The Socialist Temptation
2nd July 2017
Marxism appeared to have suffered a knockout with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. It looked at the time like the postscript to Ronald Reagan’s long struggle against Communism, the struggle Peter Schweizer called Reagan’s War.
Now in what seems like the blink of an eye, Bernie Sanders has somehow become the most popular politician in the United States. By contrast with Reagan, here is a guy who has deeply felt what Vivian Gornick called The Romance of Communism. As we all have learned, Sanders merged the personal and the political when he spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union. No honeymoon in Vegas for the class warrior from Burlington by way of Brooklyn.
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The late Harry Jaffa cogently warned that the socialist temptation would survive the fall of the Soviet Union. If anything, the fall of the Soviet Union would enhance its appeal. “The defeat of communism in the USSR and its satellite empires by no means assures its defeat in the world,” Jaffa argued. “Indeed, the release of the West from its conflict with the East emancipates utopian communism at home from the suspicion of it affinity with an external enemy. The struggle for the preservation of western civilization has entered a new—and perhaps far more deadly and dangerous—phase.”
And here we are.