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Last year, socialism was the most looked-up word at Merriam-Webster.com. It clearly reflects growing interest, especially with the remarkable surge of lifetime socialist Bernie Sanders, who won a pile of states in pursuing the Democratic Party presidential nomination. He earned over 13 million votes nationwide. Many of those voters surely know that it gives the government more control over the so-called means of production as well as your wallet and your property, but not as much as outright Communists crave.

American interest in socialism was growing well before Bernie Sanders. A telling marker came in 2011, when a major study by the Pew Research Center found that 49 percent of Americans aged 18-29 have a positive view of socialism, exceeding those with a positive view of capitalism. What those voters might not realize, but which I know for certain, is that socialism undermines marriage and family: Ive published an entire book on the subject. What I learned from mining the origins of the movement is that this is not an accident: The founders of socialist movements always intended their system to have this effect.

Most obviously, socialism undermines the family economically. Socialism is ineffective, unproductive and impoverishing. In that way alone, socialism adversely affects what sources as diverse as Pope Francis and Ronald Reagan have described as the fundamental cell of society: the family.

But surely socialisms founders didnt realize that their system just flat-out didnt work, right? Actually, they believed that it didand in one sense it does: It weakens families for the benefit of the state, exactly as it creators meant it to.

Since at least the early 1800s, when the effort began in earnest, extreme-left radicals have sought to undermine the natural-traditional-biblical familythe Western Judaeo-Christian model anchored in a man and woman as parents of a household. The steady assault on this timeless model has been a long march that culminated in the chaos of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and in the antics of the nature-redefiners of todays secular left.

Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto wrote of the abolition of the family, which even in 1848, they could flaunt as an infamous proposal of the communists. What, precisely, they meant by that is a complicated subject. But complexities aside, there is no question that efforts to redefine the family structure have been long at work.

A glance at the dubious characters reveals a mangled mosaic of the wide-ranging left. Among them, the earliest and maybe most revealing of the socialists specificallyat least from a family-focused perspectivewas perhaps Robert Owen.

Owen (1771-1858) was an English utopian-socialist who made his way to American soil. On July 4, 1826, Robert Owen stood atop his new ideological colony in New Harmony, Indiana, and delivered his Declaration of Mental Independence. It is a document you surely didnt read in school, but perhaps you should have, because it foretold the spirit of our modern age.

There it was: property, religion, marriage. This was Robert Owens unholy trinity.

Owen established what the 1960s hippies would call communes. Owens socialist communes pooled not only profits but people, replacing the nuclear family with the collective family.

The New Harmony colony floundered within just two years, with Owen curiously absent from his creation for sustained periods, thus setting the standard for future leftist-utopian chieftains: They rarely live according to the rules and systems they create for others. Socialism and communism have always been for the people, the masses, the ruled, but rarely for the rulers. Their socialist-communist cocoons were always intolerable because they were bankrupt and unnatural. No one chooses that misery.

But the unnatural is what so many leftist utopians pursued then and in the years and centuries ahead.

An uphill stream of Owen-like dreamers on the left would keep the flame alive, from the 1820s to the 1960s in their own communes, and into the 21st century with their own versions of marriage and family.

All of these nature-redefiners plowed new ground for new versions of the family according to each of their ideological conceptions. To borrow from Pope Francis, they were engaged in ideological colonizations.

In short, these were the bold ancestors of todays same-sex marriage movement and LGBTQ sex-gender redefiners. They all shared in common, then and today, the rejection of any notion that there is a single natural, traditional and biblical model for the family.

It is not possible to speak of the family, insisted Friedrich Engels. Indeed, just ask the broad range of leftists in the current-day organization Beyond Marriage. They agree wholeheartedly with Engels on that one.

Dr. Paul Kengor is professor of political science and executive director of The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. His latest book (April 2017) is A Pope and a President:

John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Extraordinary Untold Story of the 20th Century.

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Socialism Attacks The Family - Greeneville Sun