In 1950, Supreme Court Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson listed the critical differences that separate the Communist Party from all other American political parties, as related in American Betrayal:
Among the six key differences Jackson cited— including Party aims to seize power by and for a minority, Party membership secrecy, the Party requirement of unquestioning obedience to Party authority—he wrote, “The Communist Party alone among American parties past or present is dominated and controlled by a foreign Government.”
He continued, “The chain of command from the Kremlin to the American party is stoutly denied and usually invisible, but it was unmistakenly disclosed by the American Communist party somersaulting in synchronism with shifts in the Kremlin foreign policy” in the run-up to World War II.
"Somersaulting in synchronism" not only describes American Communists of yore, who, anti-Nazi one day, could be just as adamantly in favor of the Nazi-Soviet Pact on the next; it also calls to mind the strenuous exertions of the contemporary American Left/Establishment/Media, which, until about five minutes ago, yelled "Red-baiter!" "conspiracy theory!" "McCarthyism!" even on being handed the hard, cold, and redundantly voluminous facts of Moscow's covert, conspiratorial influence on our national decison-making chain that resulted in the subversion of our own and the world's destiny.
I can personally attest to how that goes.
But now everything is different. Media and pols, who, for example, routinely show ignorance and malice by continuing to crucify Sen. Joseph McCarthy for actually exposing some 50 Communists, Soviet agents and Fifth Amendment cases inside the federal government; who see nothing notable in the incontrovertible fact that the White House troika of Barack Obama, Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod descends from a clique of Chicago Commnists and Soviet operatives; who ignore the transfer of US uranium stocks and high technology to Russia under Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama; these same zombies have now awakened to shriek "Kremlin conspiracy" to explain the election of Donald Trump.
As Jeff Nyquist put it to me recently, "By the present campaign of insinuating that Trump is receiving clandestine help from Putin, the real agents of disinformation in our country are setting up a situation in which the statements of a US President may be designated Russian `disinformation.'"
It is all very disorienting, this seismically shifted landscape. Historically, however, it may be that we are crossing familiar territory as staked out in the 1930s/1940s when this same Left's ideological and emotional forbears went from being pro-democracies and anti-fascists/Nazis, to being pro-fascists/Nazs and anti-democracies -- and, later, back again.
There is no seriousness to their whiplashing concerns; only the panicked pursuit of leverage and power.
The question is, Who is calling the shots?