The Return of Lenin in Progressive Disguise

Marxism-Leninism and our Western-style progressive movement are two very different entities, and yet the obsessiveness and dogmatism of the latter is increasingly reminiscent of Soviet practices. We are no longer dealing with relatively open-minded American-style liberalism or British-Australian versions of social democracy, but an unapologetic fanaticism. What Marxist-Leninists and our own modern-day leftists share, above everything else, is a comparable eschatological sensibility, a certainty about the final destiny of humankind and an unshakeable self-belief that they have the wherewithal to lead us to their promised land. Today’s progressives, in short, are secular millennialists who constitute a new chapter of radical elitism which demands that ordinary people—deplorables, if you will—accede to a worldview conceived not by a theological priesthood but by an ideological vanguard. This is despotism dressed up as a moral imperative. It is, a là Marxism-Leninism, a…