"‘Red October” was the name for a great Cold War movie.
It’s also the name for the Communist takeover of the Russian government on Oct. 26, 1917, when Bolshevik forces stormed the Winter Palace in today’s St. Petersburg.
That’s according to the old-style calendar; in the new calendar, the 100th anniversary of the Revolution is Tuesday, Nov. 7.
We had our own revolution, a year ago.
Which makes it a good time to compare Red October with red-state America, the Trump revolution in American politics.
I got a heads up about the comparison at a 2015 dinner, when I heard a congressman complain about the members of the House’s rambunctious and very conservative Freedom Caucus. “Right-wing Marxists,” he called them.
Aha, I thought.That’s me.
...With all the horrors of communism, with all the misery it unleashed on the world, Karl Marx still has something to tell us.
Something about the problem he had with America.
It didn’t fit with his theories.
He said society progressed in stages: first feudalism, then capitalism, then socialism.
But in 1852, when he wrote “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,” the most advanced capitalist society was that of the United States, and it was nowhere near socialism.
That was a bit of an embarrassment for Marx, but then he had an explanation for what he might have called American Exceptionalism.
...The election was thus a struggle between one set of voters with a revolutionary consciousness against a counter-revolutionary class that denied that any change was possible.
It was like 1917, with the difference that now it’s the Left that is counter-revolutionary, that wants to keep things as they are — unjust, unequal.
And that’s why, of the different kinds of Marxism, mine is right-wing.
It wasn’t free-market capitalism that made us immobile.
Instead, it was all the barriers to advancement that liberals created, through statutes and regulations that place a stumbling block in the path of those who seek to rise.
Today it’s the socialist who is objectively counter-revolutionary, for there’s nothing more truly revolutionary than a capitalist system that opens its doors to talent and industry, that erases unearned privileges..."
Read on!
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