State of Mankind

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On Thursday, October 24, 1929, the New York stock market crashed. The crisis spread from the financial sector to the entire economy, sparing none of the major developed nations of the West. Unemployment spiked to over a quarter of the population, and the total number of unemployed exceeded 30 million. Apart from the Soviet Union, industrial production in major industrial countries dropped by an average of 27 percent. [12]

In early 1933, within 100 days of Roosevelt’s inauguration, many bills were introduced around the theme of solving the crisis. The policies increased government intervention in the economy and passed major reforms: Congress enacted the Emergency Banking Act, Agricultural Adjustment Act, National Industrial Recovery Act, and Social Security Act. Though Roosevelt’s New Deal essentially ended by the outbreak of World War II, many of the institutions and organizations that emerged during the period have continued to shape American society to the present day.

Roosevelt issued more executive orders than the total number of such decrees hitherto issued by all presidents in the 20th century. Nevertheless, the American unemployment rate in the United States did not fall below double digits until the war. The New Deal’s real effect was to set the U.S. government on a trajectory of high taxation, big government, and economic interventionism.

In his 2017 book The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, conservative thinker Dinesh D’Souza argued that the National Recovery Act, which formed the centerpiece of Roosevelt’s New Deal, essentially meant the end of the U.S. free market. [13]

According to FDR’s Folly, a 2003 book by historian Jim Powell, the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression rather than ending it: the Social Security Act and labor laws encouraged further unemployment, while high taxes encumbered healthy business, and the like. [14] Economist and Nobel Prize Laureate Milton Friedman praised Powell’s work, saying: “As Powell demonstrates without a shadow of a doubt, the New Deal hampered recovery from the contraction, prolonged and added to unemployment, and set the stage for ever more intrusive and costly government.” [15]

President Lyndon Johnson, who took office after the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, declared a War on Poverty in his 1964 State of the Union address and launched the Great Society domestic programs. In a short period of time, Johnson issued a series of executive orders, established new government agencies, reinforced the welfare state, raised taxes, and dramatically expanded the government’s authority.

It is interesting to note the similarities between President Johnson’s administrative measures and “A New Program of the American Communist Party’s New Agenda,” published in 1966. Gus Hall, general secretary of the CPUSA, said: “The communist attitude toward the Great Society can be summarized in an old saying that two men sleeping in the same bed can have different dreams. We communists support every measure of the Great Society concept because we dream of socialism.”

Hall’s “same bed” refers to the Great Society policies. [16] Although the CPUSA also supported the Great Society initiative, the intention of the Johnson administration was to improve the United States under the democratic system. The Communist Party’s intention was to ease the United States into socialism step by step .

The most serious consequences of the Great Society and the War on Poverty are threefold: They increased dependence on welfare, discouraged people from working, and damaged the family structure. Welfare policies favored single-parent families, in turn encouraging divorce and extramarital children. According to statistics, the rate of children born out of wedlock in 1940 was 3.8 percent among all newborns; by 1965, this figure had increased to 7.7 percent. In 1990, 25 years after the Great Society reform, the figure was 28 percent and again rose to 40 percent in 2012. [17]

The disintegration of the family brought with it a series of widespread consequences, such as an increased financial burden for the government, a soaring crime rate, the decline of family education, families that are stuck in poverty for generations, and a mentality of entitlement, which led to a higher rate of voluntary unemployment.

A quote attributed to Scottish historian and jurist Lord Alexander Fraser Tytler says: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that time on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.” [18]

As the Chinese saying goes, “From thrift to extravagance is easy, but the opposite is difficult.” After people develop a dependence on welfare, it becomes impossible for the government to reduce the scale and types of benefits. The Western welfare state has become a political quagmire for which politicians and officials have no solution.

In the 1970s, the extreme Left gave up the revolutionary terms that kept the American people on guard and replaced them with the more neutral-sounding “liberalism” and “progressivism.” Readers who lived in communist countries are no strangers to the latter, as “progress” has been used by the Communist Party as a quasi-synonym for “communism.” For example, the term “progressive movement” referred to the “communist movement” and “progressive intellectuals” referred to “pro-communist individuals” or underground members of the Communist Party.

Liberalism, meanwhile, is not substantially different from progressivism, as it carries the same connotation of high taxes; expansive welfare; big government; rejection of religion, morality, and tradition; the use of “social justice” as a political weapon; “political correctness”; and the militant promotion of feminism, homosexuality, sexual perversity, and the like.

We do not intend to point fingers at any political figure or individual, for it is indeed difficult to make correct analysis and judgments in the midst of complex historical developments. It is clear that the specter of communism has been at work in both East and West since the beginning of the 20th century. When violent revolution succeeded in the East, it spread the influence of communism to the governments and societies of the West, shifting them ever leftward.

Particularly following the Great Depression and beginning with the conclusion of World War I, the United States has adopted increasingly socialist policies, such as the welfare state, as atheism and materialism eroded the moral fabric of American society. People grew distant from God and traditional morality, weakening their resistance to deception.

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The 1960s, a watershed moment of modern history, saw an unprecedented counterculture movement sweeping from East to West. In contrast to the Cultural Revolution of the Chinese communists, the Western counterculture movement appeared to have multiple focuses, or rather to lack any focus.

Over the decade from the 1960s to the 1970s, the mostly young participants of the counterculture movement were motivated by various pursuits. Some opposed the Vietnam War, some fought for civil rights, some advocated for feminism and denounced patriarchy, some strove for homosexual rights. Topping this off was a dazzling spectacle of movements against tradition and authority that advocated sexual freedom, hedonism, narcotics, and rock music.

The goal of this Western Cultural Revolution is to destroy the upright Christian civilization and its traditional culture. While apparently disordered and chaotic, this international cultural shift stems from communism.

Youthful participants of the counterculture movement revered three idols as “the Three M’s” — Marx, Marcuse, and Mao Zedong.

Herbert Marcuse was a key member of the Frankfurt School, a group of Marxist intellectuals associated with the Institute for Social Research at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. First established in 1923, its founders used the concept of critical theory to attack Western civilization and apply Marxism to the cultural sphere.

One of the school’s founders was Hungarian Marxist György Lukács. In 1919, he famously asked, “Who can save us from Western civilization?” [20] Elaborating on this, he said that the West is guilty of genocidal crimes against every civilization and culture it has encountered. American and Western civilization, according to Lukács, are the world’s greatest repositories of racism, sexism, nativism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, fascism, and narcissism.

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Marcuse