[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]

A subgenre of Republican commentary this election is the scolding of Democrats, establishment media, White House staffers, and Jill Biden for their callous cruelty in exposing Joe Biden’s cognitive decline before millions of people. As a New York Post editorial wrote, “Whatever it [the reason] is, to any outsider it looks downright cruel to keep trotting Biden around under the pretense that he can possibly serve four more years in the world’s most grueling job. . . . How much longer must we bear this grim charade?”

All are obvious and valid points. But we shouldn’t be surprised. Since the Democrat Party sold its liberal-democratic birthright to the Left for a mess of electoral pottage, all the inhumane dysfunctions of the “woke” Left have now become institutionalized features of the Democrat Party.

Exhibit No. 1: the Left’s amoral precept “by any means necessary” now permeates Democrat policies and electoral practices, and has led a substantial number of party members, including Biden’s advisors and campaign staff, to endorse ––with public enthusiasm and moral preening––the unholy alliance of “woke” Leftism with antisemitism; implied, or even direct approval of the Holocaust; and solidarity with the genocidal, sadistic butchers of Hamas.

This penchant for extreme violence and cruelty has characterized the Left from its beginning. In 1843, Karl Marx announced to the Prussian government, “We are ruthless and ask no quarter from you. When our turn comes we shall not disguise our terrorism.” The next year, in his “Plan of Action” he circulated in Germany, he wrote, “Far from opposing the so-called excesses, those examples of popular vengeance against hated individuals or public buildings which have acquired hateful memories, we must not only condone these examples but lend them a helping hand”––just what we’ve seen from government and university officials, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and the ongoing protests in support of Hamas’ atrocities.

Vladimir Lenin was a good student of Marx. He also equated Marxism with cruelty: “When we are reproached with cruelty,” he said, “we wonder how people can forget the most elementary Marxism.” As such, the Judeo-Christian moral code had no force in Marxist materialist determinism.

Indeed, this ethical and moral relativism was a constant theme in Lenin’s sermons: “We say that morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the proletariat’s class struggle . . .  That is why we say that to us there is no such thing as a morality that stands outside human society; that is a fraud.” In other words, the communist revolution is not a question of principle, truth, justice, human rights, or equality––those are all propaganda slogans.

Moreover, only violence and force can achieve the revolutionary aims of seizing political power and violently imposing Marx’s utopian, radical transformation of humanity into what Leon Trotsky called the “new man,” a “higher sociobiological type, a superman.” And as Marx said of his own generation, it “must not only conquer a new world, it must also perish [sic] to make room for the people who are fit for a new world.” The Bolsheviks’ brutal purgings of its members certainly lived by that creed, one made even more brutal by Lenin’s principle of “responsibility of next of kin” that called for also executing the families of political enemies.

Hence the Left’s fondness for dictatorship, the centralized, tyrannical rule by a party oligarchy unchecked by law or accountability. As far back as 1906 Lenin had defined dictatorship as “nothing other than power which is totally unlimited by any laws, totally unrestrained by absolutely any rules, and based directly on force.” A few years later, he instructed his henchmen, “Introduce at once mass terror, execute and deport hundreds of prostitutes, drunken soldiers, ex-officers, etc.”

For, he continues, “There is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.” We all know what followed: the show trials, torture, gulags, and engineered famines that metastasized under Stalin and were imposed on Eastern Europe during the Cold War.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 did not cleanse the West of the Marxist toxins in our politics and culture. History’s enormous repudiation of Soviet communism’s failed collectivist ideology and crimes against humanity, with a few exceptions have not been able to shake the Left’s faith in Marxist theory, or accept the facts of its inhumane, ghoulish oppression.

Indeed, even after the opening of the Soviet archives in 1992, and subsequent research confirming the truth of Soviet atrocities that revisionists had dismissed as “fascist” lies, Lenin and Stalin retain their historical respectability. More intellectually corrupt, neither did the toll of those murdered by communism––documented in The Black Book of Communism to be nearly 100 million people––dispel the long fondness of Western intellectuals for communism, or their revisionist whitewashing of it.

The starkest example of this strange tolerance for the ideas of the most murderous ideology in history comes from the comparison of the Left’s reception of Soviet tyranny and murder with that of Nazism’s. Except for the short hiatus of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939, which collapsed a few years later with Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Nazism for the Left has been the epitome of political evil. But with the start of the Cold War, Leftist cognitive elites in the Free World added their own liberal democracies to Hitler’s Reich as another “fascist” paragon of evil.

But it was not the enormity of Nazism’s crimes, or its monstrous toll of victims, or its totalitarian police state that made it evil to the Western Left, which didn’t care if communism’s crimes dwarfed Hitler’s, just as today it ignores, as it has for decades, the Palestinian Arabs’ terrorist atrocities and murder of Jews.

Instead, the communist and jihadist perpetrators of genocidal violence have been cleansed with specious rationalizations and distortions of historical reality. Nazis justly became the epitome of evil for committing genocide against millions of Jews; but now the Jewish victims of Palestinian genocidal terror are unjustly accused of genocide and equated with “Nazis” for defending themselves against Palestinian terror.

Similarly, the U.S. has become another Hitler not for any crimes, but because for over four decades it successfully led the resistance to communist ideology, and to the Soviet Union’s commitment to fomenting the global communist revolution––fulfilling Stalin’s prediction a month before the end of WWII, “The war shall soon be over. We shall recover in fifteen or twenty years, and then we’ll have another go at it.”

As a result of this politicized history, from our universities to popular culture, Soviet communism’s similar or worse atrocities have been with some exception ignored or rationalized away. This rewriting of history created an Orwellian “memory hole” that has kept communism and the Left respectable for millions of Westerners. And it has worked. As Martin Amis, in his 2002 book on Stalin Koba the Dread, pointed out: “Everybody knows of Auschwitz and Belsen. Nobody knows of Vorkuta and Solovesky. Everybody knows of Himmler and Eichmann. Nobody knows of Yezhov and Dzerzhinsky. Everybody knows of the six million of the Holocaust. Nobody knows of the six million of the Terror-Famine.”

Why? In part, because for the cognitive establishment communism presented itself as a “science,” the product of the Enlightenment, whereas Nazism was about atavistic blood-and-soil myths and passions. In fact, the failure to acknowledge communism’s evil simply reflects the political preferences and prejudices of those who control our public narratives.

All this toxic detritus of Leftist ideology and practice has spread throughout Western culture and empowered the new coalition of “woke” Leftists and Hamas jihadists. This alliance, of course, is purely tactical for devout followers of Sharia law, which repudiates every feminist and “woke” gospel endorsed by the women, transexuals, and homosexuals broadcasting their support for Hamas, for whom those identities are capital offenses.

But decades of Leftist indoctrination of American students about “imperialism,” “colonialism,” “white supremacy,” “settler colonialism,” and fabricated ethnic and racialist fables of identity, have all served the Left’s “by any means necessary” modus operandi that has turned cruelty, extreme violence, mass murder, genocide, and rape into acceptable tactics and occasions for celebration.

Why, then, would we be surprised that so many Dems are willing to globally humiliate a senile old man?