To the 60 percent of Americans not polling for Trump, many firmly left-of-center, a thought experiment as November draws nearer: What must be true so that Trump gets your vote? It is a miserable question because many Americans are, to put it mildly, negative on the president.
In Homer’s Odyssey, the hero must swallow a hard truth—there is no good and bad, just better and worse. His ship must pass between the monsters Scylla and Charybdis. The enchantress Circe counsels him toward Scylla—some will perish but all will not be lost. Our hero attempts to reject the premise of the question—could we not pass the one and fend off the other? Negative, chides Circe.
Every four years, we replay Circe’s game. One can vote for Specimen A or B. In 2016, millions chose not to vote at all, rejecting the premise of the question. For those who found both candidates irredeemably defective, 2020 may seem like a sick repeat. But this time around, Circe implores otherwise.
The race-class strife incited by Black Lives Matter (BLM) has brought America to the brink. We are in the midst of a moral crisis. Like our hero, we need to have the perspective to know what game we are playing and the fortitude to define our Scylla and Charybdis. This election is not a clash between two men à la Donald v. Joe, or between two parties, but rather a clash between fundamentally opposing ideologies—one mostly in sync with life as we know it, the other rooted in a system whose precedents are among the worst in human history.
The president’s detractors allege unprecedented misconduct. His supporters praise unprecedented achievement. Each view operates in its own deafening echo chamber. The contender is a seasoned veteran of an establishment that wants him to stay at home. Specimen B is not Joe Biden. It is the Reformed Democratic Party, folded around its new central platform: racially inspired Marxism.
Black Lives Matter Matters
BLM is unapologetically grounded in Marxist revolutionary ideals. As early as 2015, followers of the movement openly invoked the Communist Manifesto. Its takeover of the Democratic Party and muffling of the Republican Party have been swift. It does not aspire to a summer of love, but rather to a summer of revolution. This revolution is being televised.
Query how many of our fellow citizens chanting “Black Lives Matter” in the streets, hashtagging “#BlackLivesMatter” on social media, disowning family, or using their celebrity to spread the good word, know or care about these facts.
When the animals take over in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the pigs issue commandments which are then simplified to one maxim: “Four legs good, two legs bad.” This becomes a mantra of the faux enlightened. The sheep, who don’t understand the phrase, memorize it and “often as they lay in the field they would all start bleating ‘Four legs good, two legs bad! Four legs good, two legs bad!’ and keep it up for hours on end, never growing tired of it.”
The emotional call-and-response appeal of “black lives matter” entices all who repeat it into believing they are anti-racists and that everyone else must be the opposite. But “black lives matter” (which no one disagrees with) is not the same as Black Lives Matter.
The sheep may be forgiven their trespasses, for they do not have the benefit of history. We do.
Communism—Marxism applied—was responsible for over 100 million deaths during the last century alone, which says nothing of the psychological terror, the Auschwitz of the mind, that imprisoned the untold millions who did not perish. The systematic oppression and terror Marxist ideas engendered is nowhere better described than in Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, a painstaking and harrowing account of the forced labor camp system under Soviet Communism. In a telling passage, he provides an insight into the engine that made the tyranny possible:
Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb, too. The imagination and spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology. Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes . . . . That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills . . . the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race . . . Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.
I was spared those horrors thanks, in part, to being born nearer the dismal end of the Soviet Union and thanks, in part, to the courage of parents who dared seek permission to leave from a central authority notoriously brutal to the unbelievers. As Jews ostensibly bound for Israel, we had the great fortune of being unwanted anyway. Almost all your life’s possessions stay behind—they belong to “the people,” after all—but the scars most certainly do not. Scars travel with you. The many hundreds of thousands of refugees and exiles from Communist countries living in America today can fill entire libraries with the stories behind those scars. Go seek them out and listen.
Whether in Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, or Pol Pot’s Cambodia, the precepts of Marxism led humanity as close to the abyss as it has ever come. Nazism was a menace to humanity, but that racist ideology poses no serious threat today. Massive droves of people are not marching through the streets chanting Nazi slogans. None of our country’s presidential candidates are holding massive Nazi rallies. The same cannot be said of Marxism.
Neither do Marxism’s purveyors and apologists all sit in Beijing. For years, many intellectuals in the West openly espoused Marxism. Its great utopian appeal should come as no surprise particularly in our present age of social justice. Solzhenitsyn would later lament at the West’s failure to accept the grim warnings of his testimonial:
Modern society is hypnotized by socialism. It is prevented by socialism from seeing mortal dangers it is in. And one of the greatest of all is that you have lost all sense of danger, you cannot even see where it’s coming from as it moves swiftly towards you.
You imagine you see danger in other parts of the globe and hurl the arrows from your depleted quiver there. But the greatest danger of all is that you have lost the will to defend yourselves.
That was written in 1976 as the United States was deep into the Cold War. Nearly 45 years later, long after the Cold War has ended, the generation that is driving today’s revolutionary agenda has little to no conception of what socialism is and what brand of misery it left in its wake. It is nearly impossible to cultivate any sense of dread or urgency in a society whose connection to that chapter of the human experience has been all but severed. But we have to try.
Until recently, the leading Democratic candidate for the highest office in our land was a card-carrying socialist. Bernie Sanders was perhaps the most successful purveyor of socialism in the West since the fall of the Berlin Wall. His impressive run proved the power of folksy charisma, “insane consistency,” and populist rhetoric. But Sanders’ brand of Marxist ideology has been replaced with something far, far more dangerous.
BLM is pure ideology. It appears bent on redefining America and its institutions pursuant to progressively tribalistic commandments. Draped in the powerful albeit deceptive cover of racial indignation, the movement has convinced many Americans that being white is an original sin, that America is evil, and that the sinners’ day in court has arrived. It prescribes class struggle, exponentially amplified by the battle cry of racial reckoning.
What comes next?
Revolutions vilify the past. BLM’s ritualized statue destruction is just the beginning. History books are next. Mass re-education, show trials, and public spectacles of contrition is the socialist way. Its logical conclusion is not an extension of our country’s hallowed antislavery and civil rights movements for which people of many races gave life and limb. Its tribalistic creed is the antithesis of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream: our children will live in a nation where they will in fact be judged by the color of their skin rather than by the content of their character.
Circe Demands An Answer
We must assume BLM’s staggering adoption rate will only grow. Mobs do not slow down of their own accord. So what would it take for the man you polled against to get your vote? Does the prospect of Marxist rule in America qualify?
Comparing Trump to Richard Nixon has become standard for the Left. But many in the 60 percent need not tap dance around this one. They could make the unreasonable leap of assuming that each and every one of the allegations against Trump is true and that each and every purported accomplishment is false. They know neither is the case, but that’s beside the point. Faced with BLM’s ideological threat, and outside a viable third option, many in the 60 percent may take a dozen Nixons if it means keeping the new racial Marxists and their sympathizers out of high office.