Capitalism is dead.
Communism is dead? This would be nice, if true.
Sure, communism was tried about 20 times, and failed just as many times, killing hundreds of millions and making the lives of even more people miserable.
But communism does work very well in another way. It’s a wonderful way to convince idiots to let you establish a dictatorship over them. So you get all the power and privileges of a dictator, and your pals do very well do as members of the Nomenklatura, and tough luck to the people who put you there.
So what if it all falls apart 70 years down the line, or even 20 years down the line? Meantime, you’ve had a very nice life, living high on the backs of the Proletariat, and killing off your enemies. Let someone else worry about what happens later.
Kristol also fails to consider, what happens if you get a leader like Obama who WANTS to destroy the country? It’s a twofer. He gets to live high off the hog, make his country as miserable as he thinks it deserves, and be a hero to the fellow traveling intellectuals and media while he does it.
Lots of great parties, lots of photo ops, lots of world travel. What more could a country-destroyer ask for? And communism explains exactly how to do it.
This is actually the crux of the problem. The intellectual avant garde always imagined the rules that they themselves were too intellectually sophisticated to follow would nevertheless always be followed by the bourgeoisie. However, their nihilism "trickled down" to chattering classes who lacked the sheer wealth it takes to indulge in that sort of behavior without leaving one's partner bereft of sustenance. In other words, it is much easier for the rich to walk out on one another. The children are taken care of. When commoners imitate the sophisticate, however, orphans without means are created and left in baskets by the road or, today, aborted.
btt