Blog #318 A Leftist Comes to Grips with Communism
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Weekend Beacon: A Leftist Comes to Grips with Communism
Also: Conservatives grappling with fusionism, a novel aimed at academia, a London neighborhood of notoriety, and the notorious Elizabeth Holmes
Vic Matus Oct 18, 2026
Socialism has become rather trendy these days. A recent survey found more undergraduates prefer socialism over capitalism by 42 to 28 percent. Our aspiring young Mamdanis would benefit from reading leftist author Paul Mason’s new book, Reds: A Global History of Communism. Russian scholar Gary Saul Morson (not a socialist!) gives us a review.
“Communists triumphed in Russia not because of a popular uprising, but because a small group of disciplined and armed intellectuals, ready to use maximal violence, staged a coup. They could do so because liberals, anarchists, populist socialist revolutionaries, and other Marxists resisted them, if at all, only when it was too late. ‘Condemn terror?’ indignantly asked Kadet leader Ivan Petrunkevich. ‘That would be the moral death of our party!’ ‘No enemies to the left!’ was an article of faith that Lenin, who was unprincipled on principle, knew how to exploit.
“In the 1960s and ’70s, I was surprised my liberal friends would rather side with Communists, who rejected their core beliefs, than with conservatives, who differed only on details of policy. Better those a mile to one’s left than an inch to one’s right! It was a matter of identity: If you grow up regarding yourself as the opponent of conservatives, it becomes psychologically impossible to join them. Is that why liberal Democrats back Hasan Piker, who praises Stalin’s USSR and Mao’s China? More terrifying than Abdul El-Sayed, Graham Platner, and Zohran Mamdani is the readiness of those who are neither totalitarians nor antisemites to support them. It is that support that may enable their eventual triumph.
“Are there any leftists willing to condemn totalitarians? Paul Mason’s new book shows there is at least one. Offering a selective, but not irresponsible, history of Communist and revolutionary ideas, Reds pleads with the author’s fellow socialists not to repeat the mistakes that cost the lives of millions. Although he celebrates Marx, Mason summons his fellow leftists to contemplate Communist crimes so they are not repeated. How many failures does it take before the argument that real communism has not yet been tried ceases to work?
“‘There is no guarantee this [Communist disaster] can’t happen again,’ Mason urges. ‘Join any left-wing protest march in the West … and you see a minority of people who think China’s system is better than ours. Worse, while Communist parties during the Cold War denied the crimes of the Soviet regime, some of today’s neo-Leninists openly defend them.’ The Communists of my childhood refused to believe in Stalin’s and Mao’s murders. Piker admits and supports them.”
The right, meanwhile, is dealing with its own divisions (albeit with far less bloodshed). Tanner Nau reviews Stephanie Slade’s Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right.
“‘It’s not easy to be on the vanguard of a new Republican Party or a new conservative movement,’ then-Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance told the ‘Restoring a Nation’ conference in October 2022. ‘There is a risk that it gets folded into Fusionism 2.0,’ Vance warned.
“The conference gathered academics and writers organizing to reorient American conservatism away from its sacred cows of individual rights, free markets, and limited government, typically referred to as ‘fusionism,’ and toward a more engaged federal government in the economy, rejection of atomized individualism, and an approach to social issues resembling Catholic social teaching.
“This new conservatism, often referred to as the postliberal Right or ‘New Right,’ gained momentum during the post-2016 shakeup of the Right’s intelligentsia, baked inside newly formed institutions during Trump’s time in the wilderness after 2020, and stormed into Washington on Trump’s coattails largely thanks to its closest political ally moving into the Naval Observatory.
“But what is fusionism? Like most political monikers on the Right—like neoconservative (scary!) or paleoconservative or today’s postliberals, which many of the conference attendees, including Vance, identify as—it tends to be defined by uncharitable definitions provided by opponents. (The term ‘fusionism’ is intended to be pejorative, originally coined by Brent Bozell, its most passionate conservative opponent at its inception.)
“Stephanie Slade, a senior editor at the libertarian Reason magazine, sets the record straight. [Her book] defines fusionism in the words of its chief advocate, Frank Meyer, former senior editor of National Review and intellectual sidekick of William F. Buckley Jr., filling in the blanks in the story of the American conservative movement from Goldwater to Trump, answering the question: How did we get here, and what is next?”
From ideological factions to satirical fiction, new Weekend Beacon contributor Martha Bayles reviews Randy Boyagoda’s Lords of Serendipity.
“To be fair, most of the satirical barbs in Lords of Serendipity hit their targets. In Sri Lanka, these include the expected—and unexpected—barriers facing Devi, a studious but impoverished young woman who dreams of attending an elite Anglophone university. Devi’s mother tries to bring her back down to earth with the belittling acronym ‘Ochpys’ (Oxford-Cambridge-Harvard-Princeton-Yale-Stanford). But her father works against that by inflating his daughter’s hopes as ridiculously as he previously inflated his own.
“In America, the barbs are aimed at two East Coast universities: the ‘barely ranked’ Arcadia Tech and the highly ranked Haven, a ‘woodsy Gothic paradise.’ At the former, an associate professor of statistics named Jack accepts a Sisyphean course load in order to keep his daughter Katrina at the latter. When Jack sees a severed pigeon wing on the ledge of his office window get blown off by the wind, then snatched in mid-air by an eagle, he is inspired to ask his bored class to calculate the odds of that happening. A lively discussion ensues, but two students tattle to the dean that their professor ‘made repeated references to graphic acts of animal cruelty,’ which he ‘forced students to discuss.’
“Meanwhile, at Haven, the annual Christmas performance of the 14th-century chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is disrupted by the cast members wrapped in black cloaks declaring that as ‘THE LAST GENERATION OF THE ANTHROPOCENE’ they resist a play that ‘PERPETUATES SPECIESIST, SEXIST, RACIST, ABLEIST, AGEIST, AND CHRISTIANIST IDEOLOGIES THAT ARE ALSO DEPLOYED IN SUPPORT OF SETTLER-COLONIAL ZIONIST APARTHEID FASCIST REGIMES.’
“Mercifully, this disruption is disrupted when two cast members drop their cloaks and in full costume perform a scene from the play. To Jack’s delight, one of the rebels is his daughter Katrina (as Reynard the Fox) and the other is Cham, her wealthy Sri Lankan roommate (as Sir Gawain). Unlike Devi’s, Cham’s life has been one of privilege, but as the novel gradually reveals, she was not born to privilege but rather gained it through tragic sacrifices made by her parents. That part of the novel is strongly felt and beautifully written in a way that stands out from the rest.”
Speaking of the privileged, Alexander Larman is out with a new book, The Secrets of Eaton Square: Sex, Scandal, and Infamy on the Road to Buckingham Palace. Kara Kennedy returns to the Weekend Beacon with a review.
“The Secrets of Eaton Square moves house by house, rather than by decade, as it examines the illustrious street. You can see, after reading it, that this is the only honest way to write about the square. Its inhabitants, unlike other pockets of London, like the Primrose Hill set or the Sloane Rangers, were never a set or community. There was no camaraderie or physical closeness one gets with their neighbors. So Larman treats each dwelling as its own crime scene taped up for examination.
“Take 19th century American banker-turned-philanthropist George Peabody in number 80, who loved his adopted city of London so much that he invested around half of his fortune in housing its poor. In number 37 lived Joachim von Ribbentrop—a former champagne salesman turned Nazi ambassador to Britain, and, according to Larman, ‘arrogant buffoon,’ and lover of Wallis Simpson. Larman believes he deserves his own book, and so do I. He was renting the house from none other than future prime minister Neville Chamberlain. Diana Mitford, Mitford sister, writer, and fascist, resided in number 2, which she moved into with a ‘small staff’ upon her divorce from Bryan Guinness, in order to be closer to her married lover, Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, whom she later married after the death of his wife, Cimmie.
“With each chapter we get the good stuff; like the nosy neighbor who’s been invited in for tea and refuses to leave. There is Vivien Leigh, who moved into number 54 with Laurence Olivier in 1957 and, during her time spent there, proceeded to fall apart in full view of Belgravia. Her mental health collapsed, leading to the end of her marriage, and then, seven years later, would die in Eaton Square from tuberculosis, prompting her now-famous complaint: Why couldn’t she have a nice, respectable illness like cancer? Larman renders her days there in a ‘relatively civilized regime de vivre,’ with her mornings spent chain-smoking in a replica of her Gone with the Wind bed while her secretary handled her fan mail and prepared her lunches of smoked salmon and gin and tonics.”
Amazing, we shared the same lunch!
You may need a few gin and tonics to get through the much-anticipated Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything. John Podhoretz got through it and gives us a review.
“You Can See Everything is nominally a documentary about the medical-tech fraudster Elizabeth Holmes and the 34 days she spends with her family before she is finally compelled to begin her 11-year prison sentence in 2023.
“I say ‘nominally’ because by the time it’s over, 2 hours and 54 minutes after it begins, what we’ve experienced is an entirely different movie—and one hell of a movie it is, the most memorable experience I’ve had in a theater this year besides The Odyssey and Obsession.”
Filmmaker Nathan Fielder “has been brought in to get up close and personal with Holmes and [her boyfriend Billy Evans]. They want her to have a receptive ear into which she can ‘speak her truth’ to someone willing to think ‘outside the box.’ We all know that time and again, true crime podcasts (like The Serial) and documentaries (like The West Memphis Three) have succeeded in creating populist groundswell on behalf of convicted murderers and felons and have succeeded in getting cases newly adjudicated.
“That’s what Holmes and Evans surely wanted, without saying so, and they have turned to Fielder because Evans knows Nathan is an awkward weirdo who likes to follow Emily Dickinson’s admonition to ‘tell all the truth but tell it slant—success in circuit lies.’
“And boy, do Fielder and Oppenheim tell this movie slant. About halfway through, they turn You Can See Everything into a work of metafiction—the term we use to describe any creative work that turns around and makes the work itself the subject of the story it’s telling. But the ironies here are so bottomless that this work of metafiction then turns into a critique of metafiction, a parody of metafiction, and a commentary on the factitiousness of documentaries altogether.
“It’s effing amazing.”
Happy Sunday.
Vic Matus
Arts & Culture Editor
Washington Free Beacon