Cato’s remarks are pretty much the reality. Not many people have heard about the Gramscian “long march through the institutions.” Antonio Gramsci is the Communist theoretician who most influenced the Left’s strategy in this country, and in Western Europe.

Believe it or not, in my experience most of the Younger Cohort of the Baby Boomers are not punitive liberals. The higher number of punitive liberals (and the term is misleading because “punitive liberalism” really is socialism by another name)are in the Older Cohort of the Boomers. And the number of soft and hard socialists/Marxists among the under-40 crowd is a lot higher than you are led to believe. And that is due to the success of the Gramscian Strategy.

I am a former member of the Far Left (from over thirty years ago), so I know how this thing has been evolving. Most of the kids never studied Marxism and don’t know what it is. But their views have been a project for a long time, as they have taken socialism in like mother’s milk. They see the world a certain way, but they don’t know how they got there. Having not studied the history of ideas very well, if you ask them what Marxism is they could not tell you.

I see the Left on the move and ascendant in the U.S. We are the only country left where socialism has not been discredited. One way or another, we have a date with a confrontation about socialism. With Obama’s candidacy one of those critical moments has arrived. One way or another we have to come to terms with socialism and its legacy.

I left the Left because eventually I could no longer ignore the stack of intellectual problems stemming from socialist thought in my mental inbox called “cognitive dissonance.” For many people, they don’t even have such an inbox in their brains. And that’s frightening.