We Did Too Good a Job

A threat nobody remembers does not feel like a threat at all.

Micheal S. Parkhurst | October 9, 2026

My grandfather was seventeen years old when he joined the Navy in Boston.  A few months later, on the other side of the world, a place called Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese.  When he arrived there not long after, as one of the young men who would become known as SeaBees, he would tell his grandchildren — I was one of them — that the harbor was still smoking, and that the fires were being left to burn themselves out because there was more important work to do.  He spent the rest of his working life in the Navy: World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and a winter spent among the first Americans to stay over in Antarctica.  He had watched communism and its allies up close, for the better part of forty years, and he never once had to be convinced that the threat was real.  The great-grandchildren of his generation have no idea why their ancestors were considered great, because the thing those ancestors defeated has been defeated so completely that it no longer looks like a threat.  It looks like history.

It began, as these things do, with a diagnosis rather than a cure.  Karl Marx, watching the widening gulf between rich and poor as Europe industrialized, and writing from exile — first in Brussels, later in London — published the Communist Manifesto in 1848.  Decades later, Vladimir Lenin took up its terms during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.  Marx was not wrong that the industrial poor had real grievances against their employers.  But where he predicted that overturning the old order would produce a kind of economic bliss, Lenin and his allies produced something else: They turned the resentment of the nouveau riche into a weapon; stripped families of their wealth in the name of the poor; converted great homes into........

© American Thinker