When you are a party without religion, you make party the religion

The irony for today’s Marxist Salifists is that no one in the few remaining citadels of Communism actually believes in let alone bows to Marx.

When you are a party without religion, you make the party the religion. We see this in Communist dictatorships from China to North Korea to Cuba. We also see this with today’s Democratic Socialist Party.

For today's Democratic Socialist faithful, the party must win because, minus religion, the party gives life meaning. Its agenda is so urgent, so transcendent, so spiritually correct that we must burn down cities, attack elected representatives, censor speech, and mercilessly terrorize opponents into silence lest they even think of opposing our sanctified agenda on abortion, guns, “equity,” reparations, defunding the police, and support for pre-teen and teen genital mutilation.

For today’s Democratic Socialists, we are always in end times. The sky is always falling. Racism, “transphobia,” “disinformation,” and The Orange Man are omnipresent threats. It's how the party rallies the faithful to vote, to protest, to circumvent state election law. "We must act now by any means necessary," sayeth the Democrat apostles, "lest a white supremacist cabal of QAnon Oathkeepers takes over our country!” Never mind that these benighted Marxists do not actually like this country or its founders.

“The Nazis” ––Godwin’s Law in full un-ironic effect–– “must be destroyed!" scream the Socialist scions on cable TV. The party faithful proceeds to do just that: shooting up GOP baseball practices, defacing pregnancy centers, destroying statues, and torching and looting cities, all with the smug, tacit compliance of their statist overlords. Nary a word is said in opposition, let alone a serious investigation is undertaken, since, in true Marxist practice, the Democratic Socialist Party controls media, social media, and search, and can reliably get Big Tech to censor the opposition under the pretext of blocking “foreign disinformation.”

The irony for today’s Marxist Salifists is that no one in the few remaining citadels of Communism actually believes in, let alone bows to, Saint Karl Marx. As with the American Left’s recent embrace of the long-dead and discredited Critical Race Theory, Marxism is being given a perverse second life long after its dire real-world implications were exposed by the likes of Solzhenitsyn and Orwell.

With all this ahistorical myth-making going on, you’d think today’s Republican crusaders would make hay of the Democratic hard-left pivot. But they can’t. Republicans are, in general, iconoclastic Libertarians. They know there is more to life than the party. They rightly see the obsession with politics as a mental illness that plagues people without religion.

In lieu of the party, Republicans have family, friends, church, work, clubs, and helping the poor without political strings attached. Republicans are, thus, hard to rally because they want less government, not more. They want power devolved from the federal leviathan back to the states, and from states back to persons.

Republicans are consequently not a very effective bulwark against the centralizing forces of Democratic Socialism. That job is up to free-thinking, party-agnostic independents like me and perhaps you. By nature, and perhaps nurture, I cannot join a party, Democrats in this case, that openly embrace me but, in their Faustian bargain, require me to embrace palpable lies around race, Trump, cops, crime, gender, and taxes. Nor can I join a party, Republicans in this case, that hate or rebuff me because of my support for gay and lesbian rights, a woman's right to choose (albeit within reasonable limits), and Zen Buddhism instead of their preferred Judeo-Christianity. Were it not for those differences, Republicans would just hate me anyway because I am not some boring, robotic supply side square. I have personality! I think in new and creative ways! Only billionaire narcissists and their dittohead backers are allowed to do that.

In this era, we are experiencing the dangerous extremes of the Democratic Party, including its cynical use and abuse of deranged, damaged, and incompetent persons (Biden, Fetterman, Harris) for political ends. In other eras, we witnessed the extremes of the Republican Party and its cynical abuse of intel to justify horrific, unnecessary, and disastrous regime change wars of choice abroad.

We desperately need a third way in America to tackle huge existential problems--the debt, the deficit, the border, crime, big tech censorship, nuclear proliferation, and the steady dumbing down of our kids. But I feel powerless to create it, let alone inspire it. How about you?