Marching towards marxism?

There's an amusing and perceptive article over at Pravda arguing that Americans are enduring a descent into marxism with barely a whimper. Before Troutsky comes along to correct me, let me say that while many of the points made by the writer are good ones, we are not becoming socialist, but merely fascist--not that there is a terribly large difference between the two. Briefly, the means of the production are not now owned by the State. Instead, the State exhibits ever increasing amounts of control over the way those means are used. Having dispensed with that caveat, we proceed:

First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics.

There is no causative relationship between reading Shakespeare and hating government intervention. No such relationship can exist with agents who possess free will. I would wager that in almost any department, at least of the social sciences, in any college in this country can be found a fan of the Bard who would agitate for totalitarian control by the State. Nonetheless, a relationship with the classics--begun in school, perhaps, but hopefully lasting throughout one's adult life--focuses one's mind on the enduring truths which tend to become lost in the ephemera of pop culture and politics.

After going through a number of objections to the Great Books approach to a liberal education, which he is "perfectly aware of, and actually agree[s] with", Alan Bloom observes that such an approach still provides the students: "an acquaintance with what the big questions were when there were still big questions; models, at the very least, of how to go about answering them; and, perhaps most important of all, a fund of shared experiences and thoughts on which to ground their friendships with one another." (The Closing of the American Mind, p.344)

As Bloom recounts in his book, the benefits provided by a familiarity with the classics have now been lost, at least in this country. The closing of the American mind is one reason we are so open to allowing our leaders totalitarian control; but it is also the reason that those among us who realize, however vaguely, that something is horribly wrong, have proven unable to posit real and sustainable objections to such a descent.

Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different "branches and denominations" were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the "winning" side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may complain, but when explained that they would be on the "winning" side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for earthly power.

This is a very perceptive point. Like an education in the classics, religion should serve, at a minimum, as a reminder to reject the transient--such as the present political arrangement between two parties of pseudo marxists--for the real issues which plague mankind. Nowhere was this more clear than in the blind support evangelicals gave to their guy, George W. Bush. That the unnecessary war he fought was almost certainly antithetical to Christian principles didn't bother them; but neither did the fact that he tortured terrorists. In fact, much to my embarrassment, many of my fellow Christians continue to support torture. If an institution cannot summon the means to reject a practice as barbaric as torture, it has ceased to provide society with any value in the realm of ethics.

Those of a religious bent like to believe that the secular culture often lags behind our culture which intends to be in, and not of, the world. But the evangelicals prove that religion alone is insufficient to prevent man from "the degrading slavery of being a child of his age", to borrow from Chesterton. Whatever the shortcomings of the democratic party--most obviously, perhaps, their defense of abortion--history will lament that Christians threw in their lots with the republicans, even when the latter utterly failed to uphold the standards set by the Man from Nazareth. The state of American Christianity is so abysmal that no effective defense can now be made for the basic natural rights which our constitution was created to proect, and over which the State now runs roughshod without the slightest disinclination.

So it should be no surprise, that the American president has followed this up with a "bold" move of declaring that he and another group of unelected, chosen stooges will now redesign the entire automotive industry and will even be the guarantee of automobile policies...

So, should it be any surprise to discover that the Democratically controlled Congress of America is working on passing a new regulation that would give the American Treasury department the power to set "fair" maximum salaries, evaluate performance and control how private companies give out pay raises and bonuses?

As I've explained before, when the bailouts fail, Obama has positioned himself so as to take over complete control of the economy. This is happening even faster than I imagined--we're not even at the halfway mark of his first term. But the most astounding thing about all this is not the rapidity with which we have thrown off the vestiges of liberty and constitutional law: it is the complete and utter inability of the people to curtail this in any way, shape or form. Those who protest against the growing leviathan are either right-wing drones, who can wait their turn while the winners run things for awhile; or they are, in the eyes of most, marginalized cranks, vindicated by their predictions, perhaps, but ultimately with so little power as to be utterly ineffectual. At least the latter are refusing to go down without a fight.

I'll let the writer have the last word:

The proud American will go down into his slavery with out a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is. The world will only snicker.