court-packing, protecting the Holy State from unwarranted
inspection by the irrelevant citizenry—in short, those programs that
are the precise opposite of traditional conservatism. Their
allegiance is to “the people who own the country” and therefore
“ought to govern it,” in the words of Founding Father John Jay.
It’s really not that hard, once one understands the rules.
To make sense of political discourse, it’s necessary to give a
running translation into English, decoding the doublespeak of the
media, academic social scientists and the secular priesthood
generally. Its function is not obscure: the effect is to make it
impossible to find words to talk about matters of human significance
in a coherent way. We can then be sure that little will be
understood about how our society works and what is happening in
the world—a major contribution to “democracy,” in the PC sense of
the word.
Socialism, real and fake
One can debate the meaning of the term socialism, but if it means
anything, it means control of production by the workers
themselves, not owners and managers who rule them and control all
decisions, whether in capitalist enterprises or an absolutist state.
To refer to the Soviet Union as “socialist” is an interesting case
of doctrinal doublespeak. The Bolshevik coup of October 1917
placed state power in the hands of Lenin and Trotsky, who moved
quickly to dismantle the incipient socialist institutions that had
grown up during the popular revolution of the preceding months—
the factory councils, the soviets [popularly elected legislative
assembies], in fact any organ of popular control—and to convert the
workforce into what they called a “labor army” under the command
of the leader. In any meaningful sense of the term “socialism,” the
Bolsheviks moved at once to destroy its existing elements. No
socialist deviation has been permitted since.
These developments came as no surprise to leading Marxist
intellectuals, who had criticized Lenin’s doctrines for years (as had
Trotsky) because they would centralize authority in the hands of
the Vanguard Party and its leaders. In fact, decades earlier, the