For a few months I have been avoiding my normal radio listening habits. I have been an NPR news listener from the late 1970’s until very recently. It isn’t NPR itself that I’m avoiding but the news. I still think NPR is a first-rate operation. Everywhere the news has become all-election all-Trump all-the-time and it turns my stomach.

This morning I grew tired of listening to the song of the open road so I switched away from FM and entered a place I never go- the AM radio band. I stopped on several talk radio and religious stations. There were a few gravel-throated guys yammering non-stop about sports minutiae or some anti-liberal diatribe. One station featured an author who was interviewed by the preacher-man host. The guest had written a book about -as always- the collapse of American values and the negative role of liberal progressivism from the evangelical Christian point of view. This is the doom and devilry so beloved by evangelicals. The idea that they are being oppressed for their faith gets their Christian soldier juices flowing and the preachers know it. The threat of the Jesus team hanging on by a thread unifies the flock and gives them the vigor to continue accelerating the second coming of Christ through Christian Zionism, book banning, prayer in school, reproductive issues and running the government by “biblical law”.

In particular the guest spoke of Marxism in America and how liberal/progressives are, among other things, forcing gay and transgender permissiveness down the throats of good citizens and school districts across the country. The emphasis, they claim, is not on teaching tolerance but on outright conversion of innocent children to a trans lifestyle.

In the mid 19th century in Germany, Marx and Engles contended that there was a practical materialistic conflict between capitalists (bourgeoisie) and the workers (proletariat). According to Vladimir Lenin–

“the principal content of Marxism” was “Marx’s economic doctrine. “Marx demonstrated how the capitalist bourgeoisie and their economists were promoting what he saw as the lie that “the interests of the capitalist and of the worker are … one and the same.” He believed that they did this by purporting the concept that “the fastest possible growth of productive capital” was best for wealthy capitalists and workers because it provided them with employment. Source: Wikipedia.

The radio author’s Marxism angle included the demise of individualism which he claimed to be a goal of the alleged Marxist liberals. This was contrasted with the Declaration of Independence and its emphasis on the rights of the individual. Raising the specter of Marxism in America and misusing the meaning of it is useful rhetorical leverage for his argument to an audience slow to fact check.

While there is no definitive Marxist theory, conservative evangelicals like the author on the radio like to use the word Marxism as a dog whistle to frighten the masses of the poorly informed.

Marxism is the theoretical underpinning of communism and socialism. Some of it seems to make sense as a critique of capitalism. You know, capitalism is great if you have capital. But, the application of Marxism to revolution and government takeover is always performed by flawed human beings who usually resort to totalitarianism. It has yet to be demonstrated that it can be humanely to the application of governance.

Marxism was about fair treatment of workers. Lenin took it way beyond that to governance as well. We all know how that turned out.

Marxism is a social, economic and political philosophy that analyses the impact of the ruling class on the laborers, leading to uneven distribution of wealth and privileges in the society. It stimulates the workers to protest the injustice. Source: The Economic Times.

Socialism is characterized by community ownership or regulation of the means of production, distribution and exchange. Source: Google.

Communism is a subset of socialism that seeks to socialize both production and consumption for economic equality. It is both a form of government and an economic system. Private ownership is not allowed. Source: Google.

The American side of the cold war in the middle of the 20^th century was based on dread fear of communism, Soviet socialism or Marxism-Leninism spreading around the world in domino fashion. The Soviets had their own fear-mongering propaganda on the evils of capitalism and American nuclear strike capability. Americans noticed with alarm the trend starting from the Bolshevik revolution to Stalin’s land grab after WWII, to the communist takeover of China, Cuba and North Korea.

The communists eventually prevailed in Viet Nam as we all know. The cold war motivated each side into an ever-increasing arms buildup and a few ill-advised military actions on foreign soil. It also gave birth to many successive generations of increasingly deadly weapons systems and advances in aerospace technology to bring the battle to the enemy.

It could be said that both the West and the USSR were guilty of pumping up irrational fear of the other side. Both sides took advantage of the strategic tensions by advancing their own technological prowess in weaponry, aerospace and nuclear weapons design. Both sides had (and have) a government-military-industrial complex that consumes vast amounts of funds.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then war is a mother.

Both sides had political movements that they benefitted and suffered from in their respective arms buildups and political polarization. But that is not to say that they were equivalent in their morality status.

People have struggled to immigrate to the US and Europe for a long time. In the USSR, people struggled to get out. People made their choice and the USSR wasn’t the place to go.

In America, many began to imagine that the Soviets were ten feet tall and made of steel based on their rapid development of both fission and fusion weapons, the massive size of the Warsaw Pact forces as well as their notable firsts in space exploration. But in the end, it wasn’t sustainable. The USSR trotted out for all to see the one thing they were good at and that was its military forces. In the end, the USSR governmental apparatus was rotten to the core and collapsed in on itself. The USSR cracked open spilling out solitary states, including Russia which struggled in a whirlpool of giddiness followed quickly by discontent over 10 years. A few Russians became fabulously wealthy oligarchs. But a market economy was not to be and general dismay with Yeltsin and government support gave a player like Putin the chance to bubble up from the KGB and eventually succeed Yeltsin.

It could be that I’m just ignorant. But I am unaware of a burgeoning Marxist/communist/socialist movement in the US that the GOP refers to. Where are these Marxists and their ideological children the socialists and the communists? Like everywhere else, the US is comprised of a statistical distribution of individuals in its population representing a roughly bell-shaped spectrum of beliefs. I’ve no doubt that there are a few actual Marxists and communists scampering about in America, but seriously, is it a movement?

Trump and others have seized upon the epithets “Marxism, communism and socialism” in their rhetoric along with “immigrants who murder, rob, rape and terrorize” the good citizens of the US. This dark variety of persuasion has been used with success probably as far back as humans have had language. Fear of uncertainty and of “others” is a fundamental human weakness and will live on.

Marxism-Leninism collapsed with the USSR on 26 December, 1991. Communist China remains a unitary communist state, but they have morphed into a controlled capitalistic economy. Viet Nam is a one-party socialist republic that is a popular with tourists. North Korea remains a backwards and closed totalitarian state. Cuba, according to Wikipedia, is a Unitary Marxist–Leninist one-party, semi-presidential socialist republic.

What kind of fool would propose to convert to a state based on Marxism today? Where is the successful example from history that you could point to? Or communism or just socialism. All of these “-isms” have any number of variants.

The US has long operated state-run organizations like fire departments, police departments, street maintenance, postal service, social security, the military, the US mint, water and sewer utilities, and more very successfully. It seems to work pretty well, overall.

Despite what you may hear, a great many things in the USA do work very well or well enough. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. I don’t see anything so bad that it is worth dumping democracy for the totalitarian pipe dream of the Neo-Republicans or some despicable clown like Trump.