Politicrossing Here is the script of the video:
There’s a new socialism in town. I call it identity socialism.
The old socialism, the kind Karl Marx dreamed up, was all about the working class, the sort of blue-collar worker who, ironically, voted for President Trump. But today’s socialist couldn’t care less about the guy in the hardhat. He had his chance at revolution and blew it. Today’s socialist is all about race, gender, and transgender rights. Class is an afterthought.
To understand this is to understand the Left’s takeover of the college campus and all the ills that takeover has spawned: from MeToo to Black Lives Matter to girls competing against biological boys. But campus culture has now metastasized into the culture of the whole society. As liberal writer Andrew Sullivan has put it: “We all live on campus now.”
Identity socialism is first and foremost about division. Not just class division, but now race division, gender division, transgender division. Blacks and Latinos are in, whites are out. Women are in, men are out. Gays, bisexuals, transsexuals, transgenders are in; heterosexuals are out. Illegals are in, native-born citizens are out.
One may think this is all part of the politics of inclusion, but to think that is to get only half the picture. The point, for the left, is not merely to include but also to exclude.
So, where did this identity socialism come from? Meet Herbert Marcuse.
Born in Berlin in 1898, Marcuse fled Germany at the dawn of the Nazi era. After stints at Columbia, Harvard, and Brandeis, Marcuse moved to California, where he joined the University of California at San Diego in 1965. You’d think that living in a paradise like Southern California with all the comforts and privileges of academic life, might have softened Marcuse’s Marx-like hatred of capitalism. But it was not to be. If anything, the more he prospered the more he wanted to bring the system down.
He had a problem, however. A big one. Socialism didn’t work in America. Life was too good. The working class in the US didn’t aspire to overthrow the existing order, they aspired to own a home. How could you foment revolution without revolutionaries? Classic Marxism had no answer for this. But almost a hundred years after Marx, Marcuse did. The answer was college students. They would be the recruits for what he termed the Great Refusal—the repudiation and overthrow of free-market capitalism.
Conditions were perfect. The students of the sixties were already living in what was in effect a socialist commune—a university campus. Rather than being grateful to their parents for providing them with this opportunity to learn and study, they were restless and bored. Most importantly they were looking for “meaning,” a form of self-fulfillment that went beyond material gratification.
Of course, as with all successful social movements, timing was critical. Here Marcuse was very fortunate. The sixties was the decade of the Vietnam War. Students faced the prospect of being drafted. Thus, they had selfish reasons to oppose the conflict. Marcuse and his acolytes turned this selfishness into righteousness by teaching the students that they weren’t draft-dodgers; they were noble resisters who were part of a global struggle for social justice.
Marcuse portrayed Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Cong as a kind of Third World proletariat, fighting to free themselves from American Imperialism. This represented a transposition of Marxist categories. The new working class were the Vietnamese “freedom fighters.” The evil capitalists were American soldiers serving on behalf of the American government.
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About Dinesh D’Souza:
Dinesh D’Souza is a bestselling author and filmmaker. His films, 2016: Obama’s America and America: Imagine A World Without Her, are respectively the #2 and #6 highest political documentaries of all time. D’Souza’s feature-length film, Hillary’s America, is widely credited with contributing to Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016, and quickly joined his first two films in the top 10 political documentaries of all time. D’Souza’s latest film, Death of a Nation, builds on this success and takes on progressive big lies, finally proving once and for all that the real party of fascism and racism is now and has always been the Democratic Party.
In D’Souza’s newest pathbreaking book, United States of Socialism, he reveals how the Left uses the Venezuelan formula for socialism, decisively refutes the new face of socialism, chillingly documents the full range of the Left’s gangster tendencies, and provocatively exposes the tactics of the socialist Left.
Born in Mumbai, India, Dinesh has truly lived the American Dream. He moved to the United States to attend school on a Rotary Scholarship. Following graduation from Dartmouth College, he went on to work in the Reagan White House as a policy analyst. D’Souza has served as the John M. Olin Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Robert and Karen Rishwain Fellow at Stanford University. D’Souza served as president of The King’s College in New York City from 2010 to 2012.
D’Souza has won numerous awards including “Best Documentary” for America (The Dove Foundation), and he has been called one of the “top young public-policy makers in the country” by Investor’s Business Daily.
As the author of over 15 nationally renowned books—many of them #1 New York Times bestsellers—D’Souza has been invited to speak to groups all over the country on politics, philosophy, and Christianity. His razor-sharp wit and entertaining style have allowed him to participate in highly-publicized debates about politics and Christianity with some of the most famous atheists and leftists of our time, including Christopher Hitchens, Bill Ayers, and others.
One of D’Souza’s favorite venues for debates and speeches has always been college campuses. During the past 25 years, he has appeared at hundreds of colleges and universities and spoken with hundreds of thousands of students in these live settings.
D’Souza has been named one of America’s most influential conservative thinkers by the New York Times Magazine. The World Affairs Council lists him as one of the nation’s 500 leading authorities on international issues, and Newsweek cited him as one of the country’s most prominent Asian-Americans.
D’Souza’s articles have appeared in virtually every major magazine and newspaper, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair, New Republic, Forbes, and National Review. He has appeared on numerous television programs, including Tucker Carlson Tonight, Real Time with Bill Maher, Hannity, The Today Show, Nightline, The News Hour on PBS, NPR’s All Things Considered, and The Glenn Beck Program.
D’Souza is married to Debbie D’Souza and together they have three grown children.
