On November 14, 1939, Israel Amter thundered to his large gathered audience that Josef Stalin was “the greatest leader and statesman of our time.” Not content with one mere exaggeration, Amter continued with the undisguised rhetoric, calling Stalin also “the wisest man on the face of the earth.” This wasn’t all that surprising given that Israel Amter was the New York State Chairman of the Communist Party of the USA.

What may be unanticipated, shocking even, is the setting from which he so openly celebrated the Soviet dictator. He did so from the stage erected within Madison Square Garden, right in the heart of New York City. It was on the occasion of the Soviet revolution’s 22nd anniversary, and to hear him and others speak was a capacity crowd of 22,000.

The main speech that night was given by the Party’s national chairman, Earl Browder. He mostly attacked the Pope and was given more press for it, but his real message related to the early days of World War II, then in its first months, and how great a man Stalin must’ve been for keeping Soviet Russia out of it (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Communist Russia and Nazi Germany signed in August 1939 just a week before Germany invaded Poland).

Browder declared unequivocally that Europe would “inevitably turn to Communism if this imperialist war is carried to its logical conclusion.” The war was for Browder and his legions of admirers another great sin of capitalism, along with the Great Depression. It’s why he campaigned earlier in the decade with the slogan, “Communism is 20th Century Americanism.”

It’s no surprise that Communism as well as communism both gained such wide following when it did even here in the United States. As the New York Times wrote in Browder’s (favorable) June 1973 obituary:

The zenith of Communist influence in the United States occurred in the years from 1930 to 1946, when Earl Russell Browder, a sharp‐minded, tart tongued Kansan, was the undisputed leader of the Communist party in this country. Feeding on the economic and social discontents engendered by the Great Depression and on the hopes for political change implicit in the New Deal, Mr. Browder’s party, laying claim to native radicalism, attained a membership of 100,000 and, through a network of friendly organizations, exerted a considerable effect on American affairs.

The embrace of the New Deal was a later development, one that eventually got Browder kicked out of his own Party in 1946. When the Depression was at its absolutely worst in 1933 and 1934, the Communists here in America were growing, adding significant numbers with their unqualified revolutionary doctrine. The Eighth Party Convention report of the Central Committee, prepared at the meeting in Cleveland, Ohio, in April 1934, was just the sort of straight-up overthrow you hear here and there again today:

The idea of the storming of capitalism is maturing in the minds of the masses . . . rallying them around its [the party’s] program for the overthrow of capitalism and for the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat-for a Soviet Government . . . The bitter truth is rapidly being learned that Roosevelt and his New Deal represent the Wall Street bankers-finance capital-just the same as Hoover before him, but carrying out even fiercer attacks against the living standards of the masses of the people.

Change Roosevelt to Obama in that last sentence, and Hoover to Bush, it really starts to sound awfully familiar again (anyone remember Occupy Wall Street?). When the economy doesn’t work for a prolonged period people turn increasingly to extremes. Communism caught on in the thirties in a way it hadn’t in the twenties for obvious reasons. When confronted by constant stagnation and depression, people cannot be blamed for thinking the system is broken; and a terrible cost belongs to those who broke it.

The fall of the Soviet Union a quarter century ago has allowed Communism across the West to be romanticized, if slowly over time. The Great “Recession” and more so its aftermath and the lack of recovery from it has given it an opportunity to be re-embraced and reborn, often in the 1934 spirit if more so couched carefully in Browder’s softer terms.

When Americans think of Communism in Eastern Europe, they imagine travel restrictions, bleak landscapes of gray concrete, miserable men and women languishing in long lines to shop in empty markets and security services snooping on the private lives of citizens. While much of this was true, our collective stereotype of Communist life does not tell the whole story.

 

Some might remember that Eastern bloc women enjoyed many rights and privileges unknown in liberal democracies at the time, including major state investments in their education and training, their full incorporation into the labor force, generous maternity leave allowances and guaranteed free child care. But there’s one advantage that has received little attention: Women under Communism enjoyed more sexual pleasure.

The above is taken from a Times article written last month. The very same media outlet that allowed Walter Duranty to publish outright lies within its pages in favor of Soviet Russia during the thirties has been revisited with such leftist nostalgia in increasing frequency of late. Here it is just yesterday:

A few months before that in its Opinion pages, the same media outlet published what seems like the same utopian broadsheet Earl Browder delivered to the cheering throngs in the same city under much the same economic circumstances. What was old is new again.

Some broad outlines should already be clear: Worker-owned cooperatives, still competing in a regulated market; government services coordinated with the aid of citizen planning; and the provision of the basics necessary to live a good life (education, housing and health care) guaranteed as social rights. In other words, a world where people have the freedom to reach their potentials, whatever the circumstances of their birth.

 

We can get to this Finland Station only with the support of a majority; that’s one reason that socialists are such energetic advocates of democracy and pluralism. But we can’t ignore socialism’s loss of innocence over the past century. We may reject the version of Lenin and the Bolsheviks as crazed demons and choose to see them as well-intentioned people trying to build a better world out of a crisis, but we must work out how to avoid their failures.

Bernie Sanders was nearly one major party’s Presidential nominee in 2016. Economists almost universally declare that there is nothing wrong with the economy (except either a labor shortage, which sounds terrific along those lines, or an opioid epidemic that allows them to blame the medical profession) to explain this, but don’t believe it. There is everything wrong with the economy here and all over the world that this revival is taking place.

It is the inevitable consequence of these kinds of times. Should it go further, and it will so long as nothing changes, we should at least be aware of who brought it on, and in whose name (capitalism and free markets) they falsely operated so incompetently. History repeats because no one was really listening the first time.