Not long ago, who would have believed that an American president would nominate a communist for an important U.S. Treasury job?  Not a “I’ve seen the light” repentant communist, like Whittaker Chambers, but a person who must believe that the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union was fake, like the moon landings that tinfoil-hatters swear never happened. 

Joe Biden is the president and Saule Omarova is the communist -- or communist sympathizer, depending on reports.  Then again, Omarova disavows being a Bolshevik.  Easier to slip through the confirmation process with a disavowal, possibly.  In any event, Omarova isn’t exactly a small government, free-market sort.  Her positions are radical.  Marxism (aka communism) isn’t a dirty word among Democrats and progressives nowadays.   

Rounding out Omarova’s resumé, shoplifting, which is fitting in that communism is a form of organized thievery.  Stalin committed crimes, too. 

Once upon a time in America, there would have been collective outrage at plucking a communist or fellow traveler for any role in our government.  You see, communism is antithetical to a free society.  It’s darkness to our light.   But in those bygone days, Americans -- Republicans and Democrats -- were reared to embrace liberty and the core beliefs that made freedom possible.  Yes, we had differences, but we shared a culture rooted in traditional values.   

There’s been plenty of negative ink by conservative media about Omarova’s nomination, as well there should be.  The corporate news media are predictably nonplused.  That shouldn’t surprise us, given that “journalists” for establishment outlets operate as shills for the left.  

Most Americans, however, don’t have a clue who Omarova is, and that their president, who claims to be a capitalist, is trying to make a woman who graduated from Moscow State University on a Lenin academic excellence scholarship, comptroller of the currency. 

Reported Fox Business on November 12:

Saule Omarova, a Cornell University law professor, has raised eyebrows for comments she has made, which include saying the banking industry is the "quintessential a ****** industry," as well as calling for an end to banking "as we know it" by "the complete migration of demand deposit accounts to the Federal Reserve."

Come again with the disavowal, Professor Omarova? 

Ah, yes, the centralization and control of capital in Washington, D.C. would hardly resemble, say, the centralization and control of capital -- along with everything else -- in Moscow pre-1991, would it?  A mere coincidence.        

Consider the absurdity of Omarova’s nomination.  Imagine nominating someone who graduated from a Nazi Germany university on a Hitler scholarship. 

Morally, the differences between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were paper-thin.  The Bolsheviks just had a longer run than the Nazis, hence, Lenin, Stalin, and their lesser-known heirs were able to rack up tens of millions more victims.  Freedom and human lives were ground into the permafrost that gulags were built on.  Alas, creating utopia has its costs. 

The USSR’s command economy proved to be a spectacular bust.  Communism managed to pull off the nifty trick of making Russia and its vassals a squalid industrial Third World empire, full of shoddy products, bare shelves, long lines, corruption, and a proletariat so joyous about those achievements that the state made tidy sums off vodka sales.  Being a happy people, Soviets routinely drank themselves into stupors.  Alas, creating utopia has its costs.  

But rest assured, Saule Omarova and her American comrades will make communism – or some knockoff -- work here.  You can bet your Federal Reserve controlled bank account on that.    

Whereas homegrown leftists loathe everything about their country and Americanism, they’ve retained that old “can-do” American spirit.  Why, where those thickheaded Russians failed, they’ll succeed.  The Soviets just bungled it.  American Marxists won’t.

The American left brims with smarter, better credentialed, and fully woke people, we’re to believe.  They’re the crème de la crème of humanity, and they’ve got shelves full of participation trophies to prove it.  How can they not transform the U.S.A. into utopia?

A preview of their mastery was displayed last year in Seattle, Portland, D.C., Minneapolis, L.A., Atlanta, and anywhere else Democrats hold sway.  Cities torn apart by Antifa- and BLM-inspired mobs.  Cities made foul with homeless encampments and unsafe with ever-increasing crime.  Cities like San Francisco, where shoplifting and looting have given “deep discounting” new meaning.  Omarova must appreciate that.    

Whether it’s Russia, China, Cuba, Cambodia, Romania, Nazi Germany, or the aforementioned American cities, wherever leftists promise heaven-on-earth, they inevitably deliver some form of hell.       

Rule # 1 for the Left: Don’t ever permit facts and reality to interfere with the quest for a perfected world. A century of communist failure, peoples consigned to gray, wretched existences, and mass murder (estimated in the 100-million range) are denied or rationalized away or simply memory-holed. 

Communism is a testament to the human capacity to invest in the most cockeyed beliefs.  It’s a pseudo-religion that disdains facts, evidence, and reality; it feeds conceits.  Zealously held fanciful beliefs fuel dangerous delusions.  1914 onward is a chronicle of conflicts and tragedies attributable mostly to Marxist delusions.  (World War I was ludicrously proclaimed the “War to end all wars,” thus meriting inclusion.  The “Great War” opened the door to Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution.)  

When the American Experience was a shared experience, when our values and principles were common, when there was a widespread intuitive grasp of human nature, when we shared a clear, fundamental understanding of what constituted liberty, Omarova wouldn’t have had a chance to be a Capitol Hill page.  Instinctively, Americans then would have taken quick measure of Omarova and shunted her to the margins, while condemning her noxious worldview in the process. 

Why is an Omarova nomination possible today? 

Over decades, the culture has been degraded.  Americans have been detached from what made America exceptional, what made us free.  God, family, and flag have been discounted, and in too many quarters, demeaned.  The left has, in part, instigated this sad development.  Another part, ironically, is attributable to our own success. 

A long run of prosperity, beginning at the end of WWII, has created a society preoccupied with material comforts and self-indulgence.  Safeguarding our liberties and advancing our cultural heritage have been given short shrift.  Civics are taught less or poorly in our schools.  Patriotism was once woven deeply into our popular culture. 

American Marxists have proved shrewd opportunists.  Their “long march” was about infiltrating American institutions -- from universities to media to corporations to just about everything else, including sports, entertainment, public school boards and classrooms, and DA offices. 

Granted, we may have stood down all the more as a society because we believed winning the Cold War settled matters.  Democratic republicanism and capitalism triumphed.  Wasn’t that self-evident?  The threat of resurgent communism -- whatever the variant -- seemed farfetched.  In the 90s, flush with victory, we persuaded ourselves that liberty would be the norm across the planet.  We had arrived at the end of history.  We were terribly wrong. 

We’ll never arrive at the end of human nature -- the good and bad of it -- so long as humans inhabit the earth.  The human race will not perfect itself.  Utopia is a chimera.  Among us will be the conceited, covetous, angry, and controlling souls who gravitate to a variety of authoritarian and totalitarian isms.  Yesterday, it was communism and fascism.  Today it’s Marxism and globalism.  Tomorrow…?  Only the masks change.     

We must reinvest ourselves in the values and principles -- and reacquire the moral certitude -- that undergirds liberty.  We must accept that vigilance is our obligation in perpetuity. 

Saule Omarova’s nomination couldn’t happen in a nation and among a people so dedicated. 

J. Robert Smith can be found regularly at Gab @JRobertSmith and occasionally on Parler, again @JRobertSmith.  He also blogs at Flyover.

Image: Senate Banking Committee 

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