"War Room" host Steve Bannon has often described himself as a "Leninist" — not because he actually embraces communist ideology or the economic teachings of Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky or Karl Marx, but because he believes that former President Donald Trump's MAGA movement needs to tear down in order to create.
Lenin taught that communism, in order to be successful, needed to destroy existing institutions — not try to reform them. Bannon, similarly, has called for MAGA to give the United States' federal government a dramatic reset.
The New Republic's Michael Tomasky, in a scathing article published on May 20, applies the "Leninist" concept to U.S. Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas — both of whom, he argues, are not traditional jurists, but "Christian nationalists" seeking to reorder the United States along theocratic lines.
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"Mostly, what they're doing from the bench, especially on the big cases, is right-wing judicial activism," Tomasky argues. "This is because they see themselves as vanguardists in a movement — specifically, a Christian nationalist movement to overthrow the existing secular order and impose a quasi-theocracy where people are free to discriminate against others, provided they're doing so on the basis of their 'religious beliefs'…. Alito and Thomas have told and shown us time and time again that this is the America they want."
Tomasky elaborates, "Alito's Dobbs opinion cites common law going back to the 13th Century characterizing abortion as a crime, as if something that was commonly believed 700 years ago should influence us today. Thomas' infamous Dobbs concurrence warned us that Dobbs was just the beginning, and the Court is coming for same-sex marriage and even contraceptive rights. This is not calling balls and strikes, people."
The New Republic staffers goes on to explain what the "monomaniacal, steroidal judicial activism" favored by Alito and Thomas has in common with Leninism.
"Alito and his cohort are not on the Court to interpret law," Tomasky warns. "They are on the Court to change society. They are part of a movement dedicated to same. This is what makes them Leninists — vanguard members of a severe and narrow ideological movement that seeks total power for the purpose of fundamentally reordering society."
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Tomasky continues, "Lenin used cruder methods, early 20th Century tsarist Russia being altogether more welcoming of crude and violent methods than 21st Century democratic America. But the impulses are identical."
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Read Michael Tomasky's full New Republic article at this link.