Jonah Goldberg writes:
A lot of conservatives today are too quick to think that because liberals have some affinity for Marxist sentiments that they are actual Marxists. Liberals often make the same mistakes as Marxists, but they’re not Marxists. In the 1960s, the distinctions between Marxists and liberals was much more apparent and it’s worth remembering that the radicals often hated the liberals more than they hated the conservatives.
The distinctions between liberals and Marxists was much more apparent in the 1960s because it was much more real in the 1960s. Back then, and before, liberals believed in principles that clearly separated them from, and in fact led them to oppose, Marxism. The first principle they, but not Marxists, believed in was principle itself. They believed that our Constitution protected fundamental rights of individuals against the state — rights such as freedom of speech, press, assembly, religion, and even (though to a more limited degree) private property. Marxists, by contrast, believed principles, values, ideals, were nothing more than a nebulous “superstructure” extruded from the underlying economic reality of the class structure.
For all practical (which is to say, political) purposes, there are no Marxists left in the United States today, outside of academia. But there are also almost no traditional liberals either, at least few who still identify themselves as liberals. Today’s liberals believe in regulating political speech through campaign finance laws; regulating wide swaths of speech that is not campaign-related through “hate crime” laws; regulating the racial “market” and playing racial favorites through affirmative action; suppressing advertising and even news they don’t like through litigation or other intimidation; and denouncing popular assemblies protesting government policy as illegitimately radical, populist gatherings of angry racists, etc.
There are, of course, many traditional liberals still among us, but these days they call themselves conservatives.
