Marxism by Any Other Name

©2021 by Vernon Miles Kerr, VernonMilesKerr.com

Originally posted to Twitter as a rough draft August 9, 2021

A couple of our family members are big FoxNews fans so I have to sit through a lot of Fox’s bovine excrement. Today I had to endure an interview with a nauseatingly smug Mark R. Levin waxing effusive about his new book: American Marxism.

“It sold 400,000 copies in the first few days, now it’s over a half-million.” This said, as he tried but failed to conceal his glee by a sort of feigned casualness. Then he went about defining the problem his book addresses by singling out a very extreme, and minor, left-end of the progressive movement and presenting it as a Nuevo-RedScare Monster. I was hoping the book’s summary would show he took a more balanced approach…but no. (see the link below)

His approach smacks so much of the McCarthy era, which was empowered by the same kind of rhetoric as the Nazi era, just dressed up in Red-White-and-Blue. It’s the same old tired formula, “Build a simple-to understand straw man and recruit the simple-minded to knock it down.”  What America needs is not Marxism nor pure Conservatism — both have been tried with disastrous results. We don’t need to adapt economic and social theories from Germany or England. We need our OWN socially responsible hybrid of the best of Liberal and Conservative thought. 

If the Progressive movement could quit bickering, and some of its leaders could quit maneuvering for the spotlight, we could create that.  Maybe then guys like “LeVIN” not “LEVin”as he meticulously pointed out, would quit conflating Progressivism with European Marxism and calling it “American Marxism.”

Read the summary here:

https://www.audiobooksnow.com/audiobooks/american-marxism/5267210/