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Stephen Baskerville's avatar

Very good questions, which I plan to answer in a longer work. Briefly, my argument pertains mostly to the US welfare state, which differs from the European in being limited to the poor, rather than broad-based social insurance for all. So it created the "underclass" of low-income broken families (a trend also in Europe, but more slowly). As for the USSR, it defined Communism in terms of industrial production, and while it certainly did the family no good, it did not target it directly, and a solid core of "family values" survived in the former Eastern bloc to this day, more intact than in the West. Your comments also point to something very important that I plan to address: Excessive talk of "cultural Marxism" diverts attention from the ways that Woke culture, with its strong emphasis on sexual radicalism (plus race), is very different from standard Marxism. In fact I suspect that conservatives are keen to call it "cultural Marxism" so they can just go on about the virtues of the free market and private ownership, and that gives them an excuse to avoid precisely the issues I am raising and the special interests behind this.

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Jim Wills's avatar

Superb. I have had the (mis)fortune of observing the Great Society from its inception, and this is the most incisive analysis of its unintended (maybe) consequences since Daniel Patrick Moynihan's treatise of 1965.

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