Karl Marx famously said that historical facts and personages are repeated, first as tragedy, then as farce. But Marx could not have foreseen that the ideology he birthed would experience a third phase as well: therapeutic parody. The juvenile hysteria, tantrums, inflated “resistance,” and pointless vandalism of the left-wing Democrats are signs of leftism’s last phase. But that doesn’t make the left any less dangerous.
The “tragedy” wrought by the left is evident in its blood-stained history. The 100 million people murdered by purges and engineered famines were the victims of regimes founded on gulags, show-trials, lies, persecution, “re-education,” and censorship. Their deaths are one of history’s greatest tragedies. No more successful were the attempts to give collectivism “a human face” by creating the “soft despotism” of technocratic bureaucracies and agencies embodied in the EU and American progressivism, both increasingly sclerotic, ineffective, and desperate.
The “farce” came in the sixties, as one French ’68 leftist admitted in the famous graffito, “I am a Marxist, of the Groucho variety.” In less than a decade, the New Left’s embrace of hedonism and identity politics transformed it into a life-style choice and New Age cult for the affluent, pampered boomers rich enough to postpone adulthood indefinitely, and to avoid the consequences of their utopian fantasies. After a few spasms of terrorist attacks by outfits like the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army, the tax-payer-subsidized graduate seminar and faculty lounge, not the factory floor or the terrorist cell, became the nursery of the “revolution.”
A booming economy subsidized whole hordes of such parlor pinks, caviar communists, and radical chic poseurs. They turned leftist slogans and symbols into status commodities that capitalists from Hollywood and Madison Avenue were eager to co-opt and profit from. “Revolution” meant wearing a Che t-shirt, rocking with The Clash, and reading Noam Chomsky, pop-cultural brands that camouflaged sexual hedonism, licentious individualism, and conspicuous consumption. Finally, the “long march through the institutions” created not the collectivist utopia, but privileged elites in media, academe, and government whose stock portfolios, bank accounts, affluent zip-codes, and tony life-styles were indistinguishable from those of the robber-baron capitalists they demonized.
Now farce has become parody. Despite its dominance of the media, academe, and popular culture, subsequent decades of politically correct commissars policing language and thought; coercive regulations and laws encroaching ever more insidiously into private life and civil society; and the monstrous hypocrisy of an “effete corps of impudent snobs” who exempted themselves from the intrusive big-government regime they imposed on others less privileged and connected, all led to the repudiation of farcical leftism.
By November 2016, the eight years of Obama’s lies and blunders pushed the left-wing farce to the breaking point. The failure of a leftist president’s hijacking of the economy, and his foreign policy disasters wrought by a stale “we are the world” internationalism finally roused our generation’s forgotten men and women to throw the lefty bums out. It did not help that the Dems’ anointed candidate was the epitome of the left’s hypocritical mash-up mixing worn-out leftist bromides and shibboleths, with rank ambition, unseemly money-grubbing, and entitled arrogance.
