There’s a big, flashy new poster downtown on lampposts and walls. It says:
“We need and we demand the existing capitalist-imperialist system and institutions of government in this country must be abolished and dismantled—and replaced by a new socialist system based on the CONSTITUTION FOR THE NEW SOCIALIST REPUBLIC IN NORTH AMERICA.”
At the bottom the poster are several QR codes where, I assume, one can gather more information.
Of course we’ve always had outlier anarchists in America who desired to install some kind of far-left dictatorship, and Oakland has always had more than its fair share of these zealots. In normal times, I’d read that poster and think, “There goes another knucklehead group of losers who sit around drinking Carlo Rossi Red and plotting the overthrow of the U.S. government.”
But these aren’t normal times. Here in the People’s Republic of Oakland, we actually have a lot of such people. They vote for radicals like Pamela Price, Nikki Bas and Carroll Fife, and in their fever dreams they actually believe that the fire they start in Oakland will spread across the nation, resulting in the death of America and its replacement by “The New Socialist Republic in North America.”
Who are these people? They’re the same kind of extremists as the most MAGA of Trump supporters, only they’re on the left. Like MAGA and Steve Bannon, they want to destroy our existing institutions and create an autocracy, except in their case it would be a socialist-communist one. Psychologically, though, the two sides are mirror images of each other, in paranoia, megalomania and delusion.
I call the position of the far left insane and sick. The people who put up the “New Socialist Republic” poster no doubt mean well. They view America in terms of the legacy of slavery and its aftermath. In their view, America has refused to deal with the lingering effects of slavery, and—in the words of one far-left analyst—“this refusal has resulted in beliefs, practices and choices that butcher the ideals of this fragile democratic experiment.” These postmodern progressive thinkers believe that the only way to repair the legacy of racism is to devise “a long and difficult process of rethinking values, ideals, institutional arrangements, and practices, not a mere act of acknowledgment, which would be an empty gesture.” They want, in other words, what the Socialist poster demands—the absolute destruction of the existing social and political order, and its replacement by a radical regime that would upend all “values, ideals, institutional arrangements, and practices.” In so many words, they want revolution.
One problem with this approach is that lots and lots of people don’t want to give up their “values, ideals, institutional arrangements, and practices.” These people will violently resist any effort to force them to do, and this is exactly where we find ourselves: on the cusp, possibly, of a second civil war. I would suggest, in order to avoid that catastrophic outcome, that extremists on both sides of the political chasm abandon their “demands” and realize that politics is the art of compromise. When compromise fails, the shooting starts. What the progressives fail to understand are two things: first, that socialism/communism has never worked in any country on Earth, and secondly, that refusing to compromise is leading to civilizational clashes. How long will taxpayers and store owners continue to remain in Oakland as conditions worsen? What happens when the middle class flees Oakland, leaving behind only poor people? If you think the streets are bad now, in five years they’ll be cratered minefields, because all the money will have fled town.
This is my resentment of the Price/Fife/Bas/Thao wing of the Democratic Party: their indifference to the consequences of their actions, their intellectual failure to see what’s actually happening to us, their constant doubling-down on failed tax, criminal justice and social ideologies. Maybe Price, herself an unreconstructed crypto-communist, fancies that, after the victory of the socialist revolution, she will become leader of the New Socialist Republic in North America. Madame El Presidente Price—has a nice ring, doesn’t it.
Steve Heimoff