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When he was a young social worker in St. Louis, Roger Baldwin was briefly engaged to Anna Louise Strong, who later published more books in defense of the Russian Bolsheviks and Chinese Maoists than any other English-speaking author and ended up buried in a revolutionary martyrs cemetery in Beijing. The reason for their breakup was Annas controlling nature. She tried to make Roger give up cigarettes, drinking, and cards. I love her but I love my independence more, he wrote to a friend. The lovebirds enacted in a few months the same relationship that would play out over decades between the Communist Party and the organization that Baldwin was to found in 1920, the American Civil Liberties Union: sweet words, passionate embraces, followed by repudiation in the name of freedom.

There was a time when the ACLU was practically a Communist front group. Its board of directors was stacked with card-carrying party members and fellow travelers. Baldwin himself visited the Soviet Union in 1927 and came back full of praise. When his Harvard alumni committee sent him a political questionnaire in 1935, his answer concluded with the words: Communism is the goal. All that changed around the time of the Stalin-Hitler pact in 1939. The ACLU purged Communists and sympathizers from positions of leadership with a thoroughness that even its detractors had to acknowledge.

Bill Donohue, famous today as the head of the Catholic League, as a young man obtained his PhD in sociology at New York University with a dissertation on the ACLU, which he developed into the book The Politics of the American Civil Liberties Union (1985). Naturally, his book is critical of the organization, calling it the legal arm of the liberal-left, but even Donohue concedes that this characterization was not true of the Unions record in the 1940s and 1950s (the ACLU was truly worried about the threat of communism at that time).

The ACLU really did stand for sincere liberalism during the middle decades of its existence, and perhaps for even longer than that. In the 1990s, when New York Citys Ancient Order of Hibernians wanted to keep a gay pride float out of its century-old St. Patricks Day Parade, the local affiliate of the ACLU took the parade organizers side. From the 1980s until recently, ACLU lawyers filed numerous amicus briefs against ordinances that banned protest and prayer outside abortion clinics, even though the organization was institutionally pro-choice and had its own reproductive rights division. For ACLU lawyers, it was a point of pride that they defended the free speech rights of pro-lifers with whom they disagreed.

Recently, something changed. Impartial liberalism is no longer the ruling ideology at the ACLU. The organizations social media accounts now regularly weigh in on matters in which civil liberties either are not at issue or seem to lie on the other side. When Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted on grounds of self-defense after shooting three assailants at a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the ACLU Twitter account lamented that Rittenhouse was not held responsible for his actions. In a departure from longstanding practice, the organization began making political ads on behalf of candidates, $25 million worth in the 2018 midterm cycle. A million dollars were spent on an ad opposing Brett Kavanaughs Supreme Court confirmation, not because of his legal views but because he had been accused, on flimsy evidence, of sexual assault.

In 2018, a memo titled ACLU Case Selection Guidelines: Conflicts Between Competing Values or Priorities formalized the end of the old era. Due to limited resources and the ACLUs need to recruit and retain a diverse staff, its lawyers would now avoid taking clients whose views are contrary to our values. Among the criteria its lawyers would use when choosing cases were the potential effect on marginalized communities and the harmful impact on the equality and justice work to which we are also committed.

The ACLU had come full circle. The new generation of left-wing woke lawyers is trying to impose on the American justice system the attitude to the law that prevails in Communist countries, where the most important question in any trial is whether a person belongs to a favored class, and where rights such as free speech and the presumption of innocence are derided as bourgeois proceduralism. And they are well on their way to succeeding.

After Donald Trumps election in 2016, the ACLU was inundated with donations. The organization had always done well under Republican presidentsmembership rose by more than 50 percent in the 1980s, dropped by 20 percent during the 1990s, then increased by 50 percent during George W. Bushs first termbut this most recent surge was unprecedented. The combined revenue of the ACLU and the ACLU Foundation in 2017 was more than double the previous years, and donations stayed at that level throughout Trumps term in office. In 2021, revenue was $395 million, more than triple the pre-Trump figure.

The leader who presided over this windfall was Anthony Romero, the first openly gay man to lead the ACLU, the first Latino, and the first executive director in thirty years to come from outside the organizationin his case from the Ford Foundation, where he was director of Human Rights and International Cooperation. He took the money and went on a hiring spree.

The new hires did not always share the commitments of the older generations. They were Millennials and Zoomers, born after 1980, marinated in identity politics. Its no coincidence that many of the gaffes that first alerted the public to the new atmosphere over at the ACLU occurred on its social media accounts. The ACLU Twitter account in November 2018 denounced a new Department of Education rule that would have provided due process protections to college students accused of sexual assault. The tweet charged that the rule promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused. The ACLU later clarified that it did support many of the new protections and the tweet had been an impromptu reaction from a staffer in the womens rights division.

It was not just that the young people cared more about identity politics than their elders did. They believed that identity politics discredited the liberal rights the ACLU used to stand for. First Amendment protections are disproportionately enjoyed by people of power and privilege, said Dennis Parker, former head of the ACLUs Racial Justice Program. Among the changes in the 2018 case selection memo was the provision that in speech cases raising racial justice issues, at a minimum, staff in both the Racial Justice Project and the Speech, Privacy, and Technology project should be consulted.

The right to refuse medical treatment, which the ACLU had always defended when it was Jehovahs Witnesses refusing blood transfusions, went out the window during the coronavirus pandemic due to concerns about the diseases impact on minorities. The real threat to civil liberties comes from states banning vaccine and mask mandates, two ACLU staffers wrote, counterintuitively, in the New York Times, because mandates protect communities of color hit hard by the disease. The ACLU joined multiple lawsuits against states that had overturned or prohibited mask mandates, including Virginia, Iowa, and South Carolina, on the grounds that those laws discriminated against children with disabilities.

Chase Strangio is a representative example of the new generation of ACLU lawyers. Strangio, who was born a woman and adopted a trans identity in law school, is deputy director of the ACLUs Transgender Justice department. Transgender rights have been a lively field for ACLU litigators in recent years. The ACLU and its state affiliates have sued prison systems across the U.S. to force them to house men who identify as female in womens prisons. The New Jersey inmate who was reported last year to have impregnated two fellow prisoners was housed in a womens facility due to a legal settlement with the state ACLU.

Strangio is more committed to the cause of transgenderism than to old-fashioned rights such as free speech. When Target announced that it would stop selling Abigail Shriers book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, Strangio gloated on Twitter. Abigail Shriers book is a dangerous polemic with a goal of making people not trans, Strangio wrote. We have to fight these ideas which are leading to the criminalization of trans life again. And then in a tweet that was later deleted: Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.

You might say that Romero and his managers should have screened their new hires more carefully to make sure everyone was on board with basic ACLU principles, such as not banning books. But considering the quality of graduates elite law schools are turning out, they probably could not have found any more suitable lawyers than the ones they hired. Students at elite law schools have made headlines repeatedly in recent years for shouting down speakers and calling for the firing of dissenting faculty. When senior lecturer Ilya Shapiro was hounded from Georgetown Law over innocuous comments about a Supreme Court nominee, among the student groups calling for his firing was the Georgetown Law chapter of the ACLU.

In 2022 the American Bar Association voted to mandate that all accredited law schools educate students on their obligation as future lawyers to work to eliminate racism in the legal profession. Many schools already offered courses on critical race theory or included its themes in mandatory courses. One first-year property law professor at Georgetown has slides in her day one lecture that read, Property law must contend with its birth in Native dispossession and the enslavement of African Americans, and Possession is a legal term of art for a settler capitalist society.

Instead of venerating the Bill of Rights, as the old ACLU used to do, the new generation of lawyers denigrates it as a relic of white supremacy and patriarchy. The Dobbs decision in June brought out a round of vituperative left-wing Constitution-bashing. Neither the constitution nor the courtsnor the f*cking illusion of democracyare going to save us, a Yale Law student posted on Instagram. How can we possibly expect a document drafted by wealthy, white, landowning men, to protect those who face marginalization that is the direct result of the very actions of the founders? According to LinkedIn, in the summer of 2022, that student was working as an intern at the U.S. Justice Department.

American anthropologist Inga Markovits was conducting an ethnographic study of the East German legal system when the Berlin Wall fell. On September 6, 1990, she was present at the massive gathering in the city courthouse at which East German judges and prosecutors waited to be told what would become of their careers. The West German justice minister walked in and announced that they would be temporarily suspended from duty until the government could determine each individuals suitability for working in the new system. We cant just take everyone. You must understand, you are coming from an Unrechtsstaat into a Rechtsstaatfrom a lawless regime to the rule of law.

At the word Unrechtsstaat, a wave of indignation runs through the room, Markovits records. As far as the East Germans were concerned, they had the rule of law. They were right. There was no detention without trial under Honecker, East Germanys Communist leader. Laws were written down. The free world might not have liked East Germanys laws against dissent, but those laws had been enacted legitimately and convictions secured under them were not arbitrary but required evidence. In her interviews, Markovits asked the East German judges whether a phone call from a powerful party member had ever changed their verdicts. They were all scandalized by the suggestion. That would have been a betrayal of their duty.

This does not mean that socialist and capitalist justice were the same. Each trial in East Germany had to be observed by a lay assessor, representing the proletariat. In disputes between a landlord and a tenant, or an employer and a worker, the socially disadvantaged party would be favored in matters of interpretation. In order to emphasize the collective over the individual, judges were encouraged to generalize a conflict (einen Konflikt verallgemeinern): interpreting a specific controversy as a symptom of underlying social tensions and finding a solution that would not only right individual wrongs but also address their causes, prevent their recurrence, and thus ensure collective peace.

Entitlements such as the right to a job were given priority over liberal formalities such as property rights. The East Germans looked down on bourgeois rights as hollow, a pretense of neutrality meant to distract people from the fact that capitalism is a rigged game. How can we say that a boss and a worker enjoy equal rights, they asked, if one of them can be fired for speaking his mind? When the statue of Justice outside the Dresden courthouse was replaced in the 1950s, the East Germans made sure to depict her without her former blindfold. The bandage, so we were told, was a deliberate deception of the people by the bourgeois rulers, one lawyer explained.

A justice system like this one is entirely compatible with the rule of law. It could be introduced here in the United States without disturbing any of the procedural safeguards that have existed for centurieshabeas corpus and trial by jury and protection against illegal search and seizure. But the result would be an entirely different kind of legal system. The spirit of equality before the law, which has been the guardian of our liberties since medieval times, would be dead.

We are inching toward such a system already. The civil rights revolution, now well beyond its heroic phase, has made its protected classes into aristocrats under the law. If an aristocrat is disrespected or made to feel uncomfortable, the law demands a remedy. Those groups that do not qualify for protection under these laws are treated as were class enemies under East German law. They can be made to bear any sacrifice, lose any fundamental freedom, for the benefit of the legally protected. This, incidentally, is the real meaning of privilege: private law, different codes for different classes.

The ACLU once stood against this development. The national organization used to consider racial discrimination and reverse discrimination equally illegal. The New York Civil Liberties Union opposed racial quotas for seats on Mayor John Lindsays proposed police review board in 1966. Then, in 1971, the ACLU dropped its opposition to reverse discrimination. It endorsed left-wing theories of disparate impact, and its South Carolina affiliate even sued to have the state bar exam invalidated as unconstitutional because not enough black lawyers were passing it. Now, with its LGBTQ activism, the ACLU is on the front lines of pushing this type of law further.

Even in its best years, when the ACLU was true to its liberal mission, it was still a pernicious force in American life. These were the people who made high-school principals paranoid about the faintest hint of religiosity on school grounds, who hemmed in parochial schools with all kinds of absurd rules about whether parents tax dollars could pay for buses, textbooks, or speech therapists. They once sent someone to follow Congressman Henry Hyde into a Catholic church in order to collect evidence that his pro-life position was a product of his religious beliefs and thus a violation of church-state separation.

But it is no use saying the ACLU was always this bad. It was not. That would be like saying Roger Baldwin was wasting his time purging all those Communists back in the 1940s. As bad as liberals are, Communists are worse.

Is the solution to urge the ACLU to return to neutral liberalism? That seems unlikely. It would be strange indeed for conservatives to take up the cause of liberalism now that its former champions have abandoned it. Even if it were possible to rediscover neutral liberalism as a cross-ideological common groundand it is notconservatives would still be better off pursuing other theories of law based on concepts closer to their tradition, such as the common good.

There is one means of restraining the woke that we all can insist upon, liberals, originalists, and integralists alike, and that is a return to professional standards. Professional standards have nothing to do with politics. They developed at the beginning of our civilizationthink of the Hippocratic oathas a way of compensating for the imbalance of power between professionals and their clients. When a man needs a doctor or a lawyer, he generally needs one desperately at a moment of great personal vulnerability. Once he hires one, he must take the advice he receives on faith, lacking the expertise to evaluate it himself. Professionals therefore find themselves in highly advantaged positions. In order to avoid becoming clerisies or cartels, the professions have developed strict codes of conduct and an ethos of duty.

Liberalism says that everything the state touches must be neutral in every respect. Professional standards say something more modest: that certain actors have a duty to be neutral when acting in positions of trust. The standard legal ethics textbook states, A lawyer is a fiduciary, that is, a person to whom another persons affairs are entrusted in circumstances that often make it difficult or undesirable for that other person to supervise closely the performance of the fiduciary. Assurances of the lawyers competence, diligence, and loyalty are therefore vital. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo put it more poetically:

Wokeness is hostile to this ethos. In 2011, when the Defense of Marriage Act was being challenged in the courts, pressure from gay activists forced the law firm King & Spalding to drop its defense of the law. The partner who wanted to continue defending DOMA, Paul Clement, was forced to leave the firm and provide this defense independently. Representation should not be abandoned because the clients legal position is extremely unpopular in certain quarters, Clement said in his resignation statement. This would once have been an uncontroversial expression of one of the most basic principles of our adversarial system, that every client deserves representation.

Left-wing hostility to the basic rules of the game culminated in the Dobbs leak. Supreme Court deliberations and decisions have always been protected by the strictest codes of confidentiality. In May 2022, in an unprecedented breach, an unknown person leaked Justice Samuel Alitos draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade to reporters at Politico. The identity of the leaker has not been discovered, but the logical motivation would have been to spook one of the moderate conservative justices into changing his or her vote. A professor at Yale Law told a reporter that he assumed the leaker was a liberal because many of the people weve been graduating from schools like Yale are the kind of people who would do such a thing. They think that everything is violence. And so everything is permitted.

Other professions are going the way of the law. Investment firms are smuggling racial quotas into financial decisions, in disregard of their fiduciary duty to their clients. During the coronavirus pandemic, several states began rationing life-saving medical care by race, with Minnesotas black teenagers receiving priority over its white sixty-four-year-olds despite the latters greater risk of hospitalization and death. In 2022, a medical student at Wake Forest University joked on Twitter that a patient had made fun of her pronoun pin, so I missed his vein so he had to get stuck twice. When Fox News did a story on this seeming breach of medical ethics, the school closed ranks around the student. Recently I spoke to a doctor who said that residents at his hospital now regularly make jokes behind the backs of patients who are Trump supporters. In my day, medical ethics meant it didnt matter whether a patient was a drug dealer or a millionaire, you treat everybody the same, he lamented.

Let us make the last two yearssay, between the medical professions absurd posturing during the summer of Black Lives Matter in 2020 and the Dobbs leak in 2022the high-water mark of the woke attack on professionalism. Left-wing doctors and lawyers today are always talking about privilege. Let them pause and examine the type of privilege they indisputably enjoy, that of professionals.

Lawyers refer to one another as brothers or sisters of the bar, an antiquated phrase that reminds them they are all servants of a greater enterprise, the legal system, on which the rest of society depends for its continued functioning. A lawyer who takes a client, like a doctor who sees a patient or a banker who accepts a clients funds, must always remind himself that the client is in a real sense at his mercy. Maybe as a private citizen he has strong disagreements with the client. As a professional, he has a moral obligation to act as his devoted servant. Willingness to subordinate your opinions to your duties is the price you pay for the money, the status, and, most of all, the power over others that come with being a professional.

An appeal to the ACLU to start being good liberals again is not likely to cut much ice, especially when many of us exhorting them are not good liberals ourselves. But we can demand that lawyers act like lawyers. Condemning the Dobbs leak, or any campaign to ostracize a lawyer simply for taking a client, should be the bare minimum required for professional self-respect. If the ACLU believes that transgender rights are an issue within its remit, then by all means it may continue to advocate them. But it should reverse its policy of rejecting unpopular clients due to the organizations need to recruit and retain a diverse staff. If the diverse staff dont like the ACLUs core values of free speech and equality under the law, then they should find a different place to work. And if they dont like the Bill of Rights, they should find a different profession.

When the Communists said that liberal freedoms such as the sanctity of a mans home or his right to free expression were bourgeois ruses, that was projection. They meant that they had no respect for these freedoms but would use them instrumentally in order to bring about their revolution. Liberals really do care about these freedoms, the Norman Rockwell freedoms, the freedoms that allow Atticus Finch to make a courthouse into a little island of equality in 1930s Alabama.

Conservatives care about these freedoms, too. We might not appeal to John Locke and J. S. Mill in order to defend them, but we have our own traditions, going back at least to the Bill of Rights. Some liberal freedoms introduced in the 1960sincluding many championed by the ACLUwere spurious, but we can all agree on equality under the law, over against the Communist belief that rules dont apply to favored classes and rights dont apply to disfavored ones. This is the kind of equality that ACLU lawyers can and should rediscover within their storied institution and impose on their young radicals. Anyone who cannot subscribe to those commitments is not only unfit to work for the ACLU, but unfit to be a lawyer.

Helen Andrews is senior editor at the American Conservative.

Images byJernej Furman and ClkerFreeVectorImages licensed via Creative Commons and Creative Commons. Images combined and cropped, filter added to former.

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What Happened to the ACLU by Helen Andrews | Articles - First Things

WENDY WERNER

I had the honor of working the polls for Tuesdays election.

I stood outside politely greeting folks, asking them to consider my candidate, and thanking them for voting regardless of their voting choice.

I spent the entire day alongside another poll worker with opposite views to mine on every issue. We found no need to call each other names or argue but did exchange some of our differing views with curiosity about why we each thought the way we did. We then went on to talk about our kids, careers, movies, and the gorgeous weather.

This is what democracy looks like folks. A bald eagle even made a few passes overhead that caused great pride and excitement for all of us.

Reactions to asking voters to consider my candidate varied from friendly no thank yous, to civility, to ignoring me, to outright aggression.

One woman responded to me by curling her face up into an ugly sneer and spitting out, Never! Communists! She was clearly a staunch Republican supporter, and it gave me pause to wonder, had she always been so nasty or has this been since the MAGA movement has modeled and encouraged hate and bullying.

My candidate of choice is a vibrant member of our community pursuing the democratic process and trying to make a difference in peoples lives. She stands for good education, a clean environment, a living wage for working people, womens rights, and rights for all to be free to love whom they love. Her platform rests on common sense and coming to common ground for all members of the community. This does not scream communism to me.

I wondered if this woman and others with her attitude have thought about what communism is. We have plenty of examples around the world to study.

Donald Trump spent his time during his presidency trashing our allies and building up authoritarian, communist dictators. He praised Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and wrote love letters to Kim Jong Un, the brutal leader of North Korea. He tried to get his supporters to overthrow a free and fair election, the cornerstone of our democracy. He encouraged violence to bypass the U.S. Constitution. He set an angry mob on our Capitol and watched gleefully, doing nothing to stop them, as his supporters desecrated the building, beat police officers, and even threatened to hang his own vice president. He tried by any means possible to stay in power regardless of the outcome of an election.

This, folks, is the very definition of authoritarian leader and a communist regime. If given another shot at the presidency, there will be no going back. He has already promised retribution and chaos to be the tenants of a new term.

The saddest part is that he has no real interest in his supporters except for them to be the vehicle by which he can amass ultimate power.

He does not care about solving problems our country faces or addressing the concerns of everyday Americans. Trump cares about Trump only.

Wendy Werner is a resident of Winchester.

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Open Forum: Thinking of Donald Trump after Tuesday's election - The Winchester Star

Note from LeftEast: Recently, we ran across Alexander Nogovishchevs very impressive MA thesis entitled Political Communication in the USSR in the early 1960s: Discussing the CPSU Program, which proposes to examine the Soviet Union of that period (and as a whole, really) as a socialist project and to take seriously its Marxism. In the process, using canonical historical material, it reaches very fresh conclusions of major import to any leftist seeking to make sense of the Soviet experience. We decided to interview the author.

Please, tell us a little about the Program its origin, content, and consequences.

The history of writing the draft Program of the CPSU in 1961 is more than forty years long. During Stalins time, there were numerous initiatives to write such a program, but none of them came to fruition. The system worked successfully without the Program since all strategic decisions were formalized by party resolutions at congresses.

After the war, the party returned to the idea, when it became necessary for the first time to redefine the development of the state. Thus, the drafts of the draft Program of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (b) of 1947 appeared. They contained many innovations of the supposedly thaw period: the abolition of the dictatorship of the proletariat, peaceful coexistence with capitalist countries, the construction of communism in a few decades, and others.

From 1958 to 1961, the preparation of the Program began in earnest. This was because Khrushchev and his team were looking for conceptual innovations that would distinguish them from Stalinism, not only for rhetorical, but also for ideological, political, and economic reasons. In 1959, the period of full-scale construction of communism was proclaimed. At this time, a reform plan began to be drawn up.

Khrushchev approached the preparation of the Program more inclusively, but not more democratically. Unlike Stalin, he involved not only party workers in the drafting of the document but also civil servants from the Academy of Sciences.

The discussion of the draft Program was both unprecedented and ordinary. What made it unprecedented was its scale: many newspapers and public organizations were involved, and the entire Soviet population was intended to be involved in the discussion. What made it ordinary was the fact that the approaches used by the initiators of the discussion were very typical of the Thaw.

The repressive logic of Stalinism began to gradually recede: dissenters were no longer understood as direct enemies. Instead, they were perceived as ignorant.. The task of the party apparatus was no longer to destroy the enemy but to educate the student. But what both of these logics had in common was that they were authoritarian in their own way. Even allowing for discussions and suggestions from citizens, their role was reduced to useful remarks. The ones that were accepted were purely technical; there was no politics in them. Most of the political statements were either ignored, either because of the unprogrammatic content or redirected to the relevant bodies, where they were added to the archives.

The program was written during a period of extraordinary optimism: in April of that year, the first man was launched into space, and social benefits began to reach their then-unprecedented development. This created both many optimistic expectations among the population and skepticism. Both optimism and skepticism received their development in the form of a collective alternative political program from those proposals, letters, and objections from citizens that we have. So, optimistic people believed that 20 years was too long, and they wanted to speed up the process of communist development. Some of them proposed the construction of pilot communities and, the transition to a cashless economy.

Skeptics believed that communism wouldnt be established in those terms. Some of the proposed more stable, but not less radical measures, such as the collectivization of countryside recreational houses (dachas), yachts, cars, and other scarce objects and items that can be used in rotation.

Despite the large number of alternative proposals, there were no political consequences from their letters, except for the disappointment that came in 1980 from communism not coming. Almost all the proposals made were only placed in the Soviet archives and were not taken into account, except for various complaints. For example, the government responded to outrage about the lack of pensions for collective farmers, which was decided in 1964, although not in full.

With hindsight, however, the political proposals may be significant for researchers of the Soviet to show that the path that led to the collapse of the USSR had alternatives. The assessment of their prospects is a matter of debate, but I believe much more plausible than was previously thought. Some works on the subject also show that political dissent was much more complex than the generally accepted notion of dissidence. Consequently, the number of people involved in this dissent was much higher than previously thought.

Is it fair to call your work a study of socialism with a human face based on the populations reaction to one of its main documents the Program of the Communist Party of the USSR of 1961?

Yes and no. Im not fond of the term socialism with a human face because it is closely related to a well-known dichotomy of leftist ideas. It is premised on the idea that old orthodoxies must inevitably evolve exclusively towards deradicalization and erosion of their communist content. That is, you can be either radical and outdated or modern and moderate. In this logic, any socialism is seen as either a self-marginalizing thing or a self-liberalizing thing.

My research describes the political reactions of Soviet citizens to the discussion of the 1961 CPSU Party Program. I try to show that among them there were not only loyal but also completely dissident, pragmatic as well as exotopic (out-of-place) statements. My study concerns a group of people distinct from all these other groups. This group was too politicized to be exotopic, too concerned not only with their own but with the common good to be pragmatic, too hesitant to be loyal to the regime, and too loyal to be dissident. This group of people was part of Soviet socialist discourse, but not in the same way that the highest Soviet officials were. It was independent from the official authorities, and also from the dissidents. This group represents another form of political expression in the USSR. But traditionally it was not considered in historiography as an independent problem until now.

The very discourse of the Soviet citizens I am examining had not only similarities but also differences with socialism with a human face. While there are certain programmatic similarities, conceptually it called for a leap forward rather than a modernization of the current state of affairs. I think its more correct to call it a kind of communism that breaks out of the familiar context of Sovietness. By this, I mean that the status quo in the USSR should be considered the post-war period, not the pre-war period. Consequently, I consider a human face, or more precisely, attempts to find it to be the norm, not its absence. I do not take the position of a deformed workers state or any other allegedly spoiled socialism. On the contrary, I believe that the Soviet Union was not moving towards its degradation, but towards its maturation in a more democratic, inclusive, and stable way, which was not possible during the years of revolution or Stalinism. Although this reassembly of the socialist project eventually ended up in failure, I do not believe that the USSR could not have accomplished it at all this is one of the main political conclusions from my research.

But if we take socialism with a human face to be some democratic iteration of socialism, then of course yes, one can draw parallels between my research and what the term represents. But I tend to think of this term as a stage of socialism without the revolutionary context. Just as French liberal democracy stabilized in the second half of the 19th early 20th century, Soviet socialism, in my opinion, entered a stage of stabilization (unfortunately, unsuccessful).

You write that new materials are hardly used today to interpret the Soviet Union as a socialist project. Changing this trend is one of the main methodological contributions of your work. Could you explain why this trend is observed in the current political context?

With few exceptions, the trend toward localized studies is now more popular. How Soviet people dressed, what kind of medical treatment they got, how they received information all of these are important research questions, although my research is rather different.

I also understand the trend of searching for commonalities between the USSR and the USA or Western European countries. This is because earlier, when the Soviet Union itself still existed, there was a lot of comparative research on ideology and politics.

I am a leftist, and I came to history as a science because I want to change the world. But I am not satisfied with the classical (and non-classical) leftist answers. I believe that the experience of the USSR, especially the post-war experience, has been undeservedly thrown out of leftist theory and leftist consideration. It is considered too revisionist by the orthodox left, while the progressive left finds in it too many regressive aspects incompatible with a contemporary progressive left agenda (authoritarianism, conservatism, patriarchy, and so on). I believe that to reassemble leftist discourse today, it is important to reject our biased view of the Soviet socialist heritage and to look at it in its own right. Not only do we as leftists have to interpret the Soviet Union, but the Soviet Union has the right to oppose our political concepts with its existence and practices that do not fit into either orthodox or progressive Marxist concepts.

I stand in strict opposition to those who deny Soviet socialism the status of socialism simply because subjectively they dont like it. Although I have a sympathetic view of my research object, I also see many negative aspects of the USSR. However, I dont believe that for leftists the very concept of socialism should indicate something good a priori. Just as there are many different capitalisms for liberals and right-wingers, and they all prefer a particular one rather than all of them together, so too, I believe, should the left. Otherwise, I dont see the point of such a concept if it is so dependent on the actors and their political intentions.

I aim to show that the research lacuna has not been filled: we still have something to say about the Soviet past as a socialist project. We need to return to this question again because the possibilities for answering it are much wider than they were 60-70 years ago. The collapse of the USSR has brought a large number of historical sources into circulation, and the distance from Soviet society makes it possible to approach the question less emotionally.

In this sense, I am neither an apologist nor a critic of the Soviet Union. I believe that the Soviet Union is a research problem that the left faces, which can only be dialectically resolved. It cannot be solved either by embracing it or rejecting it. What is needed is a set of fundamentally new conceptual practices that lie fundamentally outside current Marxist models. I will say that I have been researching this issue as part of a different, more political intellectual project. I am in the process of publishing my book on the Russian radical left movement (1988-2022), its intellectual practices, its crisis, and ways of overcoming it. In it, I try to answer in more detail the question of the possible foundations of the methodological impasse.

What is political subjectivity and why/how does the problem of political subjectivity haunt Soviet historiography?

In many ways, it is a conventional construct, which I use to separate the space of the political, which is everything, from the old notion of politics as a contest of ideas, programs, projects, and their public defense.

Initially, reflection on political subjectivity and subjectivity emerged from the totalitarian school as a way of understanding the place of citizens within a totalitarian system. Revisionists, however, expanded this notion by emphasizing the non-obvious practices of the Soviet system, where there is a place not only for one-party politics and one-candidate elections but also for complaints, patron-client relations, the use of official rhetoric for their ends, et cetera. Alexei Yurchak wrote about spaces that did not exist at all in the form that many have sought before him.

Despite its obvious merits, all such approaches have led to the Soviet being quite rarely discussed as political in the narrow sense, and hence socialist. I, on the other hand, consciously return to a narrow notion of the political as something that requires an awareness of oneself as a political person. For me, it is fundamentally important to separate people who, for example, complain in the name of communism that its roof is leaking, from people who propose the introduction of alternative elections, who write open letters pointing out public problems, who speak not only for themselves, but also take the liberty of speaking on behalf of an entire collective and interest group.

My research deals with the fact that there are political forces even under socialism and that this is potentially normal for the system. These political forces may not only be part of the system or revolutionaries in relation to it; there is also what we would call in a more open system a moderate opposition.

For the left, recognizing such phenomena will allow it to break down the dichotomy of capitalist democracy and socialist authoritarianism. This perspective can yield much more than abstract philosophizing about popular sovereignty.

The focus of your research is the reception of the Program in the expanded public sphere of the Thaw era. What was that reception like? Could you be more specific about the social groups that participated in this public debate?

In my research, I identified five groups of statements, of which I chose to work with only one. I was interested in that group of people who, even with the utmost skepticism about the politicization of Soviet citizens, cannot be excluded from the list of politically active people. They took the liberty of speaking not only on their behalf but also on behalf of the collectives; they proposed innovations that required not taking into account simply their opinions about the placement of commas and the use of words in the text or changing the financial situation of individuals. So, if proposals for solving specific material problems of one person or group can be reduced to just pragmatic practices, then proposals affecting the Soviet society as a whole cannot be reduced to such practices. For example, proposals to introduce alternative elections cant be considered pragmatic. These proposals werent so much focused on local problems as they demanded reforms of the entire Soviet system or its aspects.

If we take this community of people in social terms, it was very diverse: it included workers, collective farmers, old and new Party members. I would like to emphasize the latter separately: very often the Communist Party in the USSR is seen as a kind of apparatus detached from the population and opposed to it. However, the party was a way of both political and career realization in the Soviet Union. So it is worth saying that the question is not how much the official or unofficial discourse generated within and by party circles was shared by the population, the discourse of the population was often shared by party ranks up to the republican apparatus. To some extent, this correlates with the party-democratic movement that Roy Medvedev tried to asses to create a subject of political change to transform socialism in a more democratic and social direction.

Not all the proposals presented politically had a left-wing political coloring. But conventionally right-wing statements were quite marginal. I do not venture to say how widespread right-wing sentiment was in the USSR, since not every right-winger will send a letter discussing a socialist program. However, the very existence of repeated socialist, and yet, independent and not unambiguously dissident statements, suggests that a socialist opposition could potentially be formed in the Soviet Union, moderate towards the Soviet system, but still radical towards capitalism.

Your work draws on, but largely diverges from, the revisionist tradition of Soviet historiography. Could you describe the main directions of your polemics with the existing historiography?

We have a fairly serious fundamental disagreement. They are looking for commonalities between the Soviet Union and other modernities, while I am trying to reopen the question of what makes the USSR different. For me, as a leftist researcher, it is important to separate the socialist from the contextual. I stand on the position that the USSR was an early socialist, with features potentially immanent to any socialism. My task is to try to identify such features in light of the rich work of contextualizing the Soviet experience, which the revisionists have already done. My polemic is no longer with them as individual revisionists but with the general historiographical position.

I polemize with Alexei Yurchak more directly. I show that the performative shift he writes about, if it did indeed begin, did so in somewhat different boundaries. I believe that although Stalins death catalyzed some processes in Soviet society, it was not decisive. Even under Stalin, there were already attempts at democratization. Yes, they were not as visible as in the thaw, but the inertia of the system and the authoritarian nature of governance remained and such cases can be found both earlier and later, during both the Brezhnev and Stalinist periods! For me, it is not so much the exact nature of the proposed measures that matters so much, but the dynamics itself. Although I am taking an individual case confined to a fairly narrow period, conceptually I am trying to look at the whole of Soviet history and give it an interpretation on a larger scale.

Do you think that by focusing on questions of material and cultural everyday life, the revisionist tradition of Soviet historiography de-politicized the USSR as a project, and thus removed the political from political economy?

If we mean the political in the narrower criteria that I am taking, then the question arises: who is to be considered a revisionist? Alexei Golubevs recent book The Life of Things: the Materiality of Late Socialism touches on political things in a narrower context. But the context he introduces through his study of materiality is more politically illuminating of the Soviet system than of Soviet citizens. Despite this, I like Golubevs study a lot, and I find it a fine exception to the descriptive practices of many of my colleagues.

What is the relationship between consumer communism and the political subjectivity of Soviet citizens? Your discussion about the presence of a strong egalitarian vector in citizens appeals is particularly interesting.

Alexander Fokin, who has studied the topic previously, distinguishes between ascetic and consumer communism. These represent two conceptual approaches to communism. While asceticism is about tightening ones belts, consumerism is about getting economic benefits here and now. I am not in favor of the latter concept, because it is very difficult to separate the reception of communism and the use of it for personal gain. Politics and pragmatics are so closely linked here that it is hardly possible to distinguish between them.

In a way, I am taking both the easiest and the most difficult path at the same time. I fully take into account all possible skepticism about the politicization of such statements addressed to the 1961 Program. My task is to show that even using all intellectual possibilities to deny the political character of such statements, there is a group of judgments that do not fit into this skepticism even in its extreme form. It is therefore legitimate to distinguish a group of people. My task is not so much to define boundaries as to show that even in the most pessimistic scenario the object of study exists. Hence, it deserves to be a separate problem.

Based on this, I try to analyze what these people are saying even when we are maximally skeptical of their statements. The egalitarian character of these statements is noticeable even in them, which suggests that independent socialist discourse in the USSR is a much broader problem than dissident organizations or individual intellectuals.

Aleksandr Nogovishchev is a MA in history and Russian left activist. His key interests include: contemporary left radicalism, Soviet & post-communist history, intellectual & political history, socialist law & political theory, left & (post) marxist history and studies.He also is a main editor of Russian political resources: Democratic Communism in YouTube and Zloy Sovetolog in Telegram.

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Was the USSR Socialist?: an Interview with Alexander Nogovishchev - Lefteast

V

eterans Day is observed in the United States on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. It was formerly known as Armistice Day and was given its new name in 1954 at the end of the Korean War to honor all veterans. Veterans Day is observed with memorial ceremonies, salutes at military cemeteries, small-town parades, homes with a flag, and the wearing of poppies.

This day was initially named Remembrance Day, along with a separate Remembrance Sunday by the Commonwealth. To be in London for their celebration during those two days, with my wife, lives in our memory. An ocean of Poppies abounded, flags were flying, church bells rang, and the atmosphere was somber with thanks.

Veterans Day is a time of remembrance that the older generation, along with a new generation of veterans, recognize with their families and friends. At the exact hour of 11 a.m. on Nov. 11, many throughout our nation will be saluting our nations flag and wearing remembrance poppies in honor of those who gave their last breath in securing the freedom that their living brethren so enjoy. It is a day of deep personal thought about the realities that created our nation as a Constitutional Republic.

Veterans slowly fade away, as do all good citizen soldiers, knowing they helped secure a better and safer life for our families, nation, and world. They were not heroes; they were just ordinary citizens from all walks of American life dedicated to preserving their goodwill for their beloved country. Veterans and their families can stand proudly, knowing they did their duty and honored their country without rancor during some of its most troubled and dangerous times.

The older veterans presently living in Northern Virginia throughout their 20th-century military service and most of their military and civilian lives were engaged with the containment of Communism. Communism seemed poised to spread indefinitely, and then it collapsed like a house of cards. It had violated one of the basic tenets of civilization, Thou shalt not kill.

After the collapse of Communism, many opined that the newly established world order would be forever peaceful. However, the opening of the 21st century has created a new generation of veterans fighting a new set of adversaries violating this same tenet of civilized people, Thou shall not kill.

American patriots and their families have been bearing the brunt of many conflicts since before the Revolutionary War. All had a continuous outpouring of brotherly love for one another and their units. The reasons, in my opinion, for our closeness as military veterans: We were personally a part of that essential national organization dedicated to preserving freedom and protecting our families and citizens, the U.S. military. We were proud to be so and to do so. And we remain so.

The many reunions of veterans throughout Northern Virginia that take place every year are the result of an ethos first noted by the ancient Greeks. Phillia never leaves the individual, and the individual never leaves the military. That ethos, brotherly love, remains to the last. It is the unselfish nature of service to the nation of each in the uniform of our countrys military forces that once again brings us together for the nationwide celebration of Veterans Day, Nov. 11, to embrace our Oath of Allegiance, to serve our nations citizens, to salute our flag, and to protect our nations Constitution. And each asks, What more could we have done?

Richard L. Spencer, Ph.D., is a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel living near Fort Belvoir.

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Remembrance Day: the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month - Fairfaxtimes.com

WASHINGTON A New York man was sentenced on Monday, Nov. 6, 2023, on a felony assault charge for his actions during the breach of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. His actions and the actions of others disrupted a joint session of the U.S. Congress convened to ascertain and count the electoral votes related to the 2020 presidential election.

Edward Rodriguez, 31, of Brooklyn, N.Y., was sentenced to 36 months in prison and 36 months of supervised release for assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers and inflicting bodily injury. Rodriguez pleaded guilty on Mar. 13, 2023, in the District of Columbia.

According to court documents, on Jan. 6, 2021, Rodriguez deployed bear attack deterrent spray on multiple police officers during the riots outside the U.S. Capitol Building. The assault was captured on video posted to social media. Rodriguez was also seen among a crowd of protesters at the plaza level of the west side of the U.S. Capitol, where he pointed a spray canister at visibly marked law enforcement officers manning a barricade on the plaza and sprayed the officers with a bear attack spray before he retreated into the crowd. Rodriguez also was recorded on video being interviewed on the scene by an independent reporter. In that video, he stated, Here in America, we fight back. We will never surrender to dictatorship, corruption, communism, or socialism. We the people will never put up with their bullsh-t.

Additionally, in body-worn camera video from Metropolitan Police Officers (MPD), Rodriguez was recorded as he deployed bear attack spray at MPD officers stationed at the West front barrier of the Capitol grounds. During portions of these videos, Rodriguez wore a red mask, but for brief moments, he pulled the mask down below his face.

Rodriguez was arrested on July 9, 2021, in Brooklyn, New York.

This case was prosecuted by the U.S. Attorneys Office for the District of Columbia. Valuable assistance was provided by the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Southern District of New York.

The case was investigated by the FBI's New York and Washington Field Offices. Valuable assistance was provided by the Metropolitan Police Department and the U.S. Capitol Police.

In the 34 months since Jan. 6, 2021, more than 1,200 individuals have been charged in nearly all 50 states for crimes related to the breach of the U.S. Capitol, including more than 400 individuals charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement, a felony. The investigation remains ongoing.

Anyone with tips can call 1-800-CALL-FBI (800-225-5324) or visit tips.fbi.gov.

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New York Man Sentenced on Felony Assault Charge for Actions ... - Department of Justice