By David Bittinger

November 2, 2024

Maybe you’ve felt your country being pushed toward something radically different. The pushers rage over ever-expanding utopian grievances, most reflecting shallow ideas, one having deep roots of tribal hatred.

According to the pushers, outrages against social justice and inadequacies in “diversity, equity and inclusion” are greatest in the United States — not in Mideastern or African autocracies, not in Cuba, Venezuela, or China. The global capital of injustice is right here, maybe somewhere between Iowa and Idaho.

The U.S., denounced on campuses and in city streets as the great oppressor, is the nation that millions of the world’s poor keep crashing illegally. Strange.

In cities that are paradoxically “progressive” yet regressing into rampant crime and brain-dead governance, the pushing is often chanted. The pushers are gifted at chanting.

The strengths and weaknesses of U.S. government have shifted. Our leaders keep growing more powerful in areas like taxing, regulation and media control while becoming more inept in areas like protecting presidential candidates, crime victims and disaster victims.

This push is backed by our powerful Deep State and the Entertainment-Corporate Media complex yet has no recognized name. I’ll propose one: Marxism Lite. The pushers don’t hector America with traditional Marxist demands like nationalizing the steel industry and other heavyweight manufacturers, since most of those were long ago moved overseas.

Their goals are more information-based: Control and intimidate the scant remaining disobedient media as well as the other power bases in education, entertainment, espionage, health-pharma, public speech, and internationalized entitlements. (That’s a power base now, just selectively blacked out, as in FBI documents.)

As Marxism Lite eats up those power bases, it gets heavier — and more sickly.

You can see the result in Venezuela today. Only 25 years ago, with its huge oil reserves and a functional private sector, it had the second strongest economy in the Western Hemisphere. Then Socialist Hugo Chávez demagogued his way to power by promising Venezuelans “economic justice.” America’s Bernie Sanders leftists cheered him on, even as desperate Venezuelans resorted to eating pets. Soon enough Chávez’s Socialists were ruling a ruined country, which today is cleverly exporting its expanded criminal population to America.

In America’s current TV-based presidential election, Marxism Lite is campaigning desperately against its Hollywood-style boogieman. That’s the president who, though abrasive and a rebel populist rather than a committed conservative, did serve a successful term, sustaining a strong economy with low inflation, no foreign debacles, and an immigration policy not based on importing 10-20 million government-dependent potential voters.

Marxism Lite’s proposed 2024 alternative to this boogieman? A woman who — as in the previous election — was taken seriously by nobody, not even Democrats. A laughingstock too radical even for her loonie-left home state of California, she was also such a political cipher that she was the first candidate to quit, delegate-less, the 2020 Democratic primaries.

She failed up. After the failure of Harris’ presidential campaign, she was anointed to the vice-presidency by Biden’s unseen handlers. The generic qualifications of her race and gender were deemed more important than her inability to handle words or ideas, which would become the trademark of the Biden-Harris administration.

Listen to her try to speak when a script isn’t in front of her — or even when one is. Would you trust her with anything of yours, anything of value? If you owned a kiosk at a mall or a hot dog stand in a good location, you wouldn’t dream of hiring her to manage it, even to promote it. When her teleprompter goes out, she starts babbling more incoherently than President Magoo.

Were you to read twenty ridiculous quotes, ten of which Harris had made publicly, mixed together with ten facsimiles by a wise-guy writer, you’d probably be challenged to guess which ten were Harris’ and which ten were mine. Actually you can take that challenge right here.

Why would Marxism Lite planners put a nincompoop like Kamala Harris up for the presidency? Why would they place such a premium on Dumb?

Actually, this is a tradition established by the descent of Democrat vice-presidential nominees in recent years. In 2008, Obama chose a running mate with such feeble intelligence that he wasn’t remotely a threat to Mr. Hope. Then, 12 years later, that former VP, now technically the president, did the same — with an even lower bar and a failed presidential candidate.

Dumb leads to Dumber leads to . . . Minnesota?

Suddenly blessed to replace the president who’d been a carefully ventriloquized dummy for three and a half years, Harris picked as her running mate Minnesota’s mysterious Governor Liberace. And Democrat power brokers OK’d her pick of this loopy guy who’d exhibited unmistakable sympathy for the BLM rioters in Minneapolis. He would soon show up for campaign events seeming to be practicing for some goofy male cheerleading squad.

Ask yourself why the Marxism Lite leaders would place a premium on dumb candidates. Are they perversely self-destructive?

Maybe not. Maybe they need to settle for an incoherent expression of Marxism Light because they know that straightforward Marxism Original is still a tough sell.

Would they dare present a candidate advocating Marxist economics plainly and accurately? In two consecutive election cycles, Nancy Pelosi and a small cadre of Democrat power brokers blocked socialist Bernie Sanders’ viable bid — popular with their growing utopian dope bloc — for the nomination.

And Sanders is just an avowed socialist, not an open advocate for you-know-whatism. But if you know anything about Marxist philosophy, you might be aware that idealistic Karl envisioned socialism as the necessary introductory stage of communism.

And communism didn’t really die, as was generally expected after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. It just moved on to a more creative presentation. Listen to Harris babble like the silliest kindergarten teacher ever, watch Walz dance into a campaign event like a refugee from a chorus line, and you’re witnessing the performance-art presentation of Marxism Lite.

They might not look serious, but you should take them seriously. And if you’re still considering voting for Harris, first consider taking an educational vacation in Venezuela.

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David Bittinger lives defensively in Packers country but still feels deep affection for the Chicago he moved from shortly after the kingdom of Daley The First.As a young advertising copywriter in Chicago, he was advised by the Tribune’s wise Managing Editor to write newspaper commentary. This good advice took 15 years to sink in. The great, open-minded Tribune Commentary Editor Marcia Lythcott published him a number of times. His op-eds were also published at the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and elsewhere. Today he posts articles on his seldom-visited website curveballcommentary.com and political poetry on “X.”  He’s remained a faithful White Sox fan since the Louie-Nellie era, but is now embarrassed even to wear that fine logo.