“You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about”, Hillary Clinton on CNN
“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming” America. – Barack Obama
In the 1950’s, when I was a teenager, the big threat to the country and to the rest of the western world was the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. We had learned how Communists had infiltrated trade unions, Hollywood, college faculties, government agencies, and who knew what all else. We learned about Eugene V Debs. We learned about Gus Hall. We learned how socialism was viewed as a necessary step on the way to communism. We learned about red spies, fellow travelers, and “useful idiots.” Those of us who took this threat seriously were charged with looking for communists under every bed. We learned about Rudolph Abel, hollow coins, microfiche, dead drops, the Rosenbergs, and Alger Hiss, etc.
In those days, if one were accused of being a communist or communist sympathizer, he/she typically would deny it. In defense of themselves, academics would make sophistic distinctions between being a communist and being a presumably more benign “Marxist.” It was, however, all part of a clandestine campaign to weaken and undermine the USA.
Recently leftwing activists, so-called “progressives,” have become more willing to identify with that effort. Some Democrat candidates run openly as Socialists. When Barack Obama announced that “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming” America,” the cat was out of the bag. The fox was in the henhouse, and those people whom we had long suspected of being part of the campaign to bring down America were, at long last, out in the open.
When Hillary Clinton, in her youth a Saul Alinsky adherent, says “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about,” it resonates just as well as a reason to oppose liberalism, and not necessarily in civil terms. Today’s leftists personify the Socialists who have for decades espoused policies to destroy what we stand for and what we care about. Our divided country is not simply fighting over the lack of civility in political discourse, it’s engaged in a civil war (no pun intended) over “what we stand for and what we care about.” Neither side is poised to surrender.
© Dwight Boud, 2018
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