How did Marxism come to dominate American Academia and now US politics after a century of oppression, terror, and failure?
Those of us who lived through the Cold War, and especially those who served on its front lines, must be asking that very question. When the Berlin Wall fell, most of us assumed that Marxism and socialism had been thoroughly discredited. F.A, Hayek had written its eulogy not long after Stalin came to power in his seminal book The Road to Serfdom, which lays out a predictive path of oppression and collapse for any country foolish enough to adopt either. Hayek had foreseen Venezuela’s collapse under Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro decades earlier.
The track record of Marxism and its cousin socialism is uniformly terrible, and all too often horrible. Marxist revolutions began emerging in and around World War I and succeeded in places like Mexico, Vietnam, and even Ireland for a while, but had no greater success than in Russia. And when we say “success,” we mean the establishment of 70 years of terror, oppression, and mass murder … and that’s just inside Russia.
With the bloody track record of the Soviets — not to mention the tens of millions killed under Mao and the millions under the Khmer Rouge, among others — this totalitarian nightmare should have died. What happened? As the walls were falling, Marxists were organizing in Academia. Over three years ago, FEE’s Jon Miltimore and Dan Sanchez recalls that the New York Times reported in 1989 on how Academia had mainstreamed Marxism even as it was in the process of being exposed as an engine of oppression and terror:
On October 25, 1989, a mere two months after Poland’s pivotal election, the New York Times published an article, headlined “The Mainstreaming of Marxism in US Colleges,” describing a strange and seemingly paradoxical phenomenon. Even as the world’s great experiment in Marxism was collapsing for all to see, Marxist ideas were taking root and becoming mainstream in the halls of American universities.
“As Karl Marx’s ideological heirs in Communist nations struggle to transform his political legacy, his intellectual heirs on American campuses have virtually completed their own transformation from brash, beleaguered outsiders to assimilated academic insiders,” wrote Felicity Barringer.
There were notable differences, however. The stark, unmistakable contrast between the grinding poverty of the Communist nations and the prosperity of Western economies had obliterated socialism’s claim to economic superiority.
As a result, orthodox Marxism, with its emphasis on economics, was no longer in vogue. Traditional Marxism was “retreating” and had become “unfashionable,” the Times reported. …
Marxism was not dying, it was mutating.
”Marxism and feminism, Marxism and deconstruction, Marxism and race – this is where the exciting debates are,” Jonathan M. Wiener, a professor of history at the University of California at Irvine, told the paper.
Indeed, and 35 years later, we can see the results. The nihilism of Marxism remains unabated. Its adherents in Academia have produced at least two generations of Marxist indoctrinees and activists, most of whom have either infected the media, educational systems, and American politics. The “exciting debates” have mutated into forced declarations of adherence and demands to shut down any debate or dissent, either through direct authoritarian action using terms like “misinformation” or by labeling opponents as “racists” and “-phobes” of every stripe.
Who’s left to tell the true story of Marxism, and its foundation of terror and ruin?
My friend Bill Whittle has stepped up to remind everyone of the real nature and evils of Marxism and its associated ideologies. Working with Daily Wire+, Bill has a new docu-series titled An Empire of Terror as part of the larger What We Saw series that focuses on the Soviet Union and a century of mass murder, genocide, and oppression in service to this evil ideology. Here’s the trailer:
I spoke with my friend Bill last week about this series, and had a delightful conversation about it and the need for a new education about Marxism. I had watched the first episode of this series before talking with Bill, and I’m looking forward to watching the rest. Today, Daily Wire+ drops the third episode in the series, “The Ramshackle Revolution,” which we touch on in the conversation regarding the Kerensky phase of the revolution.
Bill and I cover a lot of material in this podcast, including:
- The infiltration of Academia by Marxists
- The scope of Soviet brutality, even before Stalin
- The nonsense of Trotsky revisionism
- Why F.A. Hayek’s warning fails to register today
- Salma Hayek (yes, we discuss her — find out why!)
- The rich production values of the docuseries and why that matters
I hope you enjoy the conversation — but I hope it also educates and empowers you.
The Ed Morrissey Show is now a fully downloadable and streamable show at Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the TEMS Podcast YouTube channel, and on Rumble and our own in-house portal at the #TEMS page!
