The Grotesque Red-Baiting of Mayor Pete Buttigieg [View all]

[DonViejo]

A question for any conservative trying to hang the ‘sins’ of the communist father on his son: ‘Have you no shame, sir?’

Ronald Radosh
04.03.19 5:44 PM ET

The growing popularity of South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg is evidently leading to new acts of desperation from some Trumpist “conservatives.” Reading from a long-discredited playbook from the '50s, the conservative Washington Examiner has decided the best approach is to resume some old-style “red-baiting” from the McCarthy era. On Tuesday, the online edition went to press with a column titled “Pete Buttigieg’s Father was a Marxist Professor who Lauded the Communist Manifesto.”

Evidently the father’s sins are to be passed down automatically to the offspring. His father, authors Emily Larsen and Joseph Simonson write, “spoke fondly of the Communist Manifesto and dedicated a significant portion of his academic career to the work of Italian Communist Party founder Antonio Gramsci, an associate of Vladimir Lenin.”


That his father had these views is hardly a hidden secret. The late Joseph Buttigieg, who passed away last January, taught, beginning in 1980, at the University of Notre Dame, where, as the authors note, he “supported an updated version of Marxism that jettisoned some of Marx and Engel's more doctrinaire theories, though he was undoubtedly Marxist.”

There are certainly scores of Marxist professors in the academy, and clearly, Notre Dame students were able to live through the horrors of some of them having to take a course in which the Professor Buttigieg taught literary theory from a Marxist perspective. No information exists to find how many of them came out of the experience dedicated socialist revolutionaries. Perhaps some of them even found some value in applying Gramsci’s theory of “cultural hegemony,” which means “political leadership based on the consent of the led, a consent which is secured by the diffusion and popularization of the world view of the ruling class.”

Prof. Buttigieg, we learn, even spoke at “many Rethinking Marxism conferences and other gatherings of prominent Marxists.” That, of course, was his First Amendment right as an American citizen, and those who disagreed with him clearly had ample opportunity to challenge his viewpoints. Indeed, there is much to criticize in Prof. Buttigieg and his co-authors’ ideological critique of human rights activists made in one of his articles, and it is certain that that is what those who disapproved and took them seriously did.

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