[ml/nj]

The author's argument is a bit naive. According to her criteria, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics wasn't "communist" either. When McCarthy accused people of being communists it was because he believed these people were acting in sympathy or concert with the USSR to undermine the United States and western capitalistic governments. To take "Equal rights for gay, lesbian and transgendered people," as an example, certainly there are people who came to think this would be a good thing on their own; or at least they think they did. But just as certainly there were people within the USSR who had ideas about weakening the moral fabric of the US as part of a strategy toward undermining it. And some see the mainstreaming of homosexuality as one of those ideas. Whether such people are correct or not doesn't really matter. They are merely using the word "communist" because they believe it to have some association with those Soviets who wished to undermine our society.

And who could argue with them?

ML/NJ

[Yardstick]

Part of the problem is that really aren’t any communists anymore. Except for their true kook fringe, the left has more or less given up on the whole collective ownership of the means of production thing. Enough history has happened that even they realize that their preferred system is a failure in terms of its ability to create wealth. If the world went socialist, a third of humanity would immediately die of starvation. Even the left can see this. So they’ve more or less ceded that function to people who can perform actually produce, and resigned themselves to being a modifying force rather than the primary force. Their role now is to redistribute and to regulate and to demonize and to moralize and to nanny people around and to do everything they can on the social front to make middle America feel threatened and uncomfortable. The particular forms that this tends to take are more amorphous and less neatly categorized than the writer suggests, and so her little list is pretty worthless. Socialism has become kind of like pornography in that it’s about impossible to define but you know it when you see it.