Socialists are exquisitely attuned to history. When Donald Trump declared that his foreign and trade policies will be organized around the principle of "America First", the Left was quick to pounce, making the connection between Trump and the "notorious" America First Committee. Started in 1940, the AFC was isolationist (anti-globalist, in modern parlance) and, by association with Charles Lindbergh, faintly racist and White Supremacist, if not actually sympathetic to the Nazi cause. This was an arcane connection even I did not make, and I am more historically literate than the average American (a very low bar, so I am hardly bragging). So, what are we to make of the NY Times editorial, "President Obama and the Long March"?
Does the phrase, "Long March", sound familiar to you? It should. Google "Long March" and the very first item to pop up, and rightly so, is the Wikipedia article about the heroic military retreat of the Red Army, under Mao Zedong. Passing through some of the most difficult terrain in China, over the course of a year Mao took his army more than 9,0000 kilometers (about 5,400 miles) to evade the Kuomintang, leave China to the tender mercies of Imperial Japan, and remain intact to fight, not the Japanese of course, but the Nationalists after they had been severely weakened in their mortal struggle with Japan. Rather than find common cause with the Nationalists to defend China, Mao sacrificed millions of his countrymen in order to enhance his ability to take over China after the Western powers defeated Japan (with no help from him).
For a generation afterwards, most of the power hierarchy of Maoist China was populated by the likes of Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, comrades of Mao in that arduous enterprise.
The next time we encounter the phrase "Long March" is with Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). Gramsci developed the theory of "Cultural Hegemony", later aptly nicknamed "The Long March Through The Institutions". Probably the most realistic and practical thinker among the socialists, Gramsci realized much earlier than his socialist friends that they will never win against society via a marxist-style, mano-a-mano Class Struggle. Rather, the right strategy is that of the Glyptapanteles wasp, which lays her eggs inside the body of a paralyzed but still living caterpillar. Over a brief time, the eggs hatch and the wasp larvae eat their way out of the caterpillar, leaving behind a dead husk.
In other words, forget about Class Struggle. Rather, take over the schools, the universities, the government bureaucracies and other appointed positions of public service. Inject yourself into the institutions and, in this way, gradually transmogrify society into socialism.
How real is the Democratic Party's connection to Antonio Gramsci? Here is Anita Dunn, erstwhile communications director for Barack, telling us that one of her favorite political philosophers is the mass murder Mao Zedong. Van Jones, Barack's erstwhile Green Jobs Tsar is a self-avowed communist. For all his protestations to the contrary, Barack speaks in the lingo of socialism (redistribution, positive rights, radical transformation). And, finally (but not exclusively), one of the most important figures in recent Democratic Party politics is the socialist Bernie Sanders.
Donald Trump's connection to the America First Committee is illusory. Barack Obama's and the NY Times' connection to Karl Marx is not.
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