It’s indoctrination:
During the 2008 campaign, Obama’s critics often called him a “radical,” a “socialist” or even a “Marxist” and were either dismissed as hysterics or condemned for “McCarthyism.” It was not widely noted that, for those too young to remember America’s Cold War struggle against Soviet tyranny, the accusation of “Marxism” doesn’t carry much weight, while “McCarthyism” is at most something they’ve read about in books. (Stan Evans’s Blacklisted by History probably isn’t on the collegiate reading list.) Voters who were 25 in 2008 were in first grade when the Berlin Wall came down. If they have some idea that the Soviet empire was a bad thing, they have little idea of why it was bad. And this ignorance is no accident.
To explain why the Bolshevik experiment failed so spectacularly would require that students be taught the errors of socialism, which would necessarily require an explanation of the superiority of the market economy to the socialist planned economy. And the left-wing orientation of today’s academic establishment — “Down With Capitalist Education!” to quote a sign in a protest today by Cal State university faculty — pretty much prohibits any such explanation.
Seventeen-year-olds taught that they are “the 99 percent” and that advocates of economic freedom are “f–king up our future” have not been merely miseducated, but have been quite literally indoctrinated. But as Buckley said, they would be “outraged by the suggestion” that they have not arrived at their beliefs “by independent intellectual exertion.”
These young people have not been taught Marx and Lenin. Rather, they have had their heads stuffed with nebulous ideas about “equality,” “rights” and “social justice” by teachers (and journalists and movie producers) who cherish romantic mythology about the righteous glories of Sixties radical movements.
The other problem is that Marxism is an emotionally appealing argument, to those who have never been taught how to actually think.
[Update a while later]
“The putrid stench of a century of folk Marxism.”
It isn’t even indoctrination – it’s Potemkin.
http://youtu.be/ljQd_pfykV8
I have found that when having friendly debates with socialists and leftists, that it always requires starting at first principles and seeing what axioms/assumptions they start with. Quite often when you uncover those, and then crank in human nature they start to wonder about their positions.
Takes forever.
I’m actually a red diaper baby, I imbibed Marxism with my mother’s milk, and it has always been clear to me that iit is insulting to proper communists to call the modern new left Marxist. Not only do these kids know nothing, their teachers never bothered actually learning any Marxist theory. Marxist thought in this country has been dead since 1968-9, when it was replaced by the bastard ideology of moral relativism, deconstruction, and retrograde romanticist worship of primitive cultures that was the self hating product of the western bourgeoisie.
They know nothing and they don’t give a shit about the proletariat, which probably explains why the real proletariat now votes Republican. Anti Technology and anti universal rights is the opposite of communism. A proper communist would look at Al Qaeda and sees a group who wants to overturn the Renaissance, He wouldn’t bother trying to understand them. Real communists believe in technological betterment and conquering the cosmos, they may have been murderous but the Soviets and even Mao believed in industry, they were not superstitious nature worshippers, they left that to the Pagan Nazis, the romantic fascists and the reactionary falangists. Actually they didn’t leave that to them, they wanted to exterminate them. These New Left hippy reactionaries aren’t Marxists, they have no ideology except entitlement for themselves and hatred for those not like them. But if they have to choose they hate those closest to them, the people who gave them the luxury of being entitled brats, and that hatred makes them defend medieval religious fanatics who mutilate women to preserve their patriarchal privilege, third world exploiters who starve their own people and enslave them in order to buy houses in Mayfair with aid money.
The hippies killed the left with their self indulgence, and yet like a zombie it keeps flinging its feces. Glenn Beck is a better Marxist than almost anyone in Academia.
“No enemies to the Left; no friends to the Right.” Of course Marxists are going to have quite the list of enemies, even if some are merely adjacent…
Roy
It is worse than that. In the early 70’s the neo-Malthusians used computer programs to tell us that we were doomed. None of their predictions came true.
Those computer models were replaced with new ones, and the new models, also predicting our doom are being used as the reason that freedom is obsolete and that we must place our faith in the same people that just declared that water does not combat dehydration.
http://www.thenation.com/article/164497/capitalism-vs-climate
To combat this I read “Mig Pilot” to my two sons. http://www.amazon.com/Mig-Pilot-Escape-Lieutenant-Belenko/dp/0070038503/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1321895866&sr=1-2
I’ve read to my boys every night before they go to bed since they where old enough to listen. But by the age of 8 or so they didn’t want kids books so I started reading some real books (scifi or fantasy) Mig Pilot was a good one because it is short but really hits at the core of how it was to live as an over achiever under communism. “But DAD that doesn’t make sense! That isn’t the way things really work.” “Yes son but that is what his government told him” It was funny one time one of the boys just about jumped out of bed “That’s STUPID!”