Why is anyone surprised? With few exceptions our “educational” class has been left-wing since the FDR era. Most of the current college professors’ parents and grandparents believed that FDR was a great man and the Stalin was doing a great job of bringing the USSR into the economic mainstream. Sure, Uncle Joe killed a few people, but, after all, “you have to break eggs to make an omelet.”
The Nazis and fascists were “cleansed, rehabilitated, pardoned, and back at work” in Germany and Italy, all between 1950 and 1956. And that was mostly because the Soviet threat meant that Western Europe couldn’t afford to marginalize people because of their previous political associations. So, except for a relatively few high level party officials, Germans and Italians said they were “forced” to be Party members in order to keep jobs, and so forth. Basically, everyone was pardoned by 1956.
We must never loose sight of the fact that totalitarian government, whatever form it takes, has great appeal to people who believe that they “know what’s best” for the people and that these same ‘elites’ are uniquely qualified to define what is best and make sure the people get it. Of course, we called them the “nomenklatura” in the USSR and the Nazi party in Germany. You can draw your own conclusions as to what may be in store for the U.S. if we don’t change course quickly.
