since for over 25 years the Republican Party has failed to find any effective “defense” against the Left, when playing defense was always a losing proposition in the first place.
In the 1950s they preached aggressive offense.
Until the early 1960s, it was the Left who was always on defense. but since then they’ve waged a relentless offense, only framing it as if they were still on defense. Cry Havoc, hell. Cry, Victim and people of goodwill will part the seas at your feet.
You must understand the double negations involved in what is not only a strategy but a world view of the Left. Everything about America as seen by the Founders and free men, they are against. So their natural posture is defensive so long as that world survives. The universe they wish to replace it with has existed only in their minds for over 100 years and is only now becoming more and more of a reality.
This may yet prove to be their greatest weakness, for their playbook, from Marx to Alinsky to Obama, has always from the point of view of outside-looking-in. This is why Obama is still “campaigning”, trying to secure a power he really has pretty well locked up. Insecurity is a major component of the naked communist.
I’m not sure the Left really has a plan for a way forward until it is from a position of total control. The true Marxist really can’t comprehend anything other than out-of-power, or totally-in-it. (This, by the way, identifies the general communist nature of this current brood in Washington, for socialists would be only too happy to nibble away for several more years, almost fearful of that awful day when total power is won and they may have to shed those $1000 Hart Schafnner Marx suits and put on those awful Mao jackets. Indeed, Lenin looked upon this inability or unwillingness to seize the moment among Mensheviks as a genuine human weakness, not unlike being Finnish or maybe even being liberal Democrat.)
The Left has always fought on two fronts, in the culture and in the political arena. (I include unions as a kind of bridge here. Unlike Europe, American unions were never a secure Red bastion until only recently, and their rank and file still may have a say as to whether they are even today.)
Because communism was illegal until the 60s, before the Johnson Administration the Left’s sole theater of operations was the culture. But the front doors of the American house were generally locked to them. A free America had not been the kind of country that took kindly to socialist movements of any kind, even during the FDR era, and their advances were generally unwelcome at every level of society, except Hollywood, Greenwich Village and of course, the academy.
Being a religious nation in those days, instead of blaming government or the Left for most every cultural decay, from not wearing full length dresses at the beach, to ragtime and honky tonk music and risque dancing, people blamed Babylon (New York) and not Marx. Swing, Jive and Rock n’ Roll were all blamed on Satan. (I liked them all, and my spine never curved once.) NASCAR was never blamed on the Grand ol’ Opry.
It was not with the end-user, but at the business end of the culture the Left first found a door, among producers, directors, screenwriters, songwriters and novelists. There they learned to turn communism into a profitable enterprise that regenerated itself.
So, the Left only began to really blossom in the 1960s. The American House was generally locked and shuddered to the wares they were selling.
This all changed with LBJ, who traded on a martyred president’s name to get the government inside those homes in ways even New Dealers couldn’t even dream of. And America has never really recovered, for it’s been full-speed government invasion ever since. Swapping long hair and Army surplus jackets for blue-suits-and button downs, they now claim several seats around every American dinner table, in nearly half of them even sitting at the head of it.
Today, like a mega-corporation, the Left is now a street legal political party as well as a (really incompetent) managing government (which foretells the doom ahead). But at heart they are still an underground resistance, always against things. That’s their nature, to hate things. To define themselves by what they hate. That is the thread that attaches them together all the way back to Karl Marx.
Sharing the bitter cup of hatred and victimhood with each other is the Left’s “eucharist”.
This is why, once in charge, they always do such a miserable job of it. They never really believed their own stuff in the first place, or that they would ever really have to prove all they’d aaid. They are like the child who throws a tantrum at FAO Schwarz to get a toy then quickly discards it once it had been won. It’s the rage-of-the-day that matters most to them. Without the anger, even power loses its luster to the true Marxist.
Marx started out on his anger rampage before he was 20 (and it wasn’t against capitalism, but God). This is the age when they are most vulnerable. Only most also grow out of it (at some price later on). Those who don’t usually don’t because they have been able to create and conform to that “other universe” in their minds, where they can hide and reside while still having to negotiate the real world, living a kind of self-imposed schizophrenic life of a sleeper.
I’ve tried to say all this in such a way that you can see that this is the most basic weakness of the naked communist. And from this knowledge, we can begin putting them back on the defensive.
From Red Scare to Red Reality
You can see how all this plays out by first looking at the Left in the 1950s, when they were still illegal on several levels, and how they maneuvered themselves up to today.
They were able to do combat with the Right without being thrown into jail for many years. Because of this, as street fighters today they give the appearance of being more developed than we are. Certainly more than the GOP, only, considering the absence of any real opposition from them the past 30 years, they also have become a little lax, often lapsing into playbook orthodoxy, unable to respond to a suddenly changing battlefield. (So credit the GOP with doing the heavy lifting of lulling the Left into a false sense of security these several years. Hip, hip….)
The Left has repeated the same tactics so often, over and over again, for so many years, that once really caught off-guard, and taken off-script, and peeled away from their media shield, they really aren’t very good at thinking and acting on the run.
They really don’t have a good defense for a good offense. It’s not in their playbook.
In our few encounters with them in the field, we’ve proved this. They continue to use old playbooks because, quite frankly, they’ve never had one crammed down their throats.
Which brings me to the Red Scare. Sixty years ago, while illegal, the Left was still able to plant the term “Red Scare” in the public conscience as an unreal, nightmarish bogeyman hiding underneath the national bed for over 20 years. And it was called Russia, not communism. In doing so, they were able to drive the domestic Red agenda almost entirely out of the public consciousness.
So while None Dare Call it Treason and a few much-mocked organizations tried to warn the public of the real enemy within, the USSR became the sole image of communism in the American mind, you know, missiles, bomb shelters, air raid drills under the desk.
This lie established, all the institutions of the kind of free and moral society the communists hated most were laid out on a card table, dealt from a braced “bi-partisan” deck of first cultural, then later political poker. In a game still going on, commonly understood terms such as “justice”, “fairness”, even “love” and “God”, each in their own turn, were modified according to the winning hand. Their pile getting bigger and bigger, and ours smaller and smaller, today the game is now played entirely by the Left’s rules, the Founders nowhere to be seen in the room.
The culture asked and the politicians complied, which was how the Left got a legal leg in Congress.
All the same time making fun of the Red Scare was big business for Hollywood, well into the 1970s. And I don’t just mean Fail-Safe and Dr Strangelove, but all those gigantic atom-bomb-morphed creatures, many of whom fought Godzilla, directed towards 12-year olds telling them that nuclear power is unreliable (breeds giant ants) and is uncontrollable (nuclear winter) and the military is helpless against giant bugs anyway. Only science, and scientists, can fix the things that are wrong.
By the 1980s-90s, those scientists had put on coats and ties, and carried the sulfurous smell of bureaucrats, The China Syndrome just one of the genre, a film still vaguely remembered as real history by the Left, much as The Da Vinci Code was some years later, attacking another socialist pet enemy, religion. By the 21st Century they were giving Academy Awards to ex-politicians based on the interesting notion that polar bears can’t swim, the long term result of which was that when all those naive, trusting little children grew up, they voted for Obama.
Fait accompli.
Over the same period in drama and romance, hemlines kept getting shorter and necklines lower, then sort of meeting in the middle and disappearing altogether as the notion of “love” was morphed first into “making love”, then into common ordinary barnyard rutting.
Now, you can see how “Red Scare” has been morphed into “Red Reality” without a single shot being fired.
Everything that has happened since Bill Clinton took office was predicted in the 50s, and laid out in clear simple, unambiguous English by several groups and individuals, not just Skousen. We can’t say we weren’t warned.
(Speaking for my generation I can say that it was this clear unambiguity, taught almost as a Sunday School lesson, that made these warnings to my generation seem like Ben Stein-boring (from Ferris Buehler), almost inviting us to pay no attention. Preferring style over substance then, we liked warnings with more oomph, and liberalism, however wrong it turned out to be, seemed very wromantic by comparison.
(Consequently, besides being wrong, we were also very late to the game, those of us who came back to our roots at all.)
I’d be interested in knowing what some of the surviving elder statesmen of the anti-communist movement from the 1950s would have done differently to prevent this day from happening now that they know how real their predictions have become. My own view is that their only mistake was to believe that the political process could have fixed it. Had they known then what we know now, they may have taken the same measures I’m now suggesting.
Unlike the 1950s today we are now trying to confront an enemy that is immeasurably larger with a base driven almost entirely by appetite and hate.
Worse, they are also in charge.
Tactically and strategically, what has changed is that we are no longer up on horseback, trying to find subversives, fifth columnists and saboteurs and put them in jail. Instead they are on that horses and will eventually start trying to find us if we don’t behave and do as we’re told.
Recognizing these shortcomings, what can we do?
The Left has innate weaknesses in their DNA, among them appetite, vanity, as well as victimhood. I’ve laid out several here, but not all. Perhaps their greatest one is believing that we can no longer see them as they really are. (Again, kudos to the GOP for working so hard at creating that 30 year feint.)
Light and Dark, and an Introduction to Part III
Rush Limbaugh is one of the few public figure who understands this dual nature of the American Left. He’s always looking for the hidden motive, the feint, that often takes them off in a direction not being watched. That they like operating in the dark and fooling their watchers should be apparent.
But Rush simply identifies these characteristics. There’s not much he can do about it other than let people know. If there are organizations out there operating in an operational way to “interact” with them, I’m not aware of them.
The Left has operated in both the Light and Dark for many years. Communism was illegal for years, and socialism such a dirty name in the popular mind that no one dared use it. It was not until 1974 that the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations was discontinued (by Nixon). In my college days college professors, both for an against, had to order the monographs of Lenin and Mao from offshore printers. My first set of the Works of Mao (in 1966) came with a warning label from the State Department.
Being illegal, communists and socialists, politically were separated by the degree of state ownership of property and the means of acquiring power (communists from the 30s-40s still largely believed in taking power by violent revolution, which you should not entirely rule out even now, and perhaps even pray for just a little if they can be convinced to try it prematurely). So they allied with progressives and liberals who were not of the Left, but who still were antagonistic to the capitalist world on other grounds. Thus the confusion we have in terminologies today.
For the Marxist, Liberal do-goodism rhetoric is easily converted if you disguise the true motive of the speaker. Say one thing do another. All the Marxists have to do is fake sincerity. It’s impossible to tell the difference. Obama is proof.
Therefore naive liberal and progressive belief in the state’s ability to do good things, and continue to do those things good (sic) was an easy cover for Marxists with a darker agenda.
Today our task is also two-fold, but also geometric.
For one, the problem can no longer be fixed from the top down, nor in the conventional sense, politically. Oh, we can reclaim the Congress and the White House (which I doubt, by the way, based on the old Marxist axiom that once you take power you never allow others to take it back through the same process), but the Bush years proved we can no longer drive them back underground from Washington. They own the schools K-thru-JD, the media, pop culture, and most public institutions. You cannot even be sure which flag a public building will fly any give day, the American flag or LGBT flag?
This will remain the case until there are felt consequences for their actions, and those consequences will not come from Washington, nor in the state capital, not even in the county building and mayor’s office. When the Left first becomes aware of a dark moon rising at the grass roots, afraid is to look over their shoulder, they will know.
Only the grass roots can carry out effective operations against the Left, by blighting their path (Mark Twain) and making them once again aware that certain behavior evokes consequences in nature. (Sam Johnson called this “setting fires”. I have other names to add, depending on the circumstances.) Once nature has been “restored” to its proper position in any given local, then politics will be restored. The Left will become more wary, and, ideally, many will quit and recruitment for replacements will slow down. Only the threat of judgment (pain and inconvenience) accomplishes this. We know.
You’ll have to wait for Part III to see how this might be accomplished.
