Fred wrote:

“Today, I cannot find any really groundbreaking thought coming from the broad camp of socialist intellectuals…”

Eric Hoffer wrote that heresy is something that religions typically spawn when they are young and vigorous. He then went on to identify Communism as a kind of Capitalist heresy.

If so, no wonder no Western socialist has had any new idea for a century; Capitalism is no longer exuberant.

Mr. Hoffer went on to note that heresies are how religions spread. If Communism was a Western heresy, then it perhaps filled a need for societies who needed a way to erase their traditional character, as they modernized.

The ultimate implementation of hard-leftism, Communism, gave them a way to throw their cultural babies out with the bathwater; a kind of national ego-death.

In other words, it was a way to cope with the radical change that contact with the West brings. Look at Communism in China. The Red harrow murdered at least 50 million Chinese before the survivors decided that that wasn’t a good way to preserve the pre-eminent legacy of the Chinese nation… which, apparently, they’ve decided is worth keeping after all.

IMHO, we in the West are facing a similar choice now. But some of us, I think, have identified with Western civilization’s entropy.