He arrived at the party wearing a blazer over a black T-shirt. He sported one of those fancy, new-age haircuts and wore jeans that revealed nearly half his legs. I instantly knew what I was looking at, a campus archetype more than an individual: The ripped-jeans revolutionary.
His name was Sam, and as I soon discovered, Sam was a Communist — a Maoist, he quickly added, presumably worried that I might mistake him for one of those sellout Trotskyists. At 18 years of age, studying English at Stanford University, Sam wanted to assure me that he was on the Right Side of History.
I had encountered leftists like Sam before — there are usually one or two in every large humanities class — so I knew how to proceed. Let him talk and keep a running mental tab of his most hilarious quotes.
“You can’t deny the industrial achievements of the USSR,” he remarked. Or better, name-dropping three philosophers in one sentence: “Zizek, though he understood Hegel much better than he understood Lacan, makes a good point.” There was the curious: “Doesn’t Judaism make so much more sense without God?” And my personal favorite: “Do you really think our wage-slavery is any better?”
Ah yes, I had forgotten: Who are we to judge the Soviet gulag system?
One is tempted to shake such people, like an old television that has stopped working. It might bring him to his senses. But there is no need. Does this teenager really have a thoughtful objection to Zizek’s reading of Lacan? Does he have the requisite knowledge to assure me, as he did, that “everything would have been fine” if Lenin had lived a little longer? Of course not. He probably just gets a thrill from the shocked looks he generates upon informing his peers that “Bernie would have won if he wasn’t so moderate.”
Roll your eyes and move on.