>How do you get from Marxist to Rightwing bigot? Here is how I think it
>goes. In your heady and idealist Marxist phase, you come to understand
>that all that is morally wrong with the world is the fault of
>capitalism. Then you discover that liberal governments are actually
>the gung-ho facilitators of this atrocity and that various liberal
>policies in the socio-economic domain are used to mediate the effects
>and stave off a working class revolt. So you campaign though moral
>invective to whip up awareness and concern over the hypocrisy of
>government which manages both the socio-economic atrocity of
>capitalism and then tries to suppress revolt from overthrowing it
>through the mediation of the social welfare state. This is the high
>critique phase which I would characterize as ground level modernist
>rationalism, but it is also imbued with an idealization of working
>class virtue--working people are saints at heart, salt of the earth,
>etc.
>
>But, since the poor and working class are hardly saints, they are seen
>to fall into milking state programs for all their worth, and you
>become outraged at this abuse, along with its implicit dismissal of
>your humanitarian concern for their well being. Disillusion sets in
>against your own idealizations of these angels in the mire. It appears
>to you these charges of the capitalist state are just as criminal,
>greedy, competitive and nasty as the system that they live under. The
>welfare state itself becomes the core moral problem since it is seen
>to corrupt your angels through its mediations. The mediations become
>the mire. It then appears that the by now naturalized competition of
>the market are the purifying waters, washing away the corruption and
>leaving the saintly working body to grow anew. The mire is the state
>welfare mediation and once washed away, it will leave the working
>class angels clean to re-assert their idealized being and reflect the
>proper and true moral rectitude of the world. This then is the key
>transformational passage through the last sphincter and most of the
>remaining journey inside out follows some natural ordering of its own
>accord. Until there comes a day when viola, the free market ideologue
>springs forth in the full throated song of capital, competition, and
>the moral grace of christian righteousness (oh, sweet mystery of life,
>at last I have found you...)... all of which is mere costume,
>supported by the ugly armature of realpolitik, and the cynical
>machinations of an old Stalinist asshole in his dementia.
If by "Stalinist" you mean the political orientation of the CPUSA, I think your speculation is a bit off (to put it mildly), in that ever since the Popular Front (at least), the CPUSA hasn't been quite what you call "revolutionary," and it is difficult to find more ardent defenders of social programs of the welfare state that mitigate the worst effects of capitalism than the CPers. If anything, it has been _left critics_ of the _social democratization_ of the CPs everywhere who have been the harshest critics of the welfare state.
And according to the article Michael Hoover forwarded, Marvin Olasky was "a card carrying member of the Communist Party USA" during the 1970s.
Yoshie