If you are wondering how to start a conversation over dinner on Thursday that sheds light on both anti-Semitism and Marxism, the foundational issues of Zohran Mandami, I have a suggestion. In much the spirit that President Trump benignly manhandled the boy commie wannabe, a little Thanksgiving saga about our Pilgrim fathers might do the same for your table mates.
It begins with, of all unlikely people, Karl Marx. Although raised as a Christian, the young Marx, a newly minted atheist and aspiring socialist, turned his fury on the faith of his fathers. He compressed his thoughts into two essays published in 1844 under the title, “On The Jewish Question.”
“What is the worldly religion of the Jew?” Marx asked. “Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.” The way to “make the Jew impossible” would be to abolish the preconditions for huckstering. Without huckstering, Marx argued, the Jew’s “religious consciousness would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society.”
Even in 1844, Marx knew that America would be a tough nut to crack. From what he knew it was “pre-eminently the country of religiosity,” and yet it seemed to be the one nation that had been most thoroughly corrupted by the Judaic spirit. Two strikes against America right there.
The “free inhabitant” of New England, wrote Marx, is convinced “that he has no other destiny here below than to become richer than his neighbor.” When he travels, he worries “only of interest and profit.” The world for the New England Yankee is “no more than a Stock Exchange.” As to idols, he has but one, and that is, of course, mammon. One sees in Marx’s rant a precocious anti-Americanism that would deform the thinking of the international Left for the next 180 years and eventually get people like Mamdani elected.
Portrait of a Connecticut Yankee Peddler
Okay, now that you have your table mates’ attention, you turn the table on them. What Marx conveniently overlooked, you tell them, is that two hundred years earlier, the very first New Englanders had taken a serious stab at the social scheme Marx was in the process of formulating. The Pilgrims actually tried the “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” snake oil Marx was peddling.
Now here, you pause and pull out your handy copy of Plymouth Plantation governor William Bradford’s description of his experiment. Wrote Bradford:
THE EXPERIENCE that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years and that amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients applauded by some of later times; that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God.
FOR this community (so far as it was) was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For the young men, that were most able and fit for labour and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense.
THE strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalized in labours and victuals, clothes, etc., with the meaner and younger sort, thought it some indignity and disrespect unto them.
AND for men’s wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brook it. Upon the point all being to have alike, and all to do alike, they thought themselves in the like condition, and one as good as another; and so, if it did not cut off those relations that God hath set amongst men, yet it did at least much diminish and take off the mutual respects that should be preserved amongst them. And would have been worse if they had been men of another condition.
LET none object this is men’s corruption, and nothing to the course itself. I answer, seeing all men have this corruption in them, God in His wisdom saw another course fitter for them.
What Marx missed, you explain, is that Christianity not only created the conditions essential to free enterprise, but it also tempered its excesses. Now, of course, your young leftist kin and your spinster ELF aunts join eagerly in the discussion. No, alas, not in this lifetime. Those who have not fled the table are running AI checks on the saga you have just shared. When one among them puts his phone down, looks up at you, and says, “Did not know that,” you say, “You just made my day, Auntie. Happy Thanksgiving.”
In the spirit of the Yankee peddler, let me recommend my newest book, Empire of Lies, now available in ebook and print versions at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. ALERT to paid Subscribers. To receive your free signed copy, please email me, jackcashill@yahoo.com, with your name, address and any preferred inscription. Please put PAID SUBSCRIBER in message box. If not already signed up, sign up today to be a paid subscriber. First signed copies hit the mail on 11/19.
Rush Limbaugh loved telling this story. It puts the Pilgrims in a different light.
What you are proposing is to attempt to "reach" Libs/Progs/Pinkos/Commies/Wokesters with LOGIC. But they are impervious to logic, and to try to present to them a logical argument is a colossal waste of time, energy and brain cells.