Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Emerson, anticipating Darwin, said that to become perfect is to have changed often. But there are, in human affairs, two kinds of change, one leading to perfection and the other to social perdition. To take one example at random, the revolutionary changes introduced in the late 19 th century by Karl Marx and other socialist/communists did not lead to social perfection. They led to enforced conformity and the totalitarian menace both in Germany and Russia, and the principal beneficiaries of the revolutionary changes was the totalist state. The vanguard of the proletariat in Russia made out like bandits because they were bandits. The communist party vanguard had their dachas, the proletariat their cramped living spaces, food stores with empty shelves, low paying jobs, and the vast gulag described in painful detail by Alexander Solzhenitsyn which, with open ragged jaws, awaited anyone who presumed to question the undemocratic, plenary powers of a Stalinist,   socialist-communist...