[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
A few days before the murder of Charlie Kirk, I posted “The Dangerous Wages of Oikophobia”, a focus on the despicable mockery of patriotism, and the celebration of violence among the many leftist commentators’ gleeful joy over the nearly 3000 fellow citizens murdered on 9-11. One feature of oikophobia is the Left’s––whether progressive or “woke” ––hatred of patriots and the country they love, to the point of cheering on the sadistic murderers of their fellow Americans. The murder of Charlie Kirk has been celebrated with the same despicable oikophobia.
Patriots, in contrast, handle political conflicts, and disagree with fellow citizens by using the tools provided by the Constitution: the unalienable right of free speech, the laws and rules governing elections and legislation, and the general principles codified in the Constitution, most importantly the citizens’ political freedom and equality, without recourse to violence no matter how heated arguments may get.
Charlie Kirk was famous for following these patriotic protocols––seeking dialogue, attempting persuasion, and showing respect, while promoting acts of patriotism and support for the Constitution. Settling conflict through violence and murder is an act of treason against the Constitution and fellow Americans, and thus a threat to the freedom of all.
Since 9-11, such grotesque displays of mockery and unseemly pleasure over our fellow citizens’ suffering have increased the sadistic, juvenile pleasure in the death of a political enemy. With Charlie Kirk’s murder, they have been reined in a bit, but only because the plutocrats running the bosses of left-wing commentators and news-readers have had their fiscal wings clipped by terrible ratings and shrinking audiences. But the poison injected throughout the culture will not cease, no matter how many alleged journalists plumping for the left get fired. Their creed is the moral idiocy of “any means necessary.”
What has caused these moronic, sadistic displays by the intellectual punks created and churned out by our mediocre universities? How does the culture and its so-called adults indulge and applaud the cretins who are historical ignorant, and preen themselves by misusing words like “fascism,” as did the creep who murdered Kirk, and who should remain in the permanent damnatio memoriae reserved for ancient Rome’s worst enemies and traitors.
Let’s also add to him the legions of professors, entertainers, and low-rent politicians too lazy or stupid to make a coherent argument for, say, why they hate Donald Trump and instead shower him with question-begging epithets like “fascist,” “white supremacist,” “racist,” “autocrat,” and of course “Hitler,” the equivalent of the tantrum-throwing toddler’s “poopy-head” slur.
So, what has made possible this abandonment of patriotism by a people who live the richest, most pampered, and coddled existence in history? The answer is simple: the long embrace of Marx’s “theory” that has sown suffering and the slaughter of millions across the globe. More astonishing is how daffy is Leftism’s founding deity’s mind. Rather than science, Marxism––“the science of real men and their historical development,” as Marx’s financier Engels claimed––is a species of scientism mixed with a “religiously mythopoetic drama carefully camouflaged within various scientific-sounding accretions,” as historian Michael Burleigh put it.
Consider the preposterous ideas Marx poached from Christian doctrines shorn of their transcendence. Particularly import is the idea of the “new man,” as Christian philosopher Henri de Lubac writes, “the ideal of a liberated unified humanity that has recovered full possession of its essence reconciled with itself as with the universe, living in full consummation with History.” But this paradise is not a spiritual one, but a materialist “heaven on earth” in the here and now, “beyond necessity and alienation, in which a restored humanity, reaching its highest potential, will no longer need war, exploitation or oppression,” ––the “new man” that makes real Satan’s promise to Adam and Eve: “Ye shall be as gods.”
Leon Trotsky followed his eventual murderer Marx into his preposterous visions of human improvement through the Marxist doctrine of the “new man”: “Man will make it his goal . . .to create a higher sociobiological type, a superman. . . Man will become incomparably stronger, wiser, more subtle . . . The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, Goethe, Marx. And beyond this ridge, other peaks will emerge.”
But this “new man” will be created by force, if necessary, the “old man” reshaped or destroyed to make way for the “new” ––a grim prediction of the gulags, famines, torture, and massacres of millions under Lenin and Stalin.
And this fever dream is the ideology that for centuries has won the hearts of Europeans and Americans, and still is drawing adherents despite the long record of economic failure and political oppression. Indeed, “By the end of the 19th Century,” Robert Conquest writes, “the Marxist predictions of a capitalist failure to expand production, of a fall in the rate of profits, a decrease in wages, of the increasing proletarian impoverishment and the resulting approach of revolutionary crisis in the industrial countries had all proved false.”
But Marxism provides all the ideological desiderata of modern intellectuals’ fantasies––endless progress, improvement, and liberation from the transcendent authority and power that holds us to account for our sins. As de Lubac noted, Marxist theory is one of the ways “in which modern man seeks to escape from any kind of transcendency and to shake off the thing it regards as an unbearable yoke––namely, faith in God.”
Moreover, the power of “science” is deified, its high priests the technocrats who control the government and save us from the power of thinking morally, or abiding by the Constitution, which promises no paradise or perfection, yet still can give us freedom if we abide by its divided, checked, and balanced powers that set the ambitions of power against those of others.
But all that is too full of superstitions and pesky moral traditions, too clumsy for creating heaven on earth here and now, burdened as it is by the dour realism of the Founders’ guardrails. Stalin was much more efficient in creating his perfection: “Death solves all problems, no man, no problem.”
But there’s one big problem with Marxism––it can’t deliver the materialist goods and freedom the way free-market capitalism has does, thus creating the richest, freest, most powerful nation in the world. The EU nations, still riddled with communist parties and socialist governments, have long resented the U.S.’s dominance. As French philosopher Raymond Aron wrote in 1957, leftists “have a grudge against the United States mainly because the latter had succeeded by means which were not laid down in the revolutionary code. Prosperity, power, the tendency toward uniformity of economic conditions––these results have been achieved by private initiative, by competition rather than State intervention, in other words by capitalism, which every well-brought up intellectual has been taught to despise.”
The same psychology applies to the U.S. among its cognitive elites, whom our universities have trained in the same arrogant fealty to “state intervention” comprising federalist technocratic clerks who supposedly know better than businessmen and other practical people. That snobbery is a gift of Marxism, and its numerous failures and its toll of 85 to 100,000 million dead, which cannot wake the progressives and their “woke” offspring from their dogmatic slumbers and “any means necessary” moral idiocy. That same ressentiment pours from today’s sullen oikophobes.
The winds of change, however, are starting to blow. The murder of Charlie Kirk has aroused and energized many young people who see Donald Trump as the instrument for restoring our country’s Constitutional order, and the traditions of political freedom and equality that have made the U.S. the world’s preeminent country.
Thanks to President Trump, Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point will still be turning.
