PONTEFICATIONS

LOOKING FOR A PERFECT HOLIDAY GIFT FOR THAT LEFTY on your list? Try shopping at the Communist Party USA online. 

On its “Shop ‘till Capitalism Drops!” website you can find “Commie Bear” for that red diaper baby. It’s a cuddly teddy bear complete with the CPUSA logo, a red hammer with crescent sickle to its right and crescent machine gear to its left, only $17.99.

Or there’s the Karl Marx lunchbox, with Karl’s face and wisdom on one side and the CPUSA logo on the other, $18.99.  Or for computer users, get the CPUSA or W.E.B. DuBois mousepad, a mere $15.99 to revolt your fellow proletarians at the office.

You can also paint the town red with a People’s Weekly World messenger bag ($23.99), a Political Affairs Magazine coffee mug ($15.99), or a shirt with the image of a protestor carrying a sign that reads “Bush Out 2004.”

That’s right, the Communist Party USA has gone capitalist. It now exploits its brand name, built by years of anti-communist attacks, and now it is turning its brand into a cash cow.

But capitalism is new to these commies. Last week they were selling a far larger line of merchandise, but they have pulled their products from what had been a second website, vestiges of which you can still see from their surviving parallel product lines for People’s Weekly World and Political Affairs Magazine.

A week ago you could have bought Communist Party USA golf shirts and beer steins, coasters and baseball caps, sweat shirts and baby bibs, wall clocks and tote bags, barbecue aprons and frisbees, greeting cards and boxer shorts – and “classic thong” underwear for that special comrade in red, all emblazoned with the cherry-colored CPUSA logo.

“Product sales were good,” Brandon Slattery told me Monday when I called the Communist Party’s New York City office. They had no problems with the quality or honesty of the capitalist company making and marketing this merchandise for them, CafePress.com (which can offer the same products with anybody’s logo on them, including yours).

“But we decided to produce our own products,” said Slattery. “What we’d been selling, it turned out, had not been made with union labor. We expect to have our own product line back on sale very soon.” 

I decided not to ask whether the CPUSA was going to track down the sweat shops where what had already been sold was made, and to return all CPUSA profits from this merchandise to the exploited workers.  Neither did I ask what using unionized labor would do to the price of their commie products, or how that higher price might reduce sales and profit, or how they would react if these union workers went on strike demanding ownership of the means of production and 100 percent of the pie.

The former Harvard University economist John Kenneth Galbraith put forth a theory of “convergence,” arguing that the United States and Soviet Union were becoming more like one another and were destined eventually to merge.  Today, of course, the Soviet Union is kaput and in the United States voters have shifted internal power from the long-dominant Leftist party to America’s political party of the Right.

But “convergence” apparently is still happening on the gauche side of American politics.  The Communist Party USA is moving right, and not just in its embrace of capitalist merchandising.

America’s Leftist media is reluctant to point this out, but since 1984 the Communist Party USA has essentially ceased to function as a political party. 

Beginning that year, it had such fear that a division among Leftist voters would re-elect Republican Ronald Reagan that the CPUSA simply told its members to vote for the Democratic Party candidate. It has done so ever since, acting not like its own political party but as a special interest group auxiliary of the Democratic Party.

Indeed, with months to go before the Democrats pick their 2004 slate, the Communist Party by October 2003 had already directed its members, sight unseen, to support the Democratic ticket as the only way to beat incumbent Republican President George W. Bush.  And why not, with the Democratic Party each year embracing more and more elements of an anti-capitalist Marxist agenda?

As David Horowitz has observed, the once-ideologically-mighty CPUSA that used to dominate “progressive” politics is today “only a constituent part of the whole” Leftist mechanism for seizing power and confiscating private property in America. The same could be said for the Democratic Party.

Notice that the Democratic Party has done nothing to reject, repudiate or distance itself from this support by its fellow Leftist comrades in the Communist Party.  Is this because its Left hand does not know what its Farther Left hand is doing?

For its part, the Democratic Party was heavily infected with Marxist genes during the New Deal. As Carl Bernstein of Woodward & Bernstein-Nixon-slayer fame recounted in his book Loyalties: A Son’s Memoir, his parents were among the thousands and thousands of secret Communist Party members knowingly brought in by Franklin Delano Roosevelt to re-make our government along what today are called “progressive” lines.

Attempts have been made to re-Americanize the Democratic Party.  Heartland politicians from President Harry Truman to President Bill Clinton have tried, at least in rhetoric, to move their party back towards American mainstream centrism. Bill Clinton has been part of the Democratic Leadership Council, a small movement of “New Democrats” trying to bring their Leftward-drifting party back to sanity before it falls entirely off the extreme Left edge of the political spectrum.

But like werewolves drawn by the full moon, or like salmon drawn to swim upstream to breed and die, Leftist Democrats continue to be under the gravitational influence of the Marxist voodoo in their blood that keeps pulling them ever farther Leftward. This has produced disastrous political defeats that can be invoked by the single names of crushed Leftist candidates – McGovern, Carter, Dukakis.

And now the siren song of the lunatic Left is seducing Democrats again.  Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean cries out “Go Left, Young Persons, Go Left!” and the children of Hamlin put one left foot in front of another as they march in lockstep under his banner. Dean’s appeal is emotional – an unwavering snarl of hatred against President Bush and traditional American values.

Last August Dean went so far as to accuse his rival Leftist candidates for President of being “too far to the right.”  The first Governor to sign “same-sex unions” into law, and the loudest voice criticizing America for deposing mass murdering megalomaniac Saddam Hussein, Dean’s name will soon join the roll of ultra-Leftist Democrat losers.

In this convergence between a right-moving Communist Party USA and a left-moving Democratic Party, the once-dreaded CPUSA has become retro kitsch, the stuff of nostalgia and Andy Warhol art imitators.

One of the resident Lefties at Fox News Channel, Alan Colmes, now unashamedly makes his shockingly honest self-description the title of his new book: Red, White and Liberal.

Communism failed as a political movement in the United States for a host of reasons, including a working class so prosperous that today roughly one-third of blue collar union members vote Republican. (This is why the Democratic Party has always opposed letting workers decide how their mandatory union dues may be used in politics, dues that traditionally have gone almost entirely to help Democratic candidates.) 

The major reason the Communist Party USA has supported wide-open immigration is that Marxist revolution requires a dissatisfied proletariat.  In prosperous capitalist America this can be gotten only by importing a proletariat from poorer nations.

The alternative class that sparked Marxist revolution in unindustrialized Czarist Russia was the lumpenproletariat, made up of the scum of society – e.g., status-seeking intellectuals. It is now chic – indeed, de rigeur – to be fashionably Marxist on the faculty of the typical American college or university campus.  At the least, it is a career enhancement, a plus for promotion rather than a firing offense.

But it’s clear from speaking for a few minutes with these elitist airheads that if Hitler instead of Stalin had won World War II, they today would just as eagerly be embracing the swastikas, style and rhetoric of national socialism instead of the hammer and sickle and red rhetoric of international socialism.

Capitalists have become the fastest growing class in Communist China, the world’s most populous Marxist nation. Late last year capitalists there were pounding on the door seeking membership in the Communist Party.  Why?  Because as the Wall Street Journal observed, the CP is the biggest old boy network in the land.  Last November, after decades of shutting them out, the Chinese Communist Party Congress voted to allow “advanced element” (its apt code word for capitalist) citizens apply for party membership.

In Russia the Communist Party has welcomed capitalists not only as members but also as its political candidates for office. The December 2 Moscow Times reported that “The Communists, who have always positioned themselves as the workers’ party fighting the evils of capitalism, have filled about a quarter of their party list [of candidates] with businessmen, some of them millionaires.”

What’s in this for the capitalists?  A possible seat in the national legislature, the Duma, and the potential power that goes with such a position. Survival requires power in a ruthless Russian political culture that has never experienced the Western Enlightenment, as Russian President Vladimir Putin just demonstrated.

What’s in this for the Communists, whose leaders have taken heat from the ideological faithful for embracing capitalists?  These businesspeople are “capable managers,” Party leader Gennady Zyuganov told the Moscow Times, who can contribute to Russia’s development.  He adds, according to Times reporter Francesca Mereu, that the Communist Party of Russia “no longer opposes private property.”

Ah, if only we could say the same for the Democratic Party in the United States!  And if only they would permit America to adopt the same economically-liberating 13 percent flat tax that became law in 2001 in Russia!  (The Bush Administration put such a flat tax in place in Iraq and should propose the same here.)

“A businessman on a party list means money,” said Nikolai Petrov, an analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center, to Mereu.  She reports learning that “parties can sell good spots on their lists for $1.5 to $2 million.”

The Democratic Party in the U.S. scouts for potential candidates with enough wealth to pay for their own campaigns – and perhaps a bit more.  As the old joke goes, does the name Pavlov ring a bell?  Does the name of near-billionaire Democratic Senator from New Jersey Jon Corzine ring a cash register? 

We may not yet have the best government money can buy, but in this regard the Democratic Party has led the way in selling our government to the highest bidders, foreign and domestic. Call it “U.S. Capitol Capitalism” or “Donkey Kong.”

But perhaps the Democratic and Communist parties in our nation will ultimately converge only in the growing similarity of their ideas and not merge into a single party as they effectively operate today. 

Geologists enjoy explaining how at present rates of tectonic continental plate drift, in 50 million years the forces that cause California earthquakes will have turned Los Angeles into an island just off the coast of San Francisco.

At the present rates of Rightward drift by the CPUSA and relentless Leftward movement by the Democratic Party, sometime before the 2012 national election the Democratic Party will actually be to the Left of the Communist Party USA.

By then the Democratic Party will have shrunk to third party status and be generally viewed as a ship of fools, a barge of grafters, geezers and losers sailing into history’s sunset as did the Whigs, Mugwumps and Know-Nothings before them.

The Communist Party will be much richer from the selling of its products and will have more members than it does today.  But most of its member-customers will be brain-dead pseudo-intellectuals and artists at rural state universities and junior colleges who impress one another by flashing CPUSA membership cards and logo-emblazoned underwear.

The CPUSA will have succeeded at last, but in the same way that the 19^th Century socialist communes of Amana and Oneida did – not as cities on a hill that attracted widespread imitation, but as joint stock companies that became famous for selling products that capitalist consumers wanted to buy.  The CPUSA could become the next Victoria’s Secret, and Marx & Engels could become the next Ben & Jerry’s.

And heartland America, healthier and more prosperous than ever before, by 2012 will be celebrating our newly-elected first Hispanic President, 35-year-old George P. Bush, son of Jeb.  We will have forgotten that anachronistic Leftist Democrats and Communists even exist….at least outside the hothouse zoo enclosures called universities. And the future will be bright.