Red Scare
Written by Bill Cox
At the risk of hearing, “Okay McCarthyite boomer”, I would like to examine a recent copy of the platform of the currently prominent Democrat Socialists of America. I want to attempt to approach it from a Christian perspective. Included in that, I would like to examine the personal life and motivations of the founder of the entire anarcho-communist-socialist movement, the notorious Karl Marx.
Here is a copy of the recently published partial DSA platform:
1. No more bills for anyone
2. Government-run food, housing, medicine, transportation, and nationalizing all other large corporations and essential industries
3. The drafting of a “new constitution”
4. Defunding the Department of War
5. Slavery reparations
6. Unlimited free abortion and “gender-affirming care” for all, including minors
7. Have taxpayers pay off everyone’s entire student debt & fund unlimited “free” higher education for all
8. Taking “steps toward fully abolishing the police and prison system”
9. Ending ALL deportations, providing amnesty for ALL illegal immigrants, and allowing unlimited migration to America
10. Abolish the Presidency, Supreme Court, and Senate
Leaving aside the obvious that the platform has the political and economic sophistication that would get a sixth grader a failing grade on a civics paper, what are the roots of these particularly bizarre beliefs? Perhaps, more germane, what convinces graduate-level university students and professors to embrace it? One likely answer to that is that in their puffed-up hubris and pride, they visualize themselves as the future overseers in such a system.
Interestingly, one of the DSA candidates running for statewide office in the current election cycle, admitted recently, “ she uncovered the fact that she has bipolar disorder, had a mental breakdown, was a cutter, and is suicidal. She also hates white people”. Could it be possible that mentally ill people would embrace irrational, nihilistic public policies?
The candidate in question, Francesca Hong stated, “At 18, I had a mental breakdown,” Hong told Meal Magazine. “I didn’t actually walk at my high school graduation because I had been hospitalized for a week at a child psychiatric hospital. I just felt like nothing had meaning anymore. It was a numbness that took over, and a pain that I couldn’t describe. I couldn’t feel anymore, and that scared the h*** out of me. And I found myself self-harming to feel something… It was cutting. I was diagnosed with bipolar disease. I was taking SSRIs, and I’d overdosed on lithium.”
While, as one who has professionally worked with and supported people with severe mental illness and experienced my own mental illness before conversion, I can certainly empathize with Ms. Hong, but is a hopeless, nihilistic worldview a good soil for healthy, benevolent public service?
Essential British historian, Paul Johnson, wrote a biography of public intellectuals called “Intellectuals”. In it, he examines the personal lives of many of those who would dedicate their lives to revolutionary change. One of the lives he examined in some detail is that of communist architect Karl Marx.
Francesca Hong’s empty soul and disassociation are mirrored in some early poetry Marx wrote:
“We are chained, shattered, empty, frightened/ Eternally chained to this marble block of being", wrote the young Marx…"We are the apes of a cold God.” Easy to visualize a mad, dystopian world view when your inner world is empty, tortured, and barren.
“G.K. Chesterton quipped that ‘the problem when men quit believing in God is not that they believe in nothing but that they believe in anything.’ Without the love and transcendent morality of the living God, any crackpot theory is possible.”
A recent X post by a DSA acolyte stated his disdain for a couple of construction workers who made a lighthearted comment to him that he found offensive. While he committed to continuing to be down with the working-class struggle, he didn’t care much for actual working- class people. Karl Marx shared this proclivity.
According to Johnson, the only working-class person that Marx ever had contact with was a housemaid named Helen Demuth, whom he paid no wages to, impregnated, ignored her child, and only spoke to him only once in their shared life.
As far as Marx and religion, he was born a Jew, the son of an orthodox rabbi from a distinguished line, but he never explored it and eventually embraced the antisemitism of the left. He briefly flirted with Christianity but rejected it when he went to college.
Marx’s well-known phrase that “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people", was actually plagiarized, but he had plenty to say on the matter. A telling one of his world views was, “Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.”
What did Marx say about the nuclear family?
Karl Marx said as much in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, in which he called for the abolition of the family. Most importantly, Marx said that communism would ensure that children would be educated by the state and not by their parents. Communists, he wrote in the Manifesto, would “rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.” The making of the “New Man” was the priority, and the family was an obstacle.
Marx’s own family life was a disaster. He was married to a devoted German woman named Jenny, but ultimately destroyed her love with cruelty, sloth, philandering, and terrible financial management.
Johnson characterizes Marx’s personal life and character as, “ he led a particularly unhealthy life, took very little exercise, ate unhealthy foods, smoked heavily, drank a lot, had constant liver trouble, and he rarely took baths or washed much at all. He had a veritable plague of boils and was grossly incompetent in handling money”. Marx seems an example of someone’s foul life and disposition, spawning insane, demonic world views.
I think a good answer to communism’s ill existence is summed up by a quote from two intellectuals better than the twisted Karl Marx.
G.K. Chesterton quipped that “the problem when men quit believing in God is not that they believe in nothing but that they believe in anything.” Without the love and transcendent morality of the living God, any crackpot theory is possible.
The Russian writer Dostoevsky said in one of his novels, “God is dead, everything is permitted,” to which the Christian reply is “He lives and will consign all the bankrupt philosophies of this world to the dustbin of history."