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.
In which communist @JAMyerson briefly demonstrates his deficiency of reading comprehension. https://t.co/4w1QJP1rQK #tcot
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) February 6, 2014
Both humility and impatience (as well as years of experience) lead me to avoid a point-by-point engagement with an impudent fool.
Facts, history, truth — or what communist @JAMyerson calls "yawn-worthy McCarthyite tropes." https://t.co/4w1QJP1rQK #tcot
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) February 6, 2014
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.
.@JAMyerson Downplaying the number of people killed by communism is insulting. You're disrespecting my family, millions of others @rsmccain
— Gabriella Hoffman (@Gabby_Hoffman) February 6, 2014
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.
No, fuck you. The only murderer’s in that theatre of war were the American military. There are volumes and volumes of data to corroborate how we conducted the war which was basically a genocide. And it’s imperialism to want to push a colonzing force out of your own homeland but not imperialism for us to be there, slaughtering every single thing that looked oriental? And sorry, jerk-off, you’re the one fantasizing. History, has already judged that whole debacle and we were the bad guys. And dummy, even Vietnamese civilian called us, and the South Vietnamese government the enslavers, and not the North Vietnamese government.
No, fuck you. The only murderer’s in that theatre of war were the American military. There are volumes and volumes of data to corroborate how we conducted the war which was basically a genocide. And it’s imperialism to want to push a colonzing force out of your own homeland but not imperialism for us to be there, slaughtering every single thing that looked oriental? And sorry, jerk-off, you’re the one fantasizing. History, has already judged that whole debacle and we were the bad guys. And dummy, even Vietnamese civilian called us, and the South Vietnamese government the enslavers, and not the North Vietnamese government.
No, fuck you. The only murderer’s in that theatre of war were the American military. There are volumes and volumes of data to corroborate how we conducted the war which was basically a genocide. And it’s imperialism to want to push a colonzing force out of your own homeland but not imperialism for us to be there, slaughtering every single thing that looked oriental? And sorry, jerk-off, you’re the one fantasizing. History, has already judged that whole debacle and we were the bad guys. And dummy, even Vietnamese civilian called us, and the South Vietnamese government the enslavers, and not the North Vietnamese government.
The comrade dude in the Soviet era poster you put up could pass for you. Or maybe Robert Carlyle from Trainspotting. It is sort of creepy like the guy who is in the 20s era photograph at the end of the Shinning.
One of the reasons I was not eager to trounce the Monuments Men (before seeing it) was when I read Clooney had the Soviet Army as the bad guys too (along with the Nazis).
I’m roughly the same age as this guy, but I got entranced by military stuff at an early age. That, and I had a very good economics teacher my freshman year of high school.
No wonder he had trouble getting the movie made.
Right — there are people who, because of particular circumstances, including the influence of their parents, are immune to this left-wing trend. But if someone is vulnerable to such appeals, there is very little in contemporary culture to sway them back in the opposite direction.
You, sir, are on a roll.
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:
In other words, Meyerson is a “Dirty Stinkin’ Capitalist” in Communist Sheep’s clothing.
Oh, they ALL are nowadays, these young progressive intellectual types. And why not? If you’re a reasonably telegenic 20-something, just go whole-hog pushing left-wing memes online, then pimp yourself out for Russia Today or The Network Formerly Known As Current TV — low-threshold talk-TV gigs for leftists. If you can come across fairly well in those AA farm league outlets, next you’ll get booked on MSNBC and — boom! — you’ll be invited to write political stuff for glossy outlets like Vanity Fair, Esquire, GQ, and sooner or later, you’ve got a book deal.
You have no idea what a vicious crabs-in-the-bucket scramble there is among second- and third-tier left-wing writers for those coveted guest spots on MSNBC panel shows. People have agents and contracts and shit, you know.
An excellent post, very well done. Just as fear of God is the foundation of all spiritual wisdom, fear of communism is the foundation of all secular political wisdom.
The left has completed its long march through the institutions.
So first thing to do is get your kids and grandkids the heck out of government schools.
Next is to recognize that most of the Fourth Estate is now Fifth Column, and indoctrinate your families against that.
Simultaneously though, we need the Article Five Convention to get some balance in federalism. Without competition in government, Americans have no freedom of choice in schools or medicine.
If we don’t do all three of those things, the very notion of property will be the next to go.
And yet they still have that idiot, Buckwheat wannabe “Too Ray” on there.
Your comment about being a Democrat and then a Republican reminds me of PJ O’Rourke’s comment about his youthful (’60s) leftism. “While it is true that I was a Maoist in college in the 60s, I later on went back to being a Republican, and I am glad to say that I never shamed my family by becoming a Democrat.”
There were a lot of us People Of A Certain Age who were all into sex, drugs and rock-and-roll as youth in the 1960s and ’70s. Then we grew up, got jobs, got married, had kids and started paying taxes and, by the time we were in our 30s, realized that our parents were mostly right about the stuff that we had rebelled against.
These 20-something lefties now? They’re never going to grow up. Permanent adolescents, with the typical Anti-Establishment posture that is now so commonplace as to be an Establishment in its own strange way. The real cultural rebels nowadays are ultra-conservative home-schooling doomsday preppers stockpiling ammo for Armageddon.
Well, I guess it’s RSM’s turn to run down to Walmart and pick up a plastic 1st Place trophy for Jesse Myerson, ‘cuz his is the sole intellect capable of imagining a perfect communism. And no gold star for him – it’s Red Star by Gaw…Marx!
While Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom is perhaps his best known work, The Fatal Conceit is also required reading.
http://www.amazon.com/Fatal-Conceit-Errors-Socialism/dp/1469298163
Those “20-something lefties” are a big reason why I never, ever, have voted Democrat in a Federal election. They were the slimebags outside the Pentagon calling my dad and other career military people “baby killers” while actively & treasonously cheerleading for the VC and North Vietnamese, and not too long after that they took over the Democratic Party. F*ck those people, seriously.
Homeschooling is no longer an option – a luxury, if you will – but a necessity.
“For one thing, a large number of the people killed under Soviet communism weren’t the kulaks everyone pretends to care about but themselves communists.”
He’s got you there.
Yes, indeed.
Bravo, Stacy.
And, I’m sure, he hopes to get laid.
One of the problems for the young today is that most of their parents never grew-up, never possessed the wisdom our parents did.
And we shall give Comrade Myerson* a triumph in The Temples Of Syrinx! [that was for you, Smitty]
________________________
*It always makes me sad
when any modern Jew
adopts Communism,
considering how the Reds
have always ended-up
persecuting and murdering
them.
Funny that you bring up Hayek because even he’s out of step with modern conservatives due to his belief in a universal minimum income that would allow people to afford all the basic’s. Conservatives, in their undying loyalty to corporate America and their opposition to a minimum wage hike are in reality putting the burden on tax payers who make up the difference for the working poor with food stamps, subsidized housing, and now healthcare.
He made a good point though: how many have died for capitalism? The Vietnam war alone killed millions.
Too bad for you, they were right about Vietnam and just about all accounts of EXACTLY what went on there prove that. We were an imperialist force trying to stop a country from self determination and independence from the colonial rule they lived under for who knows how many years. Ironically, their war against us was like our war for independence and that time we were the red coats.
Communism is explicitly expansionist; capitalism is not. It’s funny how you have to try to equate them, though, to paper over the historical militancy of Communism.
Ah, so that’s why the North Vietnamese Army supported terrorists and guerrillas, and sent forces and supplies across the DMZ into another sovereign nation, i.e., South Vietnam:
Which, in any other universe (save yours), are acts of war. By an imperialist force (North Vietnam) trying to stop a country from self determination and independence South Vietnam had gained after kicking the French out, and not wanting to deal with that murderous communist, Ho Chi Minh.
But don’t let me bust the bubble into your La La Land; feel free to continue fantasizing and trolling for an emotional response. It’s just too bad that American politicians turned their backs 50,000 dead Americans and millions of enslaved people for a little improved public relations with a bunch of slimebag hippies spit on the military.
Like Wombat says, fuck em’ all.
I said it before and I will say it again : I am so old I can remember when shot goddamned commies. When did we start allowing for anything other than massive amounts of lead, whizzing through the air at incredible speeds, to argue the folly of Communism?
In other words, when did we start using the *very sternly-worded letter* instead of just shooting the sons-a-bitches?
After the Bush administration anyone that votes Republican needs to have their head examined. Sad part, is the GOP is worse now. And you’re thanking your freshman econ teacher? It was a GOP strong government that lead to the 2008 meltdown. Go back to that school and kick him in the balls.
Parochial schools are an option. The issue is time and money.
He’s a Troll, let him get banhammered.
So, what were we doing in Vietnam if not stopping a country from having the government of their choice which would have reduced our market share and inability to exploit their rubber? Why did we help get rid of Alende and install Pinochet? At the behest of IT&T and the copper mines. Not to mention the free market experiments we played over there ending with millions of people tortured or simply disappeared. How about Iran when we staged a coup and installed the Shah? OIL at the behest of Exxon and BP. How about Cuba? Sugar, fruit, casinos, property. How could you possibly be so oblivious to believe capitalism doesnt expand?
[…] where Robert Stacy McCain comes to the rescue as an adult in the […]
[…] Teach Your Children Well […]
Alas, even there you have to be very watchful. Two of my nieces were subjected to environmentalism and nanny-state, Bloombergish propagandizing in a Catholic High School in the early 1990’s.
Alas, even there you have to be very watchful. Two of my nieces were subjected to environmentalism and nanny-state, Bloombergish propagandizing in a Catholic High School in the early 1990’s.
Alas, even there you have to be very watchful. Two of my nieces were subjected to environmentalism and nanny-state, Bloombergish propagandizing in a Catholic High School in the early 1990’s.
My my, we touched a nerve with you, hmmmmm?
Heh heh heh!
ZZZZZZZZZZ…..
Don’t paint with a broad brush. Having read Matt Yglesias’ diatribes on income inequality and taxation (to my everlasting regret), I am certain he will soon donate his recently purchased $1.5 millon DC condo and most of his trust fund to the less fortunate.
Because he’s no hypocrite. No sirree! Matt Yglesias isn’t the sort of two-faced rich kid who whines about others’ greed and wealth while living the soft and privileged life of the elite himself. Not him.
Oh, wait . . .
Amen!
Dear Wombat, we humbly beseech you to hurry and promise to offer you a sacrifice. We shall burn the troll in Effigy (a tiny hamlet near Round O, SC).
Fully half of food stamps are fraudulently used – they even advertise them openly on Craig’s List now. Subsidized housing is mostly hell on earth none of you limosine liberals would dare enter after dark. And fewer people have health care coverage now than did before ObamaCare took effect.
Well argued, Mr. McCain.
Well argued, Mr. McCain.
Your claims are utter horse manure. The 2008 financial crisis was unrelated to the GOP. It occurred as a result of policies that were frankly bipartisan in inflating the housing market and the mortgage-backed securities markets.
Your claims are utter horse manure. The 2008 financial crisis was unrelated to the GOP. It occurred as a result of policies that were frankly bipartisan in inflating the housing market and the mortgage-backed securities markets.
An utterly fraudulent claim regarding history. And to be honest, you’d better hope you don’t tell that story to my friend Thai Nguyen who escaped Vietnam under gunfire from Vietnamese border guards to come to this country. He might kick yer butt.
An utterly fraudulent claim regarding history. And to be honest, you’d better hope you don’t tell that story to my friend Thai Nguyen who escaped Vietnam under gunfire from Vietnamese border guards to come to this country. He might kick yer butt.