On the 250th anniversary of the birth of our country, in his address at Mt. Rushmore, President Donald Trump warned about a threat posed to our country by domestic communists. For some—particularly those who recall when some Americans were traitors who swore allegiance to international communism and/or the Soviet Union—such a characterization may seem absurd. The Cold War is over: we won.
Viewed connotatively, however, President Donald Trump’s label of “communist” makes a ton of sense. The individuals he is warning against share the basic goals and some principal strategic approaches of communists.
They want to subjugate free and sovereign individuals to the oppressive machinery of the state. This reverses the American principle that government power is legitimate only so far as it upholds and protects individual rights. Today’s domestic enemies of America constantly seek ways for government power to trample and smash the individual rights of life, liberty, and private property that are essential to the pursuit of happiness.
Just as domestic communists during the Cold War advocated for unilateral U.S. disarmament in the face of Soviet expansionism, so today the anti-American left opposes efforts to defeat the Iranian fanatics who have perpetrated aggression against us for decades. Like their predecessors, they do not support the U.S. military and would block funding necessary for military upgrades and modernizations.
The more aggressive opponents of our American system are explicitly calling for the dismantling of key provisions of our Constitution. They literally want to abolish the United States of America as we know it.
It can be helpful to think of “communism” as a mentality or psychology, rather than simply as an ideology. Vladimir Lenin, the original Soviet dictator, stated, “Hatred is the basis of communism.” As we survey the national scene today, we see the hatred of the left manifest in various ways.
Think of the bilious attacks against billionaires, with perfervid calls to “guillotine the rich.” How perverse to want to destroy those who have created billions of dollars of value for others.
Think of the callow and shallow college students getting turned on by calls for Israel to be annihilated. Where did they learn such mindless hatred? Americans know that Jews have the same right to life as everyone else, and true Americans oppose vehemently those who advocate the genocide of an entire people.
Consider, too, the hatred for individuals that is always implicit, if not always explicit, that is embodied in the arrogance of those who seek to impose a central, top-down plan of economic organization on us.
Adam Smith warned of this dangerous mentality in his brilliant book, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” Smith labeled what we see as the communist mentality as the “man of system”: “The man of system … is apt to be very wise in his own conceit, and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. … he seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.”
Yes, the “man of systems” colossal self-love is mirrored in his total disregard and rejection of the humanity of his fellow beings, whom he treats as chess pieces subject to his direction. Thus, (more from Smith) the political reformer manifests “the highest degree of arrogance.” He seeks “to erect his own judgment into the supreme standard of right and wrong.” He “fanc[ies] himself the only wise and worthy man in the commonwealth, and [believes] that his fellow-citizens should accommodate themselves to him.”
This attitude leads to “the madness of fanaticism” among the political leaders of radical reform, while the mass of followers are “intoxicated with the imaginary beauty of the ideal system, of which they have no experience, but which has been represented to them in all the most dazzling colours in which the eloquence of their leaders could paint it. Those leaders themselves, though they originally may have meant nothing but their own aggrandizement, become, many of them, in time the dupes of their own sophistry.”
Today, calls from the anti-American left for the dismantling of the American constitution and republic are growing louder and more numerous.
Whether the goals of the anti-American left or their hatred for basic American principles makes them “communists” is not for me to decide. But that they pose as existential a threat to our country as communism did in the previous century is clear, and President Trump’s warnings about them should be heeded.
I don’t know if the label “communists” will stick, but the spirit of communism lives on in today’s illiberal anti-American left, and we will have to work diligently and persistently to repel this threat.
The current situation brings to mind Abraham Lincoln’s warning in the Lyceum Address: “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
Indeed, the threat within our gates today is more dangerous than all the enemies outside our country.
