[George W. Bush]

Thus conservatives are not fooled by Trotskyites or Leninist or socialists who are simply proposing a slower pace in destroying traditional Western institutions, regardless of any political stripe.

I think that Marxism is dead as a rational political and economic explanation. It has failed at every turn. Human beings do not and will not behave according to its underlying assumptions. We're not made of such stuff.

The remaining legacy of Marxism is that of Third Way politicians, people like Clinton and Blair and the EU. They employ Gramscian rhetoric and strategy to further their socialism-lite agenda.

But Marxism itself is dead.

[JohnGalt]

Marxism is not a system of government but a mode of thought; Stalinism, Leninism, Trotskyism, socialism, Third Way Socialism, are just interim steps toward the complete abolition of the state and the onset of the Workers Paradise. Indeed, Karl Marx recommended a period of "free trade" and high income taxes to ensure a large prosperous state; he then suggested this state would be imperialistic as it search for new markets, all the while he advocated a program of over turning traditional institutions like the family, marriage, church, gun rights, free press...

While Stalinism died with Stalin, though you could argue it lives in North Korea, Trotskyism had many adherents (James Burnham--a founder of National Review, Irving Kristol) who found their way into the upper echelon of the Republican Party in the 1980s. Indeed, National Review printed an indefense of Trotsky earlier this year by Stephen Schwartz.