One of the funniest memes of late is how regressives claim that such and such socialist policy proposal of the day is really a conservative idea, hatched previously, no doubt, by someone at the Heritage Foundation, or some such shit. The always idiotic Brian Beutler pulls the same lame bait-and-switch lie with his defense of self-declared communist J.A. Myerson, the dumb wannabe who posted the widely-ridiculed piece last week at Rolling Stone, at Salon, "The right’s latest freakout — and why they’re crying “communism”."
Well, the right was "freaking out" and "crying communism" because the idiot Myerson was indeed foisting off communism as the hip creed of the Millennial generation. But Beutler and people like him, including Democrats all the way to the top levels of the Obama administration (remember Anita "Mao tse" Dunn?), are always pushing their communist agendas in stealth, because they know there's literally no other way to pull off the "fundamental transformation" of America that is their bottom line.
So, give a hand to Jonah Goldberg, who does an excellent job of destroying the Beutler meme that the right was "freaking out" over nothing more than a few conservative policy proposals in leftist garb. At the Los Angeles Times, "A millennial's Rolling Stone rant offers up some tired old 'solutions'":
"In America," Oscar Wilde quipped, "the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience." And they often do it in the pages of Rolling Stone.I love that part about "unearned familiarity and embarrassingly glib confidence," heh.
Last week, the magazine posted a mini-manifesto titled "Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For." After confirming it wasn't a parody, conservative critics launched a brutal assault on its author, Jesse A. Myerson.
Myerson's essay captures nearly everything the unconverted despise about left-wing youth culture, starting with the assumption that being authentically young requires being theatrically left wing.
Writing with unearned familiarity and embarrassingly glib confidence in the rightness of his positions, Myerson prattles on about how "unemployment blows" and therefore we need "guaranteed work for everybody." He proceeds to report that jobs "blow" too, so we need guaranteed universal income. He has the same disdain for landlords, who "don't really do anything to earn their money." Which is why, Myerson writes, we need communal ownership of land, or something.
One wonders why he bothered to single out landlords, since he calls for the state appropriation of, well, everything. Why? Because "hoarders blow," and he doesn't mean folks who refuse to throw away their Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets and old Sharper Image catalogs. He means successful people who "hoard" the wealth that rightly belongs to all of us.
Apparently "blowing" is an open warrant to undo the entire constitutional order. If only someone had told the founders.
In the ensuing kerfuffle, Myerson, whose Twitter hashtag is "#FULLCOMMUNISM," seemed shocked that any of his ideas sounded Soviet to his critics. Andrew McCoy, a conservative blogger, offered the specific citations for Myerson's proposals in the Soviet constitution. I suspect this was news to Myerson, but even if not, I bet he doesn't care. It is a permanent trope of the left that its ideas failed because we didn't try hard enough. This time is always different.
Obviously, this is the sort of fleeting controversy that pops up daily on the Internet like fireflies on a summer night. But that's what I find so interesting about it.
Sometimes it is hard for people to accept that there really aren't many new ideas.
Yeah, the dude got slapped around pretty hard on Twitter, but keep reading.
PREVIOUSLY: "#FULLCOMMUNISM: 'Rolling Stone’s five economic reforms sure sound like Marxism...'"
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