Spirit of Stalin Haunts U.S. Politics

specter is haunting American culture and politics. It is the ghost of Stalin.

America's political life has been transformed into a Westernized version of the Soviet dictator's reign under which politics is conducted not by free men in lively and open debate, but by media-anointed commissars who carry out purges, denunciations, ridicule, and ostracism of anyone who dares to express or even entertain ideas that differ from America's left-wing ruling elites.

And those who fail to join the denunciations quickly enough find themselves denounced as well.

Although today's "deviationists" are not sent to face firing squads, they suffer the social and economic equivalent, losing their jobs, their reputations, their friends, and then stripped of dignity and legitimacy.

The latest purge, this time against GOP Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, reveals that even conservatives are eager to please the keepers of America's new ideological orthodoxy. They apparently hope that by joining the campaign of denunciations, they will come to be seen as no threat to elites, and perhaps avoid being the target of some future denunciation.

By now, the story is well known: Lott told celebrants at a birthday party for 100 year-old Sen. Strom Thurmond that Mississippi voted for his third-party Dixiecrat presidential bid back in 1948.
"We're proud of it," said Lott. "And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."

It was extravagant rhetoric for a Republican officeholder, to say the least. An earlier speaker had claimed Thurmond was America's "greatest living American."

Anyone who has ever worked on the Republican side in the U.S. Senate knows well that effusive and even transparently insincere flattery of icon and legend Strom Thurmond is routine and even expected. No one thinks it's an endorsement of segregation. But no matter. Lott opened the door just enough to let in the flood of leftist venom.

"Trent Lott's remarks on race raise a storm," blared a demonstrably false headline from Time magazine. Newsweek couldn't resist its own skewed exaggeration, telling readers that Lott "praised Thurmond's stridently segregationist presidential campaign."

The calls for Lott's head that quickly came from "Kewiesi Mfume" of the NAACP and Rev. Jesse Jackson were soon drowned out by a louder clamor for his head from American conservatives, including politicians Jack Kemp and William Bennett, and writers Jonah Goldberg of National Review and William Kristol of The Weekly Standard.

For at least two weeks, the Lott "scandal" dominated the pre-Christmas news. And yet Lott had committed no crime, took no untoward action, caused no harm, broke no law, violated no ethics. Unlike former President Bill Clinton, he was accused of no rape, no sexual harassment, no obstruction of justice, and faced no impeachment. Still, America's ideologically uniform news organizations wondered daily how soon Lott should resign his post.

So what was the reason for the denunciations? Newsweek let the cat out of the bag in its December 23rd issue with a sidebar it called "a snapshot" of Lott's record. According to Newsweek, Lott's entire public record consists of trying to restore citizenship to Confederate President Jefferson Davis in 1978; joining a bipartisan coalition to ban forced school busing for racial purposes in 1979; voting against making Martin Luther King Jr's birthday a national holiday in 1983; referring to the Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression in 1984; and once speaking before a group later accused of "white supremacy" from which Lott quickly distanced himself.

In other words, the reason Lott should be driven from his job is based entirely on his deviating thoughts -- simply matters of belief in which he differs from the ruling ideological orthodoxy that now dominates American media and even establishment conservative journals. Those are not beliefs worth debating and criticizing. Those are views that for the left to remain in power, must be suppressed and denounced as illegitimate. And anyone who holds them must be silenced and driven from public view.

Just as in Stalin's Soviet Russia, the politics of denunciation are designed to keep those in power and those who seek power, in line. Deviation is not allowed. It's a lesson Lott learned quickly. Within a few days of the first denunciations against him, he scrambled to save his job and reputation, appearing on Black Entertainment Television where he solemnly disavowed his vote against the Martin Luther King holiday, and endorsed "affirmative action."

Like everyone in the Soviet Union under the spell of Stalin, one must submit or face the consequences.