When I was in graduate school I wrote my master’s thesis on the nature and history of political revolutions. As part of my research I read Dostoevsky’s Demons, which tells the story of a fictional town consumed by chaos when it becomes the launchpad of an attempted revolution led by a master manipulator named Pyotr Verkhovensky. The novel portrays characters who seem to be possessed by demons.
I also read The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov, which tells the story of Satan visiting the Soviet Union. Only years later did I learn that the book inspired Mick Jagger to write “Sympathy for the Devil” with the terrifying verses:
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Stuck around St. Petersburg
When I saw it was a time for a change
Killed Tsar and his ministers
Anastasia screamed in vain
I rode a tank
Held a general’s rank
When the blitzkrieg raged
And the bodies stank
I recently thought of these verses—as well as Dostoevsky’s Demons—as I read Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them), by Jack Posobiec, Joshua Lisec, Stephen K. Bannon. The authors make a pretty good case that the people historically known as “revolutionaries” or “communists” are best understood NOT by the ideological doctrine they espouse, but by the emotions they harbor—namely, resentment, a sense of grievance, and a desire to destroy institutions and people. As they see it, the fact that communist revolutionaries have murdered tens of millions of people is a feature and not a bug of their approach to the world.
Readers already familiar with the blood-soaked history of the French and Russian Revolutions will not be surprised by the authors’ accounts of these episodes. They also present vivid and detailed accounts the Spanish Civil War, the Chinese Civil War and Cultural Revolution, and America’s 1960s Revolution and Culture War.
Most terrifying is their plausible demonstration that the spirit that animated these past horrors has been gathering strength in the United States for the last twenty years. This is the most relevant part of the book.
In 1995, when I wrote my master’s thesis on Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, I knew the destructive spirit that Burke described still lurked in the hearts and minds of many academics around me in Boston, but I assumed we’d reached a moment in American history when their ideas were destined henceforth to remain in the intellectual ghetto of college campuses.
Just three years earlier, Francis Fukuyama had published his widely read book The End of History in which he heralded the final triumph of Western liberal, representative government with strict limitations on state power.
My teacher and thesis advisor, Roger Scruton, often struck me as excessively gloomy in his utterances and writings about the Left and its undying ambition to destroy institutions, beauty, and truth. At the time I wondered if he was getting old and cranky. I now realize that he was right—the radical Left was resolutely continuing its “long march through the institutions” (as the German student activist Rudi Dutschke described the strategy in 1967).
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On a personal note, it seems to me that the fortunes of Cultural Marxism since 2000 have been wildly boosted by the corrupt excesses of Wall Street, especially during the aftermath of the Financial Crisis of 2008. A great paradox and irony is the fact that Barack Obama’s first cabinet was entirely composed of people who were recommended to Obama’s campaign manager (John Podesta) by a Citigroup executive named Michael Froman.
When Froman’s e-mail containing his recommendations was published by Wikileaks, it strengthened my perception that Woke Ideology partly serves as a mechanism for distracting and dividing everyone in the country who does not work in the financial industry. The objective of this strategy is to direct everyone’s resentments at each other, and not at the financial class, which has amassed immense wealth through the financialization of everything instead of producing anything. It’s a salient fact that Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, did not prosecute a single major Wall Street executive for any of their fraudulent and deceptive practices that led directly to the Mortgage Backed Securities meltdown of 2008.
From the point of view of the 1%, it’s better for poor black men and women to direct their anger at rural white plumbers (who like Trump) instead of at rich asset owners who adorned their yards with Obama-Biden and later Biden-Harris campaign signs.
