By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
I spent much of my adult life observing left-wing academics who professed a fondness for socialism in one form or another. Some were my professors, others colleagues. More than a few were New Left Marxists who spoke openly in admiration of Mao, Fidel Castro, and the Sandinistas.
One woman I taught with in a high school in a suburb of New York City adorned her classroom with posters that glamorized Communist China’s Red Guards and Che Guevara. Her everyday conversations were filled with references to the evils of capitalism and American militarism.
I can remember speculating to myself about what would happen if these individuals ever had to actually live under a Marxist government committed to a redistribution of wealth.
You see, these people may have spoken harshly about the evil of materialism but they liked “nice stuff.” Maybe not big Cadillacs and Lincolns, but BMWs; their “Beamers” were fine with them. They expressed disdain for houses in suburbs with big lawns, but cushy Manhattan apartments were high on their wish-list, especially if they could find someone with connections to get them a rent-controlled unit.
They raised their eyebrows about people who vacationed in Las Vegas or Disney World, but spoke fondly of planned visits to Indian ashrams that cost as much as a week at a hotel on the Las Vegas Strip. You wouldn’t find them in clothes from Bloomingdale’s, but they had an assortment of expensive Birkenstock sandals and Doc Marten’s boots. They derided golf and tennis as the pastimes of the idle rich, but they could be seen heading off with their gym bags to yoga classes “for the benefit of both body and mind.”
It was as if they had convinced themselves that a Marxist government would not expropriate their wealth if they spent it on things that were in good taste. That must be why Jane Fonda and Barbra Streisand think radical socialists would let them keep their beach houses in Malibu.
The website The College Fix (www.thecollegefix.com) recently offered an interview with a leftwing professor who experienced a revelation about the reality of the socialist economies he had extolled at one time in his life. A dose of reality did the trick. He discovered what he would lose if his political agenda were ever put in place. (The College Fix describes itself as “a news and commentary site dedicated to higher education news” that draws its content from the country’s “best college newspapers and reporters.”)
The professor is Jack Stauder of the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Stauder told the student reporter from The College Fix that he had been a radical since his days as a student at Harvard and a participant in the political campus movements against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s. He came to identify openly as a Marxist and a radical.
Stauder began his undergraduate career studying American history and literature but eventually switched to cultural anthropology after working with a Maya community in Chiapas, Mexico. This experience inspired him to pursue a Ph.D. in anthropology at Cambridge University in England.
What caused Stauder’s break with Marxism? Stauder says his “political and ideological conversion away from socialism and Marxism occurred” when he “actually witnessed these systems in action.” He calls it “a process of disillusionment.” Stauder, according to The College Fix, “traveled to more than 110 countries to pursue various forms of research, notably cultural anthropology.” Marxist countries were among the countries he visited. He had expected to react favorably to countries that “tried to shape their societies to conform to Marxist doctrines.”
Instead, says Stauder, “I was disillusioned by the realities I saw in socialist countries: the USSR, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, etc. I came to recognize that socialism doesn’t work, and that its ‘revolutionary’ imposition inevitably leads to cruelty, injustice, and the loss of freedom. I could see the same pattern in the many failed left-wing revolutions of Latin America and elsewhere. By combining actual travel with the historical study of socialism and revolution, I succeeded in disabusing myself of the utopian notions that fatally attract people to leftist ideas.
There was another factor in Stauder’s change of heart. He began to spend time at his family’s home in the Southwest among the ranching and farming community. “Returning to my roots also helped my transition away from the leftist ideology that exists in the intellectual atmosphere of university life. By spending my summers in the Southwest in the company of rural working people, farmers and ranchers, I developed perspectives on the real world very different from those that prevail in the academic world.”
Academic institutions are breeding grounds for leftist ideals, according to Stauder, as “academics in general are intellectuals, and hence susceptible to ideologies. People seem to feel the need to believe in something, and when intellectuals abandon traditional religion, as most have done, they tend to seek substitutes.” New Left Marxism is high on the list of substitutes.
When asked about the bias in academia, Stauder pointed out “academia has developed its own culture, a subset of the wider elite culture of the ‘new upper class,’ described by Charles Murray in his book Coming Apart. As in all cultures, pressures exist to conform one’s thoughts and actions, and those who do not conform tend to be marginalized or suppressed.” Stauder encourages professors to break free, to “be individuals. Seek the truth, and stand by it.”
Stauder’s experience points out the great paradox of our time in the academic world: The intellectuals who profess to be “free thinkers” are the most conformist element in our society. This is the source of the modern phenomenon of political correctness. It would be encouraging to think that an exposure to what life is like in the socialist economies of the world would do the same thing for most left-wing intellectuals that it did for Stauder.
Unfortunately, we know that ideological enthusiasms often lead those effected by them to see the world with blinders. Sean Penn, for example, actually spent time with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and still came home singing the praises of that Marxist regime. The truth didn’t matter for Penn.
But it is still the truth. It needs to be defended and proclaimed. We have to hope that Jack Stauder is not the only individual in academia who will come to see through the empty promises of the Marxists.
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