For equilibrium’s sake, the solid ground of conventional wisdom, circa 1989, holds great attraction. That was the year the captive nations of the USSR’s “Eastern Bloc” began to reconstitute themselves as free-standing states for the first time since the Soviets forced what Winston Churchill famously named the “Iron Curtain” over half of Europe at the end of World War II. Climactically, 1989 was also the year that the Berlin Wall, erected twenty-eight years earlier, with its checkpoints, mines, trip wires, and bunkers, crumbled in a stupendous preview of the pending implosion of the evil empire itself.

Remarkable how the phrase “evil empire,” particularly when framed in the quotation marks of irony, still evokes the indelible image of cartoonish “cow- boys” playing at “Star Wars.” Under battering assault by an arsenal of psychological weapons that began with Soviet propaganda and ended with domestic peer pressure, the West was made more uncomfortable by the phrase “evil empire” than by the evil of the empire itself. It still is.

“All Chekists,” Lenin instructed his secret police on December 25, 1919, “have to be on the alert to shoot anyone who doesn’t turn up to work because of ‘Nikola’ [St. Nicholas’s Day].”2 Seventy-two years later, on another December 25, the USSR officially dissolved. It was 1991, and the United States could suddenly lay claim to a shotless final triumph over Lenin’s police state.

It was a grand victory that seemed to be due at least partly to the ascendance of a more robust wing of the American Right in the preceding decade. Anti-Communist aspects of U.S. foreign policy had finally repulsed Soviet Communist expansionism, it seemed, thanks in decisive part to the fortunate happenstance of Ronald Reagan. The conventional chorus lists other factors—the deep rot of Communist “planned economies,” the advent of the so-called reformer Gorbachev and his policies of perestroika and glasnost, Poland’s Solidarity movement and the Pope John Paul II effect—but within this same context it seems fair to say Reagan was the singular catalyst, not to mention a lucky break, a political foundling who was only uneasily adopted by the Republican Establishment after he made it to the White House. This was something he accomplished without following (or leaving behind) a line of political bread crumbs. At the same time, however, these seemingly victorious policies (“peace through strength,” support for anti-Soviet forces in the third world, “trust but verify,” Strategic Defense Initiative) promulgated by Cold Warriors far from home proved wholly impotent stateside.

Here, since even before the earliest days of the twentieth century, the riddling, boring penetration of Marxian beliefs—through the influx of true believers from Europe and Russia, through the conversion to true belief of new Marxists at home, and through campaigns of Soviet disinformation and other “active measures”—advanced mainly unchecked. The ideological war abroad, or, more accurately, the anti-ideological war abroad—because, as Robert Conquest reminds us, the West, unlike the USSR, “did not have a universal and exclusively defined mind-set”—was lost on all fronts in the battlespace at home: in the academy, in the media, in the popular culture, in the arts, and in the zeitgeist up and down Main Street and even, or perhaps especially, along capitalism’s main thoroughfare, Wall Street.3

It was as if we opposed an enemy Over There without noticing that great chunks of his ideology had taken root, flourished, and borne collectivist and thus anti-American fruit Over Here.

I’m not just referring to those most radical elements of the early Soviet agenda (the original “Bolshevik plot,” as President Obama might have said) that became Western fixtures even as they were, ironically, reversed under Stalin in the 1930s when they proved to be destabilizing to the young regime. These would include the de-sacralization and legal diminishment of marriage (state boosterism of marriage became apparent in 1936 when wedding rings became available in state-run stores), quick ’n’ easy divorce (curtailed in 1936, largely abolished in 1944), “freedom of abortion” (abolished in 1936), and the elevation of children’s rights to the detriment of parental authority (“respect” for elders became a theme in state-controlled press by 1935).4

Such “antibourgeois” ideas, however, would become the basis of Western manners and mores. Sometimes specifically ascribed to the 1920s writings of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci or the later teachings of the so-called Frankfurt School, other times seen as spillover from the wellspring of early twentieth- century “socialist” and “progressive” political and educational movements, in recent times repackaged as “Alinskyite,” such ideas, rising from the same Marx- ian wellspring, have flooded, saturated, and finally warped those bastions of Western civilization that conservatives, by definition, feel compelled to defend—just as though those bastions of Western civilization were still bastions. Secure places. Enduring repositories. Eternally unchanged by all the meticulously, continuously documented breaching. In fact, the biggest problem today is with the bastions. They’re not secure, they’re not enduring, and they have been breached.

Broadly, these bastions include Christianity itself, the concept of “patriarchy” and family, and all safeguards of nationhood and traditional culture. My purpose is less to trace the weblike and overlapping origins of the ideas that have undermined these institutions than it is to recognize their common end- game—a place, a world, where these same core Western institutions are no more.

Funny, but wasn’t that the endgame of the defunct USSR, the raison d’être of junk-heaped Marxism-Leninism? That’s a serious question, something to ask while tripping over the strong bonds and common cause shared by America’s enemies and their American friends. The sugarcoater of my enemy, the empathizer with my enemy, the enabler of my enemy, is my . . . what?

Whatever he is, he’s still with us. Failing to see in Soviet collapse the failure and corruption of the overbearing state, the statist Left has in fact been buoyant, both in spirit and at the polls in these first post-Soviet decades. I don’t mean to suggest that Communist Party members have been winning elections—at least not in the United States. Then again, they don’t have to win to win: The col- lectivist agenda advances. (It was a positively crowing CPUSA leader Sam Webb who in May 2010 addressed his assembled masses in New York City to take stock of Communist Party gains—all policies or actions initiated by President Barack Obama.5) In fact, David Horowitz argues that “the one consequence of note” of the disappearance of the Soviet bloc has been to reenergize the Left’s assault on the West: “It has lifted the burden of having to defend . . . an indefensible regime. Because the utopian vision is no longer anchored in the reality of an actually existing socialist state, the left can now indulge its nihilistic agenda without restraint.”6

That sounds good, very neat, but I think something else is going on. Something in the wider society and across the political spectrum is permitting the Communistic Left an untrammeled indulgence: the gross fraud of sundering Communist theory from Communist practice, of detaching support for Com- munism from any moral responsibility for its crimes, of exempting those same crimes from judgment and punishment. The overlooked fact is that so much of the “utopian vision” that Horowitz refers to is now deeply anchored in the reality of our own actually existing state—and state of mind—and bastions as de- fended by the political Right.

It is the success of the Marx-inspired drive deep into the tissues of the West that is connected to the perplexing vitality of that Marx-inspired agenda. ...

[End excerpt]

---

A little of the spadework behind the sound bytes. But so much more work to be done.