Code Pink now consists of more than 90 chapters in numerous American cities and such far-flung nations as Costa Rica, Norway, and India. Mocking the Bush Administration’s color-coded security alerts, the “Code Pink Alert” warns that this administration poses “extreme danger to all the values of nurturing, caring, and compassion that women and loving men have held.” Professing their commitment to “wage peace,” Code Pink members see no justification for war under any circumstances – where the U.S. is concerned.

In addition to scorning America’s military action in Iraq, Code Pink members also condemn the racism, sexism, poverty, corporate corruption, and environmental degradation they claim are rampant in the U.S. In this respect, Code Pink is like other prominent “peace” movements in our country – portraying America as a moral cesspool and an imperialist aggressor, while remaining mute about whatever barbarities occur anywhere else on earth. Not even the pre-war atrocities of Saddam Hussein drew a scintilla of condemnation from Code Pink.

Proclaiming that “women have been the guardians of life . . . because the men have busied themselves making war,” Code Pink calls on “women around the world to rise up and oppose the war in Iraq. We call on mothers, grandmothers, sisters and daughters . . . and every ordinary outraged woman willing to be outrageous for peace.” During one Code Pink demonstration in Washington, D.C., participants marched up the steps of the Capitol, unfurled their slogan-bearing banners, and stripped down to the dove-adorned bras and panties they wore beneath their clothes. “We’re putting our bodies on the line,” they shouted. “You Congresspeople better get some spine. We say ‘Stand back, don’t attack – innocent children in Iraq!’” Another popular chant was, “We don’t want your oil war. Peace is what we’re calling for!”

Every day for four months, Code Pink also staged all-day antiwar vigils at the White House. Moreover, it initiated a campaign that involved presenting pink slips (women’s lingerie) to President Bush and other pro-war officials – a metaphor for pink slips of the paper variety, which are given to employees whose jobs are being terminated. These unique tactics have brought Code Pink’s members considerable national news coverage and many talk show invitations.

Earlier this year Jodie Evans led a delegation of fifteen Code Pink women to Baghdad, where they met with Iraqi women for the purpose of “creat[ing] the understanding that the people of Iraq are no different than you and me.” “We understand,” said Evans, “the love of a mother in Iraq for her children, and the driving desire of that child for life . . . We who cherish children will not consent to their murder. Nor do we consent to the murder of their mothers, grandmothers, fathers, grandfathers, or to the deaths of our own sons and daughters in a war for oil.” She said nothing about the fathers, grandfathers, mothers and children murdered, tortured or raped by Saddam Hussein’s regime, nor its 12-year refusal to abide by the terms of the UN’s many resolutions. While in Baghdad, Evans and her companions repeatedly and publicly painted America as an unprovoked aggressor, and Iraqis as noble defenders of their invaded homeland. “Children continue to die of hunger,” they reported, “and electricity is unreliable. However, Iraqis continue to resist the occupation in their own way.”

Similarly, Evans and her cohorts had blamed America for all of Iraq’s ills during the pre-war months of late 2002. At that time, she claimed, “a child with cancer cannot get pain relief or medication because of sanctions. Childhood diarrhea has again become a major killer. Five hundred thousand children have already died from inadequate health care, water and food supplies due to sanctions.” Yet they uttered nary a word about the reason why those sanctions had been put in place: Saddam’s refusal to honor the very pledges he had made following the first Gulf War in 1991. Nor did they bother to mention that while Iraq’s overall population struggled through the era of sanctions, Saddam and his inner circle lived like royalty, illegally diverting countless billions of “oil-for-food” dollars into their own pockets.

Criticizing the cost of the current war, Code Pink laments that “in the United States of America, many of our elders . . . now must choose whether to buy their prescription drugs, or food. Our children’s education is eroded. The air they breathe and the water they drink are polluted. Vast numbers of women and children live in poverty.” The threat of distant terrorists, claims Code Pink, is insignificant when compared to the “real threats” we face every day: “the illness or ordinary accident that could plunge us into poverty, the violence on our own streets, the corporate corruption that can result in the loss of our jobs, our pensions, our security.”

“We choose pink,” they say, “the color of roses, the beauty that like bread is food for life; the color of the dawn of a new era when cooperation and negotiation prevail over force.” Such women obstinately refuse to acknowledge that they are free to wax poetic in this manner only because others before them won their security by fighting the very real enemies that sought to destroy our civilization. Moreover, they despise the very society for which those men gave their lives.

In addition to her Code Pink duties, Jodie Evans also sits on the advisory board of the International Occupation Watch (IOW) center in Iraq, which Code Pink helped establish. The organizers of Occupation Watch — Medea Benjamin and Leslie Cagan — explicitly declared their purpose in setting up headquarters in Baghdad was to thin U.S. forces by getting soldiers to declare themselves conscientious objectors.

IOW also monitors American abuses during the reconstruction of Iraq. Implying that America’s true motivation for attacking Iraq was to seize its oil fields, IOW proudly asserts its intent to “advocate for the Iraqis’ right to control their own resources, especially oil.” No mention is made of the fact that, for decades, Iraq’s oil was controlled, not by Iraqis, but by Saddam Hussein for his own aggrandizement. IOW further purports to be “a watchdog regarding the military occupation and U.S.-appointed government, including possible violations of human rights, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly.” Again, no mention is made of the fact that these are American concepts that had not seen the light of day in Iraq since the moment Saddam first rose to power.

Clearly, Code Pink is but another in a long line of “peace” groups whose main goal is to blame the United States for every conceivable international crisis. If peace were indeed Code Pink’s chief concern, surely it would be able to find

something to say about wars elsewhere in the world. If “nurturing, caring, and compassion” were in fact what Evans and her ilk cared about, surely they would utter at least a few words about human rights abuses in some nation other than the United States. Instead they trace all of humanity’s afflictions to the doorstep of America.

As a far leftist, Evans has found a comfortable political home in the Democratic Party. Indeed she was a key fundraiser for her longtime friend and political ally, former California governor Gray Davis. Evans’ ex-husband, Westside financier Max Palevsky, actually appointed Davis to his first political job as the fundraiser for Tom Bradley’s 1973 Los Angeles mayoral campaign. Shortly thereafter, Evans and Davis worked closely together during the latter’s stint as chief of staff to then-governor Jerry Brown.

In the weeks preceding the recent California governor’s recall election, Evans was instrumental in convincing several women to come forward and tell the L.A. Times their allegations against Arnold Schwarzenegger. Moreover, she helped

organize picketing sessions in front of Schwarzenegger’s campaign headquarters. Yet her purported concern for the protection of women is wholly subordinate to her partisan political affiliations. For instance, she had nothing to say about Gray Davis’ well-documented episodes of violent and obscene behavior toward female staffers. Nor, for that matter, did Evans impugn the ill-advised remarks of her friend Bob Mulholland, the California Democratic Party spokesman, who told ABC News that “Schwarzenegger is going to find out, that unlike a Hollywood movie set, the bullets coming at him in this campaign are going to be real bullets and he is going to have to respond to them.”

In short, Evans’ posturing as a champion of human decency is nothing more than a political battering ram selectively aimed only at those with whom she disagrees. Similarly, her posturing as a woman deeply devoted to “peace” is but a mask for her real agenda: the blanket condemnation not only of our nation’s foreign policy, but its very way of life.

—FrontPageMagazine.com, December 8, 2003

The Unraveling of Scientific Materialism
by Phillip E. Johnson

In a retrospective essay on Carl Sagan in the January 9, 1997 New York Review of Books, Harvard Genetics Professor Richard Lewontin tells how he first met Sagan at a public debate in Arkansas in 1964. The two young scientists had been coaxed by senior colleagues to go to Little Rock to debate the affirmative side of the question: “RESOLVED, that the theory of evolution is as proved as is the fact that the earth goes around the sun.” Their main opponent was a biology professor from a fundamentalist college, with a Ph.D. from the University of Texas in Zoology. Lewontin reports no details from the debate, except to say that “despite our absolutely compelling arguments, the audience unaccountably voted for the opposition.”

Of course, Lewontin and Sagan attributed the vote to the audience’s prejudice in favor of creationism. The resolution was framed in such a way, however, that the affirmative side should have lost even if the jury had been composed of Ivy League philosophy professors. How could the theory of evolution even conceivably be “proved” to the same degree as “the fact that the earth goes around the sun”? The latter is an observable feature of present-day reality, whereas the former deals primarily with non-repeatable events of the very distant past. The appropriate comparison would be between the theory of evolution and the accepted theory of the origin of the solar system.

If “evolution” referred only to currently observable phenomena like domestic animal breeding or finch-beak

variation, then winning the debate should have been no problem for Lewontion and Sagan, even with a fundamentalist jury. The statement “We breed a great variety of dogs,” which rests on direct observation, is much easier to prove than the statement that the earth goes around the sun, which requires sophisticated reasoning. Not even the strictest biblical literalists deny the bred varieties of dogs, the variation of finch beaks, and similar instances within types. The more controversial claims of large-scale evolution are what arouse skepticism. Scientists may think they have good reasons for believing that living organisms evolved naturally from nonliving chemicals, or that complex organs evolved by the accumulation of micromutations through natural selection, but having reasons is not the same as having proof. I have seen people, previously inclined to believe whatever “science says,” become skeptical when they realize that the scientists actually do seem to think that variations in finch beaks or peppered moths, or the mere existence of fossils, proves all the vast claims of “evolution.” It is as though the scientists, so confident in their answers, simply do not understand the question.

Carl Sagan described the theory of evolution in his final book as the doctrine that “human beings (and all the other species) have slowly evolved by natural processes from a succession of more ancient beings with no divine intervention needed along the way.” It is the alleged absence of divine intervention throughout the history of life—that explains why a great many people, only some of whom are biblical fundamentalists, think that Darwinian evolution (beyond the micro level) is basically materialistic philosophy disguised as scientific fact. Sagan himself worried about opinion polls showing that only about 10 percent of Americans believe in a strictly materialistic evolutionary process, and, as Lewontin’s anecdote concedes, some of the doubters have advanced

degrees in the relevant sciences. Dissent as wide-spread as that must rest on something less easily remedied than mere ignorance of facts.

Lewontin eventually parted company with Sagan over how to explain why the theory of evolution seems so obviously true to mainstream scientists and so doubtful to much of the public. Sagan attributed the persistence of unbelief to ignorance and hucksterism and set out to cure the problem with popular books, magazine articles, and television programs promoting the virtues of mainstream science over its fringe rivals. Lewontin, a Marxist whose philosophical sophistication exceeds that of Sagan by several orders of magnitude, came to see the issue as essentially one of basic intellectual commitment rather than factual knowledge.

The reason for opposition to scientific accounts of our origins, according to Lewontin, is not that people are ignorant of facts, but that they have not learned to think from the right starting point. In his words, “The primary problem is not to provide the public with the knowledge of how far it is to the nearest star and what genes are made of….Rather, the problem is to get them to reject irrational and supernatural explanations of the world, the demons that exist only in their imaginations, and to accept a social and intellectual apparatus; Science, as the only begetter of truth.” What the public needs to learn is that, like it or not, “We exist as material beings in a material world, all of whose phenomena are the consequences of material relations among material entities.” In a word, the public needs to accept materialism, which means that they must put God (whom Lewontin calls the “Supreme Extraterrestrial”) in the trash can of history where such myths belong.

Although Lewontin wants the public to accept science as the only source of truth, he freely admits that mainstream science itself is not free of the hokum that Sagan so often found in fringe science. As examples he cites three influential scientists who are particularly successful at writing for the public: E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Lewis Thomas, “each of whom has put unsubstantiated assertions or counterfactual claims at the very center of the stories they have retailed in the market. Wilson’s Sociobiology and On Human Nature rest on the surface of a quaking marsh of unsupported claims about the genetic determination of everything from altruism to xenophobia. Dawkins’ vulgarizations of Darwinism speak of nothing in evolution but an inexorable ascendancy of genes that are selectively superior, while the entire body of technical advance in experimental and theoretical evolutionary genetics of the last fifty years has moved in the direction of emphasizing nonselective forces in evolution. Thomas, in various essays, propagandized for the success of modern scientific medicine in eliminating death from disease, while the unchallenged statistical compilations on mortality show that in Europe and North America infectious diseases…had ceased to be major causes of mortality by the early decades of the twentieth century.”

Lewontin laments that even scientists frequently cannot judge the reliability of scientific claims outside their fields of specialty, and have to take the word of recognized authorities on faith. “Who am I to believe about quantum physics if not Steven Weinberg, or about the solar system if not Carl Sagan? What worries me is that they may believe what Dawkins and Wilson tell them about evolution.”

One major living scientific popularizer whom Lewontin does not trash is his Harvard colleague and political ally Stephen Jay Gould. Just to fill out the picture, however, it seems that admirers of Dawkins have as low an opinion of Gould as Lewontin has of Dawkins or Wilson. According to a 1994 essay in the New York Review of Books by John Maynard Smith, the dean of British neo-Darwinists, “the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his [Gould’s] work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists. All this would not matter, were it not that he is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory.” Lewontin fears that non-biologists will fail to recognize that Dawkins is peddling pseudoscience; Maynard Smith fears exactly the same of Gould.

If eminent experts say that evolution according to Gould is too confused to be worth bothering about, and others equally eminent say that evolution according to Dawkins rests on unsubstantiated assertions and counterfactual claims, the public can hardly be blamed for suspecting that grand-scale evolution may rest on something less impressive than rock-solid, unimpeachable fact. Lewontin confirms this suspicion by explaining why “we” (i.e., the kind of people who read the New York Review) reject out of hand the view of those who think they see the hand of the Creator in the material world:

“We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an

omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.”

That paragraph is the most insightful statement of what is at issue in the creation/evolution controversy that I have ever read from a senior figure in the scientific establishment. It explains neatly how the theory of evolution can seem so certain to scientific insiders, and so shaky to the outsiders. For scientific materialists the materialism comes first; the science comes thereafter. We might more accurately term them “materialists employing science.” And if materialism is true, then some materialistic theory of evolution has to be true simply as a matter of logical deduction, regardless of the evidence. That theory will necessarily be at least roughly like neo-Darwinism, in that it will have to involve some combination of random changes and law-like processes capable of producing complicated organisms that (in Dawkins’ words) “give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”

The prior commitment explains why evolutionary scientists are not disturbed when they learn that the fossil record does not provide examples of gradual macroevolutionary transformation, despite decades of determined effort by paleontologists to confirm neo-Darwinian presuppositions. That is also why biological chemists like Stanley Miller continue in confidence even when geochemists tell them that the early earth did not have the oxygen-free atmosphere essential for producing the chemicals required by the theory of the origin of life in prebiotic soup. They reason that there had to be some source (comets?) capable of providing the needed molecules, because otherwise life would not have evolved. When evidence showed that the period available on the early earth for the evolution of life was extremely brief in comparison to the time previously posited for chemical evolution scenarios, Carl Sagan calmly concluded that the chemical evolution of life must be easier than we had supposed, because it happened so rapidly on the early earth.

That is also why neo-Darwinists like Richard Dawkins are not troubled by the Cambrian Explosion, where all the invertebrate animal groups appear suddenly and without identifiable ancestors. Whatever the fossil record may suggest, those Cambrian animals had to evolve by accepted neo-Darwinian means, which is to say by material processes requiring no intelligent guidance or supernatural input. Materialist philosophy demands no less. That is also why Niles Eldredge, surveying the absence of evidence for macroevolutionary transformations in the rich marine invertebrate fossil record, can observe that “evolution always seems to happen somewhere else,” and then describe himself on the very next page as a “knee-jerk neo-Darwinist.” Finally, that is why Darwinists do not take critics of materialist evolution seriously, but speculate instead about “hidden agendas” and resort immediately to ridicule. In their minds, to question materialism is to question reality. All these specific points are illustrations of what it means to say that “we” have an a priori commitment to materialism.

The scientific leadership cannot afford to disclose that commitment frankly to the public. Imagine what chance the affirmative side would have if the question for public debate were rephrased candidly as “RESOLVED, that everyone should adopt an a priori commitment to materialism.” Everyone would see what many now sense dimly: that a methodological premise useful for limited purposes has been expanded to form a metaphysical absolute. Of course people who define science as

the search for materialistic explanations will find it useful to assume that such explanations always exist. To suppose that a philosophical preference can validate a cherished scientific theory is to define “science” as a way of supporting prejudice. Yet that is exactly what the Darwinists seem to be doing, when their evidence is evaluated by critics who are willing to question materialism.

One of those critics, bearing impeccable scientific credentials, is Michael Behe, who argues that complex molecular systems (such as bacterial and protozoan flagella, immune systems, blood clotting, and cellular transport) are “irreducibly complex.” This means that the systems incorporate elements that interact with each other in such complex ways that it is impossible to describe detailed, testable Darwinian mechanisms for their evolution. (My review of Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box appeared in FT, October 1996.) Never mind for now whether you think that Behe’s argument can prevail over sustained opposition from the materialists. The primary dispute is not over who is going to win, but about whether the argument can even get started. If we know a priori that materialism is true, then contrary evidence properly belongs under the rug, where it has always duly been swept.

For Lewontin the public’s determined resistance to scientific materialism constitutes “a deep problem in democratic self-governance.” Quoting Jesus’ words from the Gospel of John, he thinks that “the truth that makes us free” is not an accumulation of knowledge, but a metaphysical understanding (i.e., materialism) that sets us free from belief in supernatural entities like God. How is the scientific elite to persuade or bamboozle the public to accept the crucial starting point? Lewontin turns for guidance to the most prestigious of all opponents of democracy, Plato. In his dialogue the Gorgias, Plato reports a debate between the rationalist Socrates and three sophists or teachers of rhetoric. The debaters all agree that the public is incompetent to make reasoned decisions on justice and public policy. The question in dispute is whether the effective decision should be made by experts (Socrates) or by the manipulators of words (the sophists).

In familiar contemporary terms, the question might be stated as whether a court should appoint a panel of impartial authorities to decide whether the defendant’s product caused the plaintiff’s cancer, or whether the jury should be swayed by rival trial lawyers each touting their own experts. Much turns on whether we believe that the authorities are truly impartial, or whether they have interests of their own. When the National Academy of Sciences appoints a committee to advise the public on evolution, it consists of persons picked in part for their scientific outlook, which is to say their a priori acceptance of materialism. Members of such a panel know a lot of facts in their specific areas of research and have a lot to lose if the “fact of evolution” is exposed as a philosophical assumption. Should skeptics accept such persons as impartial fact-finders? Lewontin himself knows too much about cognitive elites to say anything so naïve, and so in the end he gives up and concludes that “we” do not know how to get the public to the right starting point.

Lewontin is brilliantly insightful, but too crankily honest to be as good a manipulator as his Harvard colleague Stephen Jay Gould. Gould displays both his talent and his unscrupulousness in an essay in the March 1997 issue of Natural History, entitled “Nonoverlapping Magisteria” and subtitled “Science and religion are not in conflict, for their

teachings occupy distinctly different domains.” With a subtitle like that, you can be sure that Gould is out to reassure the public that evolution leads to no alarming conclusions. True to form, Gould insists that the only dissenters from evolution are “Protestant fundamentalists who believe that every word of the Bible must be literally true.” Gould also insists that evolution (he never defines the word) is “both true and entirely compatible with Christian belief.” Gould is familiar with nonliteralist opposition to evolutionary naturalism, but he blandly denies that any such phenomenon exists. He even quotes a letter written to the New York Times in answer to an op-ed essay by Michael Behe, without revealing the context. You can do things like that when you know that the media won’t call you to account.

The centerpiece of Gould’s essay is an analysis of the complete text of Pope John Paul’s statement of October 22, 1996 to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences endorsing evolution as “more than a hypothesis.” He fails to quote the Pope’s crucial qualification that “theories of evolution which, in accordance with the philosophies inspiring them, consider the spirit as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the truth about man.” Of course, a theory based on materialism assumes by definition that there is no “spirit” active in this world that is independent of matter. Gould knows this perfectly well, and he also knows, just as Richard Lewontin does, that the evidence doesn’t support the claims for the creative power of natural selection made by writers such as Richard Dawkins. That is why the philosophy that really supports the theory has to be protected from critical scrutiny.

Gould’s essay is a tissue of half-truths aimed at putting the religious people to sleep, or luring them into a “dialogue” on

terms set by the materialists. Thus Gould graciously allows religion to participate in discussions of morality or the meaning of life, because science does not claim authority over such questions of value, and because “Religion is too important to too many people for any dismissal or denigration of the comfort still sought by many folks from theology.” Gould insists, however, that all such discussion must cede to science the power to determine the facts, and one of the facts is an evolutionary process that is every bit as materialistic and purposeless for Gould as it is for Lewontin or Dawkins. If religion wants to accept a dialogue on those terms, that’s fine with Gould—but don’t let those religious people think they get to make an independent judgment about the evidence that supposedly supports the “facts.” And if the religious people are gullible enough to accept materialism as one of the facts, they won’t be capable of causing much trouble.

The debate about creation and evolution is not deadlocked. Propagandists like Gould try to give the impression that nothing has changed, but essays like Lewontin’s and books like Behe’s demonstrate that honest thinkers on both sides are near agreement on a redefinition of the conflict. Biblical literalism is not the issue. The issue is whether materialism and rationality are the same thing. Darwinism is based on an a priori commitment to materialism, not on a philosophically neutral assessment of the evidence. Separate the philosophy from the science, and the proud tower collapses. When the public understands this clearly, Lewontin’s Darwinism will start to move out of the science curriculum and into the department of intellectual history, where it can gather dust on the shelf next to Lewontin’s Marxism.

—First Things, November 1997

Communist Party/
Democratic Party
by Lowell Pante

Looking for a perfect holiday gift for that lefty on your list? Try shopping at the Communist Party USA online.

On its “Shop ‘till Capitalism Drops!” website you can find “Commie Bear” for that red diaper baby. It’s a cuddly teddy bear complete with the CPUSA logo, a red hammer with crescent sickle to its right and crescent machine gear to its left, only $17.99.

Or there’s the Karl Marx lunchbox, with Karl’s face and wisdom on one side and the CPUSA logo on the other, $18.99. Or for computer users, get the CPUSA or W.E.B. DuBois mousepad, a mere $15.99 to revolt your fellow proletarians at the office.

You can also paint the town red with a People’s Weekly World messenger bag ($23.99), a Political Affairs Magazine coffee mug ($15.99), or a shirt with the image of a protestor carrying a sign that reads “Bush Out 2004.”

That’s right, the Communist Party USA has gone capitalist. It now exploits its brand name, built by years of anti-communist attacks, and now it is turning its brand into a cash cow.

But capitalism is new to these commies. Last week they were selling a far larger line of merchandise, but they have pulled their products from what had been a second website, vestiges of which you can still see from their surviving parallel product lines for People’s Weekly World and Political Affairs Magazine.

A week ago you could have bought Communist Party USA golf shirts and beer steins, coasters and baseball caps, sweat shirts and baby bibs, wall clocks and tote bags, barbecue

aprons and frisbees, greeting cards and boxer shorts – and “classic thong” underwear for that special comrade in red, all emblazoned with the cherry-colored CPUSA logo.

“Product sales were good,” Brandon Slattery told me Monday when I called the Communist Party’s New York City office. They had no problems with the quality or honesty of the capitalist company making and marketing this merchandise for them, CafePress.com (which can offer the same products with anybody’s logo on them, including yours).

“But we decided to produce our own products,” said Slattery. “What we’d been selling, it turned out, had not been made with union labor. We expect to have our own product line back on sale very soon.”

I decided not to ask whether the CPUSA was going to track down the sweat shops where what had already been sold was made, and to return all CPUSA profits from this merchandise to the exploited workers. Neither did I ask what using unionized labor would do to the price of their commie products, or how that higher price might reduce sales and profit, or how they would react if these union workers went on strike demanding ownership of the means of production and 100 percent of the pie.

The former Harvard University economist John Kenneth Galbraith put forth a theory of “convergence,” arguing that the United States and Soviet Union were becoming more like one another and were destined eventually to merge. Today, of course, the Soviet Union is kaput and in the United States voters have shifted internal power from the long-dominant Leftist party to America’s political party of the Right.

But “convergence” apparently is still happening on the gauche side of American politics. The Communist Party USA is moving right, and not just in its embrace of capitalist merchandising.

America’s Leftist media is reluctant to point this out, but since 1984 the Communist Party USA has essentially ceased to function as a political party.

Beginning that year, it had such fear that a division among Leftist voters would re-elect Republican Ronald Reagan that the CPUSA simply told its members to vote for the Democratic Party candidate. It has done so ever since, acting not like its own political party but as a special interest group auxiliary of the Democratic Party.

Indeed, with months to go before the Democrats pick their 2004 slate, the Communist Party by October 2003 had already directed its members, sight unseen, to support the Democratic ticket as the only way to beat incumbent Republican President George W. Bush. And why not, with the Democratic Party each year embracing more and more elements of an anti-capitalist Marxist agenda?

As David Horowitz has observed, the once-ideologically-mighty CPUSA that used to dominate “progressive” politics is today “only a constituent part of the whole” Leftist mechanism for seizing power and confiscating private property in America. The same could be said for the Democratic Party.

Notice that the Democratic Party has done nothing to reject, repudiate or distance itself from this support by its fellow Leftist comrades in the Communist Party. Is this because its Left hand does not know what its Farther Left hand is doing?

For its part, the Democratic Party was heavily infected with Marxist genes during the New Deal. As Carl Bernstein of Woodward & Bernstein Nixon-slayer fame recounted in his book Loyalties: A Son’s Memoir, his parents were among the thousands and thousands of secret Communist Party members knowingly brought in by Franklin Delano Roosevelt to re-make our government along what today are called “progressive” lines.

Attempts have been made to re-Americanize the Democratic Party. Heartland politicians from President Harry Truman to President Bill Clinton have tried, at least in rhetoric, to move their party back towards American mainstream centrism. Bill Clinton has been part of the Democratic Leadership Council, a small movement of “New Democrats” trying to bring their Leftward-drifting party back to sanity before it falls entirely off the extreme Left edge of the political spectrum.

But like werewolves drawn by the full moon, or like salmon drawn to swim upstream to breed and die, Leftist Democrats continue to be under the gravitational influence of the Marxist voodoo in their blood that keeps pulling them ever farther Leftward. This has produced disastrous political defeats that can be invoked by the single names of crushed Leftist candidates – McGovern, Carter, Dukakis.

And now the siren song of the lunatic Left is seducing Democrats again. Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean cries out “Go Left, Young Persons, Go Left!” and the children of Hamlin put one left foot in front of another as they march in lockstep under his banner. Dean’s appeal is emotional – an unwavering snarl of hatred against President Bush and traditional American values.

Last August Dean went so far as to accuse his rival Leftist candidates for President of being “too far to the right.” The first Governor to sign “same-sex unions” into law, and the loudest voice criticizing America for deposing mass murdering megalomaniac Saddam Hussein, Dean’s name will soon join the roll of ultra-Leftist Democrat losers.

In this convergence between a right-moving Communist Party USA and a left-moving Democratic Party, the once-dreaded CPUSA has become retro kitsch, the stuff of nostalgia and Andy Warhol art imitators.

One of the resident Lefties at Fox News Channel, Alan Colmes, now unashamedly makes his shockingly honest self-description the title of his new book: Red, White and Liberal.

Communism failed as a political movement in the United States for a host of reasons, including a working class so prosperous that today roughly one-third of blue collar union members vote Republican. (This is why the Democratic Party has always opposed letting workers decide how their mandatory union dues may be used in politics, dues that traditionally have gone almost entirely to help Democratic candidates.)

The major reason the Communist Party USA has supported wide-open immigration is that Marxist revolution requires a dissatisfied proletariat. In prosperous capitalist America this can be gotten only by importing a proletariat from poorer nations.

The alternative class that sparked Marxist revolution in unindustrialized Czarist Russia was the lumpenproletariat, made up of the scum of society – e.g., status-seeking

intellectuals. It is now chic – indeed, de rigeur – to be fashionably Marxist on the faculty of the typical American college or university campus. At the least, it is a career enhancement, a plus for promotion rather than a firing offense.

But it’s clear from speaking for a few minutes with these elitist airheads that if Hitler instead of Stalin had won World War II, they today would just as eagerly be embracing the swastikas, style and rhetoric of national socialism instead of the hammer and sickle and red rhetoric of international socialism.

Capitalists have become the fastest growing class in Communist China, the world’s most populous Marxist nation. Late last year capitalists there were pounding on the door seeking membership in the Communist Party. Why? Because as the Wall Street Journal observed, the CP is the biggest old boy network in the land. Last November, after decades of shutting them out, the Chinese Communist Party Congress voted to allow “advanced element” (its apt code word for capitalist) citizens to apply for party membership.

In Russia the Communist Party has welcomed capitalists not only as members but also as its political candidates for office. The December 2 Moscow Times reported that “The Communists, who have always positioned themselves as the workers’ party fighting the evils of capitalism, have filled about a quarter of their party list [of candidates] with businessmen, some of them millionaires.”

What’s in this for the capitalists? A possible seat in the national legislature, the Duma, and the potential power that goes with such a position. Survival requires power in a ruthless Russian political culture that has never experienced the Western Enlightenment, as Russian President Vladimir Putin just demonstrated.

What’s in this for the Communists, whose leaders have taken heat from the ideological faithful for embracing capitalists? These businesspeople are “capable managers,” Party leader Gennady Zyuganov told the Moscow Times, who can contribute to Russia’s development. He adds, according to Times reporter Francesca Mereu, that the Communist Party of Russia “no longer opposes private property.”

Ah, if only we could say the same for the Democratic Party in the United States! And if only they would permit America to adopt the same economically-liberating 13 percent flat tax that became law in 2001 in Russia! (The Bush Administration put such a flat tax in place in Iraq and should propose the same here.)

“A businessman on a party list means money,” said Nikolai Petrov, an analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center, to Mereu. She reports learning that “parties can sell good spots on their lists for $1.5 to $2 million.”

The Democratic Party in the U.S. scouts for potential candidates with enough wealth to pay for their own campaigns – and perhaps a bit more. As the old joke goes, does the name

Pavlov ring a bell? Does the name of near-billionaire Democratic Senator from New Jersey Jon Corzine ring a cash register?

We may not yet have the best government money can buy, but in this regard the Democratic Party has led the way in selling our government to the highest bidders, foreign and domestic. Call it “U.S. Capitol Capitalism” or “Donkey Kong.”

But perhaps the Democratic and Communist parties in our nation will ultimately converge only in the growing similarity of their ideas and not merge into a single party as they effectively operate today.

Geologists enjoy explaining how at present rates of tectonic continental plate drift, in 50 million years the forces that cause California earthquakes will have turned Los Angeles into an island just off the coast of San Francisco.

At the present rates of Rightward drift by the CPUSA and relentless Leftward movement by the Democratic Party, sometime before the 2012 national election the Democratic Party will actually be to the Left of the Communist Party USA.

By then the Democratic Party will have shrunk to third party status and be generally viewed as a ship of fools, a barge of grafters, geezers and losers sailing into history’s sunset as did the Whigs, Mugwumps and Know-Nothings before them.

The Communist Party will be much richer from the selling of its products and will have more members than it does today. But most of its member-customers will be brain-dead pseudo-intellectuals and artists at rural state universities and junior colleges who impress one another by flashing CPUSA membership cards and logo-emblazoned underwear.

The CPUSA will have succeeded at last, but in the same way that the 19th Century socialist communes of Amana and Oneida did – not as cities on a hill that attracted widespread imitation, but as joint stock companies that became famous for selling products that capitalist consumers wanted to buy. The CPUSA could become the next Victoria’s Secret, and Marx & Engels could become the next Ben & Jerry’s.

And heartland America, healthier and more prosperous than ever before, by 2012 will be celebrating our newly-elected first Hispanic President, 35-year-old George P. Bush, son of Jeb. We will have forgotten that anachronistic Leftist Democrats and Communists even exist….at least outside the hothouse zoo enclosures called universities. And the future will be bright.

And come what may, Santa Claus – along with his politically incorrect fur, leather, tobacco pipe, overweight, moral judgmentalism, and exploited reindeer and elves – will continue to wear red.

—FrontPageMagazine.com, December 16, 2003