Last year the fiftieth anniversary edition of my old SDS book was published, the classic history of the central organization and essential creative center of the New Left in the 1960’s..  I contributed a preface in which I pointed out that the kind of “warmed-over Marxist-Gramscianism that purported to be the Left” for most of the decades after that time was the form of “dried-out socialism and authoritarian government that SDS in its serious years would have rejected out of hand.”  There was nowhere “any champion of participatory democracy and community empowerment so important to SDS and its allies, nowhere the rejection of authoritarian institutions and government complicity” that marked the New Left. A Century of War: Linc... John V. Denson Best Price: $3.72 Buy New $8.50 (as of 07:45 UTC - Details)

I go back to that era now because what the Left has become over these years, particularly with its adoption of feministic values and woke racialism, is a threat to become a quite dangerous power in this country since one of its followers has a good chance to become President this fall, and to govern under the direction of Barak Obama and Bernie Sanders and their ilk in the effort to put all the basic functions of the society under government control.

A few years ago I wrote a book about society without government, in which I began by saying that finding out about what’s bad about it is inherent in its definition, if you just think about it. At a  minimum, a government is a system of control over members of a political body—Max Weber defined it as “the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory”—and that includes the power to levy and collect taxes and raise and maintain an army. You will notice the centrality of “control,” and its ancillary “power.”  That alone should make any serious person start to think maybe something’s wrong.

And ask, “Where are the essential values of a society like individual liberty, familial integrity, religious freedom, and communal sovereignty, none of which are taken care of by government, not even in the purview of government.  Governments are designed to establish the good of the whole, of the state, and that always takes precedence over the status or interests of the individual, the family, the community, the church, the guild, all of which it seeks to control.  Worse still, governments by their nature tend to get bigger and stronger, and establish a system—of princes and , of generals and bureaucrats, of statraps and underlords—that sees to it that they do.  And again, by their essential nature, governments seek to centralize their power and diminish or eliminate other nodes where power may be exerted, like princes, substates, independent  unions, cities and counties, for, after all, through taxes they are the pipers and they call the tune.

War and Democracy Gottfried, Paul Best Price: $32.19 Buy New $21.50 (as of 05:22 UTC - Details) Given those ugly truths, who could possibly advocate enlarging a government’s power, giving it effective control over almost all of life?  Unfortunately, Kamala Harris and her entourage of socialists who have been waiting years to do just that.  Not that she herself has the brains to do it, but that is her California-born instinct and desire—she was a leftie Attorney General and the leftiest politician in her Senate term—and she will gladly let the Big Leftie Boys have their way and send the neocons packing.

I think that most Americans who realize what havoc a Harris administration would bring, would be unwilling to go down that road—though in truth I must admit that those content to live on the largesse of the state right now are nearly half the population.  But I think outright socialism in its modern woke form would scare them, and incline them to vote for the other side, and the worst thing he could do would be to give us another term like his first, and that wasn’t so awful—and he kept us out of war,  as they say.

It is a shame that the Left has come to this, particularly the Old Left that is stale and one-sided and guided first by a Marxism that has not provided a sensible government anywhere it has been tried, and then by a feministic credo and race-based favoritism that hasn’t even been tried in governing. All that the New Left had fought for fifty years ago—and was the reason I spent four years writing about it–has been buried and its decentralist dreams shattered.  I wonder if any young people are reading it now.

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