The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Teach Your Children Well

Posted on | February 6, 2014 | 94 Comments

Jesse Myerson (@JAMyerson) seems to believe he is so clever that the “points” he makes in advocating communism deserve a detailed rebuttal, and I suppose there may be people who have nothing better to do with their time than to supply such a response.

Both humility and impatience (as well as years of experience) lead me to avoid a point-by-point engagement with an impudent fool.

Jesse Myerson is not interested in the facts of history or economics that would contradict his communist enthusiasms. Myerson is merely striking the pose of a radical intellectual, expecting admiration and applause from those who share his socialist sympathies. No doubt he hopes these gestures will enable him to obtain TV appearances, book contracts and speaking invitations. His purported “idealism” is thus motivated by selfish ambition: The narcissist’s desire to be seen as praiseworthy, and to acquire an easy income by advocating ideas popular with the Left.

Many have trod that path before, and Myerson’s potential for success in this ideological endeavor cannot be underestimated.

Some people take Conor Friedersdorf seriously, you know.

Myerson is dishonest about many things, but mostly he is lying to himself, and foolishly believes his own lies about himself. He thinks he is a unique individual — a Special Snowflake™ — when in fact he is manifestly a type, and not a good type, either. His insulting impudence is reminiscent of Barrett Brown, now in federal custody awaiting trial.

Were I to learn that Myerson had a history of substance abuse and/or psychiatric problems, it would not surprise me.

Who Has ‘Huge Misconceptions’?

Myerson seems incapable of realizing that his insults are directed at someone who has seen his type a thousand times before. Presuming to lecture others about subjects which they know far better, Myerson petulantly pretends that their refusal to treat his faulty arguments seriously is proof of his own superiority. He imagines his elders who have lived through the history that he has merely read (and he doesn’t seem to have read it very carefully) need his sermons about their “huge misconceptions about communism.”

“In a socialist community the possibility of economic calculations is lacking: it is therefore impossible to ascertain the cost and result of an economic operation or to make the result of the calculation the test of the operation. . . .
“Too little attention has hitherto been given to these fundamental questions. . . . To understand the problem of economic calculation it was necessary to recognize the true character of the exchange relations expressed in the prices of the market. . . .
“It has not been realized that even exceptionally gifted men of high character cannot solve the problems created by socialist control of industry.”
— Ludwig von Mises, Socialism (1922)

Myerson is not illiterate, and is thus as capable as anyone else of reading Mises or Friedrich Hayek or Thomas Sowell. That he has never taken the time to do so — that he has not encountered the arguments of, e.g., Sowell’s The Quest for Cosmic Justice — is self-evident, and damning proof of Myerson’s intellectual sloth. He presents himself as an advocate of communism, but I can guarantee you that I have read more communist literature (including Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky) than has Myerson, and that I am more familiar than he with the history of Marxist-Leninist governments. But while I have studied the works of communism’s foremost advocates, Myerson has not studied the works of the most insightful advocates of the market economy. His ignorance, however, is no hindrance to his arrogance:

Communism envisions a time beyond work, when people are free, as Marx wrote, “to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner … without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” In that way, communism is based on the total opposite of uniformity: tremendous diversity, not just among people, but even within a single person’s “occupation.”

And good luck with that, OK? You might think Myerson would be embarrassed to recite the theoretical speculations of Karl Marx from 1845 (!) as if acquainting us with something hitherto unknown. Overlooking this puerile insult, let us instead contemplate the passage in Marx’s treatise preceding the one quoted by Myerson:

With the division of labour, in which all these contradictions are implicit, and which in its turn is based on the natural division of labour in the family and the separation of society into individual families opposed to one another, is given simultaneously the distribution, and indeed the unequal distribution, both quantitative and qualitative, of labour and its products, hence property: the nucleus, the first form, of which lies in the family, where wife and children are the slaves of the husband. This latent slavery in the family, though still very crude, is the first property, but even at this early stage it corresponds perfectly to the definition of modern economists who call it the power of disposing of the labour-power of others. Division of labour and private property are, moreover, identical expressions: in the one the same thing is affirmed with reference to activity as is affirmed in the other with reference to the product of the activity.
Further, the division of labour implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another. And indeed, this communal interest does not exist merely in the imagination, as the “general interest,” but first of all in reality, as the mutual interdependence of the individuals among whom the labour is divided. And finally, the division of labour offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape.

What Marx was doing here, laying the groundwork for his theory of alienation, was mimicking the method of 18th- and 19th-century social, economic and political philosophers who were forever dragging readers back to a mythical State of Nature in the primordial past, then leading them forward through a process of historical “development” in order either (a) to justify the existing order, or (b) to advocate some change to that order. If you’ve read through a few of these philosophical State of Nature field trips, you understand what Marx is up to here. When Marx’s particular “development” lecture ends with a contrast to “communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes,” the astute reader recognizes an attempted trickery: Marx merely imagines the possibility of this “communist society,” without bothering to specify how such an imaginary society could actually operate.

Marx assumes as a premise the feasibility of communism, which had never been proven prior to 1845 and which most observers would say has been quite conclusively disproven since. Yet here we have young Myerson holding up to us this bit of Marxian sophistry as if he has discovered a new and wonderful idea with which none of us ignorant right-wing stooges were ever previously acquainted!

Do you see the futility of arguing with Marxists? If they gave a damn about facts or logic, they wouldn’t be Marxists. And yet the brutal exposure of their errors is no idle or trivial exercise.

“Obama was already an ardent Marxist when I met in the fall of 1980. . . . I know it’s incendiary to say this [but Obama] was basically a Marxist-Leninist.”
— John Drew, Occidental College graduate

As anyone who has read Paul Kengor’s 2010 book The Communist is aware, the problem with Obama’s youthful Marxism is that he has never offered a conversion story to suggest that he ever abandoned it. When I was a young man, I was an ardently partisan Democrat — hell, I voted for Walter Mondale in 1984 — but I’ve often told the tale of when, why and how I became an ex-Democrat in the 1990s. While I was never a socialist, many others who once embraced socialism (including, inter alia, Whittaker Chambers, Ronald Reagan and David Horowitz) subsequently became conservatives, but all ex-Marxists in public life have typically made the story of their conversion a central part of their personal narrative. The absence of any such a conversion tale in Obama’s narrative is, as Kengor says, quite troubling.

Confronting the Anti-Bush Generation

Nor can we dismiss as an aberration Myerson’s enthusiasm for the discredited dream of communism. Perhaps others have overlooked how many college-educated 20-somethings like Myerson have taken up a far-left progressive stance. My interpretation of this phenomenon is that it is to a great degree a backlash to Bush-era GOP hegemony.

In the span of a decade (1998-2008), American public life went through a series of shocking events:

  • 1998 — The Lewinsky scandal and the Clinton impeachment.
  • 2000 — The Florida election deadlock and the Supreme Court decision that made George W. Bush president.
  • 2001 — The 9/11 terror attack and the invasion of Afghanistan.
  • 2002 — An unprecedented mid-term win for Republicans, securing GOP control of the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives for the first time in nearly 50 years.
  • 2003 — The invasion of Iraq.
  • 2004 — Bush re-elected after the “Swiftboating” of John Kerry.
  • 2006 — Democrats recapture control of Congress.
  • 2008 — Barack Obama elected president.

This partial list of dramatic events occurred against a background of innovations and shifts in the field of political communication: The Drudge Report, the MoveOn.org list, the rise of Fox News, the leftward shift of MSNBC as a counterweight, and the accompanying development of the blogosphere, Facebook and Twitter.

During this decade, 1998-2008, when today’s 28-year-old went through his bildungsroman from middle schooler to college graduate, what did the Republican  Party represent to him? Insofar as this 28-year-old identified with the hegemonic liberalism of American’s most powerful cultural institutions — in academia, journalism and the entertainment industry — the GOP was clearly viewed as the enemy, representing war, greed, racism and homophobia.

Let us not bother to ask whether these perceptions were fair or accurate, nor engage in a useless blame game of finger-pointing. Whether these perceptions of “Republican conservatism” were unfair, and whoever we might blame for those perceptions, the reality is that a great many young people — especially alumni of elite private schools like Bard College, which is Myerson’s alma mater — have integrated these anti-GOP perceptions into their worldview.

To such young people, “Rush Limbaugh,” “Fox News” and “Republican” are epithets, and any policy or argument that contradicts their progressive worldview they reject with a knee-jerk reflex: “Sexist! Racist! Warmonger! Homophobe! Right-wing Koch whore!”

“In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.”
– William F. Buckley Jr., Up From Liberalism (1959)

This is the problem for which our 21st-century “Republican strategists” and “conservative intellectuals” have no solution. Almost unnoticed in the quarter-century since the fall of the Berlin Wall, a chasm has emerged between the political world where Republicans contend with Democrats in hyper-partisan battle, and the cultural world where smart young people are indoctrinated with beliefs incompatible with the conservative philosophy of the GOP. Conservative faculty in academia are as scarce as conservative producers in Hollywood, and the output of the emerging Progressive Culture-Media Complex tends to reinforce the progressive lessons inculcated in most K-12 education.

Only in such an environment could a self-declared communist like Jesse Myerson be permitted to propagate a neo-Bolshevik vision without being criticized by any prominent liberal.

Where are the anti-communist liberals? Why have we seen no latter-day “Scoop Jackson Democrat” types warning against the dangers of backsliding toward discredited Marxist errors?

Where is the 21st-century Jeanne Kirkpatrick to sound the alarm?

There was a time when Americans knew what Communism was, and had the courage to fight against it. I fear for the future.

 

Category: Economics, History, Intellectuals

Comments

94 Responses to “Teach Your Children Well”

  1. SPQR9
    February 7th, 2014 @ 2:57 am

    North Vietnamese communists murdered over a million civilians. See works of R.J. Rummel for details.

  2. SPQR9
    February 7th, 2014 @ 2:57 am

    North Vietnamese communists murdered over a million civilians. See works of R.J. Rummel for details.

  3. SPQR9
    February 7th, 2014 @ 2:59 am

    The bulk of the civilian deaths were Communist murders.

  4. SPQR9
    February 7th, 2014 @ 2:59 am

    The bulk of the civilian deaths were Communist murders.

  5. SPQR9
    February 7th, 2014 @ 3:01 am

    Dude, you need to quit reading fraudulent crap from Noam Chomsky.

  6. SPQR9
    February 7th, 2014 @ 3:01 am

    Dude, you need to quit reading fraudulent crap from Noam Chomsky.

  7. K-Bob
    February 7th, 2014 @ 3:48 am

    You’re referring to this report, I think. And it’s going to get worse.

  8. K-Bob
    February 7th, 2014 @ 3:53 am

    I’ve never seen someone with blinders that tight before.

    I mean, I knew they were theoretically possible, but still.

    Say, I’ll bet “the American Military” killed “all the Indians” in this clown’s world, too.

  9. tlk244182
    February 7th, 2014 @ 6:00 am

    It really is true that teachers have a significant impact on a person’s intellectual and moral development. I had several teachers who equipped me to recognize the truth, or at least the untruth, and because of them I eventually found the narrow gate.

  10. Kirby McCain
    February 7th, 2014 @ 6:20 am

    Legalize the Constitution!

  11. Kirby McCain
    February 7th, 2014 @ 6:42 am

    You’re just a damn fool completely ignorant of history. The Soviets set up the communist dictatorship in North Korea and as soon as they were stalemated there they went to work in Vietnam. Their ‘Instant Allies’ program. Communism is only spread by violence. Did the Chinese turn to capitalism because someone held a gun to their collective heads?

    Call back when you finish fifth grade, Jethro.

  12. Socialism: Organized Evil
    February 7th, 2014 @ 7:15 am

    I’ve read most of Hayek’s work and I don’t recall seeing any sort of “universal minimum income” proposed.

    What is your source for making that claim?

  13. Quartermaster
    February 7th, 2014 @ 8:25 am

    I’m certain that’s not only fraudulent trash he’s read.

  14. Quartermaster
    February 7th, 2014 @ 8:26 am

    The actual number of communists were very small. The terror of the 30s killed far more non-communists than commies.

  15. Quartermaster
    February 7th, 2014 @ 8:29 am

    Volumes and volumes of lies. And if we were the bad guys, there were certainly a lot of people that disagreed with you on that score. We called them the boat people and there were many thousands that took to them to escape your “good guys.”

  16. JeffWeimer
    February 7th, 2014 @ 8:49 am

    Since Marxism is intellectualism for stupid people, it is useful for letting idiots self-identify, like Jesse Myerson and our very own troll commenter.

  17. M. Thompson
    February 7th, 2014 @ 8:59 am

    I’m a simple man. Just club ’em like they’re baby seals.

  18. Socialism: Organized Evil
    February 7th, 2014 @ 9:23 am

    There’s no reason to accept false marxist premises like Marx’s notion of “capitalism”.

    Similarly, there’s no reason to use marxist words, like “capitalism”, which imply acceptance of false marxist premises.

    In Western civilization, the correct terms are “free enterprise” and “free markets”.

  19. Socialism: Organized Evil
    February 7th, 2014 @ 9:26 am

    No one in Asia chose “communism” – it was opposed upon them. And brutally so because they had no buffer of Christianity.

    In the West we’ve been able to counter the religion of marxism because we have the bulwark of Christianity.

    Folks tend to forget that marxism is simply anti-Christianity. It is systematically organized evil.

  20. Jeanette Victoria
    February 7th, 2014 @ 9:30 am

    One HAS to be ignorant of history and devoid of common sense to be a Communist

  21. Jeanette Victoria
    February 7th, 2014 @ 9:31 am

    LOL well you sure did tell us

  22. DinaRehn
    February 7th, 2014 @ 9:56 am

    Whenever liberals are in a tight spot, they adopt the scorched-earth policy of argumentation. With no answer, they start demanding that you define words: What do you mean “liberal”? What do you mean “democracy”? What do you mean “patriotism”?

    They retreat from argument, burning the English language as they go.
    http://www.humanevents.com/2013/12/11/words-with-fiends/

    I’ve seen this tendency for the national socialist left to redefine of deny the meaning or words in the area of their base ideology Socialism.
    —
    They will deny someone is a socialist based on various arbitrary standards or criteria or simply say they don’t meet the definition somehow.
    —
    A certain socialists worker’s party being socialist – nope, can’t be.
    —
    Why? Well apparently that for the national socialist left to decide and they don’t have to ‘splain it to the rest of us great unwashed BTW.

    This way they can avoid having to answer fort the organized evil that is socialism or any of the other statist ideologies that have infested the world over the years.
    —
    Union of Socialist Soviet Republics [USSR]– nope they weren’t socialist either – why? ‘cause they said so, that’s why.

    Various socialist/communist/Marxist/Leninist/Fascist regimes have oppressed their people and killed them over the years – but by the convoluted lying logic of the left, that means they aren’t – somehow.

    When you ask them to based this on history or reality – they will just repeat the same load of barrack over and over again. [This is in the vain hope that as Lenin said it: “A lie told often enough becomes the truth”.]
    —
    To hear them explain it –they know the theory of Marxism and another who disagrees with said ideology simple doesn’t know what they are talking about.

    Yes, they get to define the meaning of words on the fly, and don’t you question this right of the national socialist left.

  23. Garym
    February 7th, 2014 @ 10:59 am

    Much like today’s commu …….. Democratic party.

  24. M. Thompson
    February 7th, 2014 @ 10:59 am

    True, but that applies to ANY institution.

    The Green pablum puke is a feel-goodism that’s everywhere is the issue.

  25. M. Thompson
    February 7th, 2014 @ 10:59 am

    I ignored him. It’s my policy not to feed trolls.

  26. Shawny
    February 7th, 2014 @ 12:34 pm

    I’m guessing we started using that “very sternly worded letter” about the same time we started shamefully dishonoring the graves of all those brave soldiers who sacrificed their lives believing they were saving the rest of us cowardly, ungrateful assholes from the Communist threat worldwide as well as the subversion of our own country.

  27. Shawny
    February 7th, 2014 @ 12:49 pm

    Damned Skippy! Cause if it don’t look like calling it Socialism, Marxism, Leninism or Communism is gonna fly then we’ll just lie and rebrand ourselves, oh, I don’t know…..”Progressives”. What they don’t get is that no matter how much mustard you heap on it, it’s still the same big Communist turd.

  28. Quartermaster
    February 7th, 2014 @ 12:57 pm

    But, but, that would destroy the US way of life as we know it.

  29. Shawny
    February 7th, 2014 @ 12:57 pm

    Thanks Stacy! It’s hard to find anyone in media now who will even call it what the hell it is, let alone denounce it. So how would our kids know how to recognize the threat. We need to educate them and give them the tools to fight it again.

  30. DinaRehn
    February 7th, 2014 @ 1:29 pm

    A slight edit:

    What they don’t get is that no matter how much mustard you heap on it, it’s still the same big Deadly Communist turd.

    I can’t tell how many times I’ve been in arguments with those on the national socialist left using the deny tactic.

    Whatever you say, they simply deny what you said.

    Which is why I use questions to attack their stance questions that are based on the definition of socialism and that Obama has advocated over the years.

    Most of the they will simply try to dodge of deflect from these questions and then do the great circle back to claim they’ve already answered them.

    The problem for the national socialist left is that they only have two choices – admit to reality or lie about it.

    Definition of socialism
    a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole. policy or practice based on the political and economic theory of socialism. (in Marxist theory) a transitional social state between the overthrow of capitalism and the realization of Communism.
    http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/socialism

    Are you denying what Obama is doing to the healthcare system – a good example of the Left’s socialist national agenda:
    ————–

    Love It or Hate It, Obamacare Redistributes Americans’ Wealth
    Not everyone comes out ahead as a result of the Affordable Care Act. Somebody has to foot the bill when you shift that much wealth.
    To do so would have handed his enemies the kind of weaponry they craved, validation that Obama was indeed some sort of “socialist” who believed in “redistribution.” It could have killed the effort in its tracks, then and there.
    http://www.nationaljournal.com/health-care/love-it-or-hate-it-obamacare-redistributes-americans-wealth-20131121

    From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. Karl Marx

    Did Obama advocate the taking over of GM? [Yes/No]

    Did Obama advocate doing the same ‘in every industry’ [Yes/No]

    Obama: Let’s repeat auto industry success
    PUEBLO, Colo. – President Obama, while villifying Mitt Romney for opposing the auto industry bailout, bragged about the success of his decision to provide government assistance and said he now wants to see every manufacturing industry come roaring back.

    “I said, I believe in American workers, I believe in this American industry, and now the American auto industry has come roaring back,” he said. “Now I want to do the same thing with manufacturing jobs, not just in the auto industry, but in every industry.
    http://www.politico.com/politico44/2012/08/obama-lets-repeat-auto-rescue-with-every-manufacturing-131566.html

    Did Obama advocate the taking over of the student loan system? [Yes/No]

    Did Obama advocate the national socialist healthcare(single payer)? [Yes/No]

    Did Obama advocate control over the insurance industry through Obamacare [Yes/No]
    If Not then what would possess those business to get rid of millions of paying customers?

  31. Shawny
    February 7th, 2014 @ 1:35 pm

    Our grandparents still remembered who the enemies of this nation were. They didn’t elect them to public office or hire them to subvert their children in a classroom. We need to reinstate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

  32. cmdr358
    February 7th, 2014 @ 2:00 pm

    So because Bush was such a disappointment , for lying about WMD’s in Iraq (?), no right thinking person should ever vote GOP again?
    Let’s accept that premise for a moment…

    Jimmy Carter established the Dept of Education, Dept.of Energy and is responsible for the Iran Hostage Crisis, an event which was the forerunner to every single terrorist attack on Americans since.
    And yet…..

    Bill Clinton had Whitewater, Troopergate, Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones and Monica Lewinski ( three affairs off the top of my head w/o even looking it up), implemented DADT, was impeached by the House and about the murder of Vince Foster well who’s knows right?
    And yet…

    Barack Hussein Obama aka Barry Soetoro aka who knows what other names he’s used….and Syria, Obamacare, Muslim Brotherhood, etc

    Yeah bud, all Bush’s fault. Hell you probably blame Bush for your not ever having an original thought in your head.

    Oh, were you not speaking about Bush’s dishonesty? Well what then? Just let me know, I’ll be reloading.

  33. cmdr358
    February 7th, 2014 @ 2:04 pm

    I enjoy feeding them until their gorged and can no longer move their fat little fingers across the keyboard any more
    Their like commies. Better off …

  34. bet0001970
    February 7th, 2014 @ 2:41 pm

    I have a hard time taking seriously community organizers who lecture me on history. Especially, when they were still shitting in their diapers right about the time I was heading to college.

    They always have explanations for why other nations aren’t “real” communism. They always have excuses for the failures of communism. They always say that “true” communism has never been attempted. But they never offer to reconcile human nature with their little utopia. And they never seem to wanna talk about all those murders.

    So I don’t bother giving them the attention I would give a 4 year old dancing in a YouTube video. At least the 4 year old is doing something worth paying attention to.

  35. Shawny
    February 7th, 2014 @ 3:13 pm

    If we keep them busy here it wastes the time they could be using indoctrinating the ignorant or, worse yet, procreating……or doing what they’re usually doing with their fat little fingers.

  36. Shawny
    February 7th, 2014 @ 3:19 pm

    What HE said!

  37. Good-bye, Jay: Heeere’s Jimmy | Regular Right Guy
    February 7th, 2014 @ 3:59 pm

    […] Teach Your Children Well […]

  38. Bob Belvedere
    February 8th, 2014 @ 12:20 am

    They did fine work, so I’m in favor of that.

  39. The Renegade Jesse Myerson : The Other McCain
    February 8th, 2014 @ 12:41 am

    […] thus to display his imaginary intellectual superiority. Myerson’s posing is intended, as I explained yesterday, for entirely selfish purposes: By presenting himself as an insuperable advocate of far-left […]

  40. Da Tech Guy On DaRadio Blog » Blog Archive » Islam & Communism and Uncomfortable Truths
    February 9th, 2014 @ 8:31 am

    […] So when Stacy asks this damn­ing ques­tion of the edu­ca­tional sys­tem that pro­duced Myer­son and says […]

  41. A Lesson for a Marxist Fool | The Political Hat
    February 9th, 2014 @ 1:48 pm

    […]      Plenty of individuals have taken it upon themselves to take-down the sheer and utter idiocy of Salon’s commie stooge, including Robert Stacy McCain. […]

  42. News of the Week (February 9th, 2014) | The Political Hat
    February 9th, 2014 @ 2:12 pm

    […] Teach Your Children Well Jesse Myerson (@JAMyerson) seems to believe he is so clever that the “points” he makes in advocating communism deserve a detailed rebuttal, and I suppose there may be people who have nothing better to do with their time than to supply such a response. […]

  43. Intellectuals and the Total State: @JAMyerson’s Dilettante Marxism : The Other McCain
    February 10th, 2014 @ 6:07 pm

    […] Feb. 6: Teach Your Children Well […]

  44. On Communist @JAMyerson, Psychopaths, And Useful Idiots [Updated] | The Camp Of The Saints
    February 10th, 2014 @ 7:44 pm

    […] -Teach Your Children Well […]