“What is to be done?” That’s the question posed in a 1902 pamphlet by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as “Lenin,” as the young revolutionary began to flesh out his weaponization of Karl Marx’s principles of communism.
It wasn’t enough, argued Lenin in typically turgid prose, to expect Russia’s nearly non-existent industrialized working class—the proletariat—to come to international Socialism on its own.
Instead, he believed, the radical “Populists” who advocated the communization of the peasantry as a necessary first step were in fact advocating a form of capitalism—and that couldn’t be allowed to happen. True Socialism, said Lenin, could only be found in Marxism, and for that a strong Communist Party was needed to guide the Russian people to the correct conclusions. And so he provided one.
Two decades later, Lenin was the absolute master of the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Against all odds, a true communist society had come into being without ever having passed through a capitalist phase.
The horror that resulted would last until Christmas Day, 1991, when the USSR collapsed of its own “internal contradictions” and in the face of implacable opposition and a clear objective from Ronald Reagan. “We win, they lose,” he said.
Bury Trump
For too long, conservatives have been on the back foot, constantly reacting to the Left’s ongoing provocations and, mostly fruitlessly, attempting either to resist them or roll them back. From gay marriage to transsexuals in the military—both long thought not only unthinkable but, in the case of the latter, unbelievable—has been but the work of a few years. During the same period, not a single major conservative policy has been enacted, in part because the Republican Party is engaged in defense, when it should be on offense.The Trump administration managed briefly to roll back via executive order some of the most egregious excesses of the Obama administration, but it failed to finish off Obamacare—thanks, John McCain!—and even its legislative victories, such as tax reform, are in the process of being swiftly negated, thanks to the Democrats’ narrow control of both houses of Congress.
The sentient Democrats wish to make Trump an object lesson in the price of political insubordination, even to the point of trying to jail the former president as well an anathematizing his allies and supporters.
Counter-Counter-Revolution
So let the counter-counter-revolution begin. Over the course of the next several weeks, I’ll outline here some concrete answers to Lenin’s question. Some of my prescriptions I first published in “Rules for Radical Conservatives” (writing under the name “David Kahane”) in 2010, including “Know Your Enemy,” “Get on Offense and Stay on Offense,” and “Get Better Officers.”That’s also the book in which I coined the term, “The Cold Civil War,” which seems increasingly on the verge of turning hot unless we can find a political way back from the BLM/Antifa brink.
Just as I paid homage to Saul Alinsky’s practical wisdom in “Rules,” let me now advocate a strong dose of Leninist spirit as we open up a new front in our war against the radical Left. Lenin knew that his Marxist revolution could not be left to the “petit bourgeois democrats” of the populist left in Russia; he had to grab the country by the ears while the grabbing was good.
Similarly, conservatives cannot leave the new Resistance to the current crop of Republican “leadership,” including Kevin McCarthy and, until recently, Liz Cheney, who are held in contempt by a large number of House Republicans. But while the Democrats will follow Nancy Pelosi to hell and back, the GOP is still riven by the conflict between actual conservatives, represented by the House Freedom Caucus and others, and the country club wing personified by former House speaker Paul Ryan.
One Voice, Small Tent
This is not the place to argue the merits (non-existent, in any case) of the two bogus impeachments. Rather it is to force the GOP to act more like the Leninist/Stalinist Democrats and speak with one voice, in the pursuit of a single objective: winning.In these fraught times, “comity” is luxury only congenital losers can afford, and the sooner the party purges itself the better off both it and the country will be. As Barry Goldwater famously offered: “a choice, not an echo.” Now’s the time to take him up on it.
That homogeneity has been good enough to win three of the past four presidential elections, and there’s no sign they wish to change, especially now, in the third term of the former Barry Soetero. So ideologically rigid and confident are they that they’ve cheerfully jettisoned their former base, the now-vilified white working class, and have never looked back.
Unlike a GOP which has taken too readily to heart William F. Buckley’s famous “standing athwart history, yelling Stop!” maxim, the Democrats stand for something they call “progress”: fiscal irresponsibility, the collapse of traditional American values and virtues, sexual license, military weakness, cultural pornography, and civilizational fecklessness, all in the name of “diversity,” “tolerance,” and “fairness.”
What does the GOP stand for? The party fought Trump every step of the way, double-crossed him constantly, feebly supported his policy positions, undercut his authority via the media at every opportunity, and otherwise made it clear to the conservative electorate that in the GOP establishment they had an enemy every bit as dangerous as the Democrats.
Lenin won his counter-revolution against both the Tsar and his fellow radicals, and did so with just a relative handful of followers: Trotsky, Sverdlov, Zinoviev, Kalinin, Bukharin. Together, they delivered the intellectual destabilization of the Tsarist regime, created the conditions for the short-lived Kerensky government in early 1917, and then seized power for themselves later that year. They never had the majority of the Russian people behind them but they had one thing their rivals lacked: a will to power.
There’s a lesson here somewhere. About which, more next week.
