The Most Romantic Massacre

Is Kamala Harris a communist? Oh, if only she were. Imagine the stump speeches.

“The workers. Of the World. There is a world, and there are workers in it. The work of the world is worker’s work. If we think of this as a series of chains, around the work, a knot, a problem of knots, then workers of the world, untie! UNTIE! You have only your knot to unburden from what keeps us, as a community, moving to the place that is not where we once were. Some say real communism has never been tried. I say to try, we must do, and when we do together, we try in a way much different than trying on our own, in the world.”

I heard a BBC World Service radio show address the charge, and the host brought on an actual communist. Isn’t this McCarthyism? the host asked, believing as most do that the problem with McCarthy was opposing communism, not making wild accusations. This is a bit like bringing on an actual Nazi to discuss whether Trump is like Hitler, except of course that a rose-scented mist of good intentions always follows people who wear hammer-and-sickle caps and Che Guevara shirts. (The Nazi, of course, would criticize Trump for never saying anything about annexing the Sudetenland.)

No, she’s not a communist, but that’s not exactly an inspirational campaign slogan. Still, if you’re going to throw around collectivist talk about seizing patents and using the power of the state to discern the proper price of Cheerios or issuing executive orders to make the Naval Observatory timepieces say that it is, in fact, wine o’clock somewhere, and your dad was a professor of Marxism —

Well, hold on, you say, that’s not fair. Maybe he went into that line because he was virulently opposed to it. You know, the way people who absolutely hate 20–20 vision become ophthalmologists. Maybe.

The stranger part is Governor Walz’s trips to China. He made 30 trips. So what? you say. Some people eat at Applebee’s every Friday. You find what you like, you stick with it.

The Washington Free Beacon ran a piece on what Walz said while he was a social-studies teacher in the ’90s. What is communism? Why, he’ll tell you.

“It means that everyone is the same and everyone shares,” he said. “The doctor and the construction worker make the same.”

This is not the correct answer. Here is what you tell your class:

“Communism was invented by a hairy, smelly dude who sat in the library all day writing an explanation for why he was broke and ignored. He came up with some ideas that appeal to people who think they can figure out a secret special formula that explains everything and also has the totally coincidental outcome of giving them stuff they didn’t work for or deserve, at the expense of successful people with lots of friends and hot wives and steady access to a bath so that people don’t faint when they walk into the room.

“This system is utterly at odds with human nature, history, economics, and common sense, and hence it is beloved of two kinds of people: college professors who can fasten on a fat Western college like a leech on a whale, and clever sociopaths who can use it to exert power over the masses. It killed millions in the 20th century, yet we are told true communism was never tried, which is like poisoning 200 million people with a dose of arsenic and insisting they would have been fine if they’d been fed twice as much. Any questions?”

To be fair, Walz is on record as supporting Tibetan rights and has spoken up for dissidents and detainees. Maybe Tiananmen Square made the scales fall from his eyes with a clang like manhole covers dropped from the second floor? He was actually in China during the massacre, which, of course, is why he chose the anniversary years later for his wedding. From an interview in the local paper:

“Walz and his wife honeymooned in China after getting married on the 5th anniversary of Tiananmen Square. Why? ‘He wanted to have a date he’ll always remember,’ said his wife.”

Okay. Nothing odd about that. At all. Just as long as no one celebrated the marriage anniversary by standing in front of the spouse’s car as it tried to leave the garage.