How can we save America from the radicals?

America is caught in a tug-of-war that feels like it’s pulling the nation apart at the seams. On one side stands the radical left (woke left), proudly flying the banner of Marx’s vision of communism under the modern guise of “wokeness.” On the other side, a growing segment of the radical right (woke right), fed up (and hey, fair enough — their frustration with the left isn’t wrong) with the institutionalization of the Left’s agenda in our schools, media, and government, is beginning to embrace the rhetoric and logic of fascism.

What’s happening here is not new — it’s a dialectic at work. Philosophers like Hegel, and later Karl Marx, explained history as a process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. An idea or system (the thesis) is challenged by its opposite (the antithesis), and out of that clash comes a new state of affairs (the synthesis).

In the 20th century, we watched this play out in real time. The old monarchies and empires of Europe collapsed after World War I, and into that vacuum came two radical opposites: communism and fascism. Lenin’s Bolsheviks took Russia and promised a classless utopia by abolishing private property and dissolving traditional institutions. Fascists like Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany rose up as a direct reaction, promising to crush communism with nationalism, authoritarian control, and corporatist economies.

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