[Blind Eye Jones]

"Their real god, Marxism, has settled in among the other relics in the cultural dumpster and is good for humor value only at this point."

The real god, IMHO, is Romanticism. Take that away and you take away the the avant garde, progressive post modern ethos, the problem with the bourgeois, the hedonism, the search for identity, the ineluctable nose dive into the id as a cure for repression within society. Rousseau suggested something was lost by entering society from the state of nature. Everything romanticized and idealized that followed was an attempt to correct that problem (including a free sex, worker's paradise).

[Billthedrill]

I agree completely. Marxism (and other related systems of thought such as Nazism) are profoundly romantic, which explains their continuing appeal in the face of complete and utter failure to deliver the promised goods. Only that could possibly explain the weird fashion for Che Guevara - the t-shirts, the ridiculous Motorcycle Diaries - on the part of those who simply don't want to hear that he was a failure as a revolutionary and a psychopathic monster because it's uncongenial to their fantasy worlds.

Romanticism per se isn't the problem so much as people who are drunk with it. Enjoying an overbearing aristocrat get his comeuppance is one thing, watching all of them being marched to the guillotine and cheering the death of the innocent is quite another. That is equally true of the bourgeoisie or the Jews or whatever the "oppressor" class of the moment happens to be.

I would add collectivism to the mix because only when one is subject to the dehumanization inherent in dealing with another person as a member of a class rather than an individual human being do we get the sort of outrageous violations of human decency we see in fascism, Nazism, communism, Jacobinism, radical Islam, and to only a slightly lesser degree in such class enthusiasms as feminism and racial movements from Mugabe's to Sharpton's.