Since applied Marxism is responsible for 100 million or so corpses over the last century, it’s hard to imagine an ideology more worthy of scorn. But hipsters didn’t get the memo. Radical chic is alive and well in—where else?—Brooklyn. Naturally, the New York Times is eager to report on this exciting development.
Recommended Stories
For the sake of brevity, we’ll sum up the Times’s profile of 23-year-old Bhaskar Sunkara. He was raised in Westchester County, one of the country’s wealthiest suburbs. He attended the George Washington University, ranked as America’s most expensive college while he was there. After college, he settled in Bedford-Stuyvesant, founding the country’s most exciting neo-Marxist journal, Jacobin, which recently published a “radical analysis of the Onion’s online reality-television satire ‘Sex House’ ” and is named after a movement whose signature achievement was the Reign of Terror. Naturally, all this merits glowing coverage by the Times, even though Jacobin doesn’t have enough subscribers to fill a minor league baseball stadium.
Sunkara, you’ll be pleased to hear, has book deals now and makes regular appearances on MSNBC, so he seems to be getting what he wants out of life. But how is this supposed to help the masses? We don’t know, and we doubt Sunkara has a clue either, though he does seem desperate for attention:
Sunkara hasn’t figured out yet that the only reason a rump Marxism survives in America is that soporific academics have done their best to obscure what it’s really about. Still, Sunkara is managing to fool some of the people some of the time:
If mainstream liberals start to embrace Marxism again, that hardly means Sunkara is sane. It might, however, prove they’re stupid.
