Grand Old Communist Party

The Republican Party is filled with radicals and revolutionaries

I am glad that the GOP lost both Georgia Senate seats. It’s not merely the schadenfreude of seeing the insider-trading, Mao-worshipping Republican incumbent Kelly Loeffler lose. Though that does feel good.

No, the real reason I wanted them to lose is simply that I want the GOP to be destroyed. It is beyond reform. Curtis Yarvin helps explain why. In a recent podcast, he was discussing the Allied victory over the Nazis.

“When you conquer Nazi Germany, and you want to eliminate Nazism, can you go in and ask, ‘How do we create an SS without Nazism?’ No — the SS is a Nazi institution,” he said.

“You have to destroy the SS in order to have a Germany without Nazism.”

In the same way, in order to have an America without communism, we must destroy the GOP.

Red Republicans

Instead of endlessly repeating the cringe line, “Dems are the real racists,” let’s replace it with “Republicans are the real commies.”

Does this sound insane? Of course. But is it? The point is not original to me. Right-wing journalist Pedro Gonzalez (previous participant in America First Weekly’s “Five Questions”) has alleged something similar.

Gonzalez has made the argument, repeatedly, that the GOP is to the left of Marx. Here he quotes Marx, who saw how the English capitalist class imported cheap labor from Ireland in order to drive down wages:

Marx wrote:

Ireland constantly sends her own surplus to the English labor market, and thus forces down wages and lowers the material and moral position of the English working class. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power.

What would we think of Marx if he showed up in 21st century America?

Gonzalez: “Marx would be considered “far-right” by the standards of modern conservatism and the GOP.”

Tweeting during the Summer of George Floyd, Gonzalez reprised the theme:

“The modern Republican Party along with mainstream conservative “intellectuals” stand to the *Left* of Karl Marx, on everything from immigration to harmful international free trade. Marx would have condemned the mob as a filthy lumpenproletariat, whereas GOP leaders praise it.”

By the terms of debate today, the Republican Party leadership and conservative Thought Leaders™ would call Marx a racist, a nativist, and a fascist (and that’s just for his policy positions defending workers). This is pathetic, but does it actually prove Gonzalez’s point? Are Republicans communists?

In their advocacy of the free movement of capital and labor, the Republicans take the side of capital against labor — the same side that the English capitalist class took back in Marx’s day. Pedro’s tweet, taken in isolation, is obviously anachronistic — it applies the terms of 19th century politics to the current terms of woke political discourse.

They’re not really communists, are they? Aren’t they just the enablers of oligarchy?

The answer is: both.

That the leaders of the Republican Party are the enablers of oligarchy (and in many cases, the oligarchs themselves) is obvious. So they look an awful lot like the English capitalist class of the 19th century. But they differ in this (and this is where Gonzalez’s musings are helpful): The Republican leadership shares Marx’s goal of creating a classless society. Victorian capitalists knew that class antagonism was inevitable; they just intended to maintain the upper hand in the class war. Modern-day Republicans, on the other hand, are not so cynical. They are more utopian. They believe they can end the class war.

Class and Culture War, at Home and Abroad

For at least fifty years, the American leadership class has systematically transformed the country from an industrial power to a consumer power. That industry could make a country powerful on the geopolitical field is obvious — that consumption can do the same is not so obvious. But the collapse of the Soviet bloc shows just how powerful the American consumption economy was: Coca-Cola, jeans, and rock music — industrial-scale consumer goods — exploded like a nuclear warhead in eastern Europe. The Soviet system did not survive.

But communism was not defeated. It came home; or rather, it was already here. The shift from an industrial to a consumer economy had a domestic edge to it as well. It wasn’t just, or even primarily, for taking down the USSR. It was for transcending the traditional class antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat and transforming America into a classless society, or more accurately, a single-class society: a universal, national class of consumers.

Holding the whip hand in the class war has been the goal of owners since capitalism was born. That’s normal, and it’s what the power of the state should be used to moderate and restrain. But dissolving class distinction altogether — that’s a Marxist goal. And that’s the goal of our Republican Party.

Understanding this helps explain a lot of what the Republicans do. Why do they push bad trade deals that de-industrialize the country? It’s not because they want to uplift Bangladeshis from rural poverty to industrial poverty. It’s because by exporting labor, consumer goods will become cheaper. They are simply serving their constituents’ economic interests — since we are all consumers foremost, it is in our economic interests to get more goods for cheaper, no matter the consequences to the productive economy.

It also helps explain Republican foreign policy. Why has the guardian of a supposedly cautious, patriotic, conservative political movement spent so much time, money, and American lives in and for other countries far, far away?

Trotsky Never Dies

It’s simple: That’s what Trotskyites do. Trotsky sought to defend the international character of communism against the one-state, national communism of Stalin. We all know how that ended.

To many idealistic communists however, Trotsky lived on after his death as the defender of the international character of the communist revolution. And while the dogmatic Trostkyites at my local organic farm wouldn’t recognize it, that is precisely what our military adventurism in the Middle East (and elsewhere) has been about.

What was our goal in Iraq? To “make the world safe for democracy”? What did we really want to happen there? Yes, we wanted them to vote, but we don’t care that much about Arabs dipping their fingers in purple ink — when some different Arabs did so and voted for Sharia Law in Egypt, we were happy to help overthrow that democratically elected government.

What Uncle Sam really wants in Iraq — and the world over — is to integrate the Iraqi people into a global community of neoliberal capitalism (our Defense Department would have no problem with ISIS, the Taliban, the Muslim Brotherhood, or other “Islamofascists” if they would just let Amazon, Disney/Pornhub, and Nike into the country). Americans, Iraqis, Mexicans, and Englishmen: All of us will consume together in a giant, global, classless community. Capital and labor will move entirely without friction, like greased-up gears, their action will be sight-out-of-mind. The real show is not productive relations at all — but on Netflix or Prime or whatever streaming service(s) the modern consumer chooses.

Trotskyites in Britain

If this is true, if our Republican Party is a Trotskyite Party that has occasional recourse to the Bible and the flag, how’d it happen?

Not too differently from how it happened in Britain. The Trotskyite character of the British Conservative Party is instructive for America.

Peter Hitchens, of course, is himself a former Trotskyite. He is now a devout Anglican and a really fabulous conservative journalist and polemicist (I use the lowercase advisedly — he has no love for the Conservative Party in Britain). And he’s the one who has exposed the Trotskyite character of the ostensibly Conservative Party.

Hitchens has long been a harsh critic of Boris Johnson. In the Daily Mail in 2019, he called the Conservative Party the “main Left-wing party in the country”:

Mr Johnson’s mind is not conservative. He is a North London bohemian, a social liberal who can barely understand the arguments for lifelong marriage. He is rich enough to have no idea how bad, and how crammed with indoctrination, state schools actually are…

What did you think it meant when Mr Johnson appeared standing in front of a backdrop inscribed with the words ‘The People’s Government’, a phrase that could have been concocted by Blair’s mental valet, Alastair Campbell?…

What he meant was that he has engineered a reverse takeover of the Tories by New Labour.

And when you read “New Labour” in Hitchens’ prose (or tweets), you know that he means “Trotskyite”:

The truth about the Labour Party and its ferociously radical leader Sir Keir Starmer is so obvious that nobody sees it. This is why the recent revelation that the Blair creature himself was once a Trotskyist came and went without any response at all.

Nobody in the media wants to believe it, so they simply ignore it. Since the days of the Blairites, Labour has been a revolutionary party, crammed with people who long to get rid of the Monarchy but have more sense than to say so in public.

An astonishing number of Blair’s Cabinet colleagues had deep past links with revolutionary sects. Now such ideas are embedded in a party that used to be based on working-class trade unionism and Methodist Christianity…

This has been the genius of Blairism, to be miles to the Left of Jeremy Corbyn, but to persuade gullible media types that they are actually conservative.

Many of the neoconservatives that have dominated the Republican establishment over the postwar conservative establishment have a similar pedigree: former Trotskyites (in the American context, prewar New York intellectuals) who never really renounced the communist dream of an international revolution that would create a perfectly classless society.

Communist Social Policy

Once you understand that the “conservatives” of the Anglo world are actually Trotskyites, you not only understand their economic and trade decisions — you also understand their acquiescence to radical social policy.

The social radicalism that has reigned triumphant in the US and the UK for decades — the dissolution of borders and welcoming of millions of immigrants and refugees (some legal, some not), the war on the family, the legalization of drugs, the abortion regime — all of this serves their utopian vision of a global, classless, consumer society.

Capital already moves freely across borders, but labor is a bit stickier — it is, after all, human beings we’re talking about. So, religion, family, and patriotism must be dissolved. Those traditional aspects of human culture help glue humans to particular places and practices that are resistant to the friction-less labor markets our Trotskyite elite class desires.

Traditional culture also — and more importantly — subverts a global consumer culture. It closes off markets. It demands that certain things be off limits to commerce, and demands national and local limits inimical to the international consumer revolution. Hence why religion, family, and patriotism must be swept away.

So long as we keep the GOP around, we’re giving communism a lifeline in America.

Workers of America, unite! Destroy your Republican Party — you have nothing to lose but your consumerist Trotskyite chains!