The drum beat of big think political commentary that comes with the 4th of July - worse it seems in this year of street protest and general dissatisfaction with bumbling government - has gotten to me a bit. In general it's tedious stuff which interests me very little since none of the various factions seem to have a useful grasp of the material, and in any event do not reason in good faith. It's like listening to a dysfunctional couple bicker - you end up loathing them both.

Genuine support for Communism -- meaning the Marxist-Leninist governing ideology of the Soviet Union and its allies, as distinct from various flavors of socialism or social democracy -- was minimal in the Western world, despite the United States government's best efforts to uncover it. But you didn't have to endorse Communism to be fascinated by it. Simply the existence of that alternate model, with its claim of scientific inevitability and its alleged utopian aims, had a bizarre, distorting effect on political discourse clear across the ideological spectrum.

Significant sectors of the left were paralyzed by Communism, unwilling or unable to criticize regimes (no matter how nightmarish and autocratic) that nominated themselves as the enemies of capitalism and imperialism and the champions of third-world revolution. . .

Academics pumped out scholarly treatises on the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism by the yard, and debated the Soviet system's merits and flaws feverishly. . .

In some quarters, President Obama is denounced as a Leninist for suggesting tepid social-democratic reforms to the healthcare system (which come nowhere near the government-administered programs of Canada or Western Europe). To other critics, Obama is merely a spineless replica of a Cold War liberal, unable or unwilling to stand tall against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Khamenei . . .

There is an evolutionary relationship between Western socialism and Soviet Communism, to be sure, but their bitter split predates the Russian Revolution, and many of Communism's sharpest critics have been socialists. It is no more meaningful to say that Stalin and George Orwell were both socialists than to observe that Martin Luther King Jr. and George Wallace were both Christians.

The paralysis of the left continues. Academic obfuscation and failure to think clearly has not abated. The elephant in the room can be unveiled with one change to the last graf above: Martin Luther King Jr. and George Wallace were both Democrats. Saying it this way makes the intended point more starkly clear - there are wildly diverse factions within socialism - but those on the left are still unwilling to criticize their various factions no matter how loathsome. Criticizing Wallace required that the 1972 candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination be characterized as a Christian rather than a Democrat, since Christian bashing is O.K. Both King and Wallace were victims of assassination attempts. Wallace survived though he was paralyzed, ending his bid for the Presidency. The left is OK with that since he needed killin'. Their fierce moral urgency is conditional.

The stark differences between the rhetoric of the left, all hopey changey, and the reality of their governance when they hold power should be the focus of analysis and conversation since this is the problem with socialism in all of its flavors and factions. The claims of "scientific inevitability and alleged utopian aims" are bunk. That we continue to be burdened with advocacy for this sort of thing is the deep failure of the left and has brought nothing but grief to the world since its theoretical beginnings in 19th-century Europe.

I know, borrrring. But perhaps it is apposite on this holiday weekend when the thoughts and actions of 17th and 18th century idealists are celebrated in some places. They opposed the predations of kings and strong central authorities in general, emphasizing liberty and freedom rather than strict control, steeped in fallibilist philosophy that recognized the irremediable imperfection of humans and the necessity of institutions designed to reduce the consequences of such defect. Their insightful realism is still worth our attention, and the institutions that they proposed - though necessarily imperfect since they were humans too - are worth study.

As our current government continues to pursue a blundering and corrupt variant of socialism with all of its centralization and disregard for liberty and freedom we can usefully reflect on how we arrived at this point and the refusal to honestly engage the failures of that model that has haunted the left all this while, allowing it to make the same errors repeatedly. The utopian rhetoric is intoxicating, but the reality is always tawdry. The film is never like the novel. The left ought to mature at long last and abandon its steam age pretensions. The idea of scientific management of human societies was a brain fart. The fallibilists are more correct and we would do well to focus our efforts on further improvement of their ideas rather than ignoring them in pursuit of a childish fever dream.