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11 Doctrinal Parties 1 The Socialists and Communists [While] there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element , I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. Eugene V. Debs, upon his conviction of sedition in 1918 Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party? Congressional query during the McCarthy period There are times—rare ones—when a provocative, even outrageous act by a very small group at the distant edge of the political periphery can impact constitutional development and public policy. On June 21, 1989, the United States Supreme Court invalidated a Texas law that had banned the desecration of the American or Texas flag. The high court also set aside both the conviction and sentence—one year in prison and a two-thousand-dollar fine—of one Gregory Lee “Joey” Johnson. Back in the summer of 1984, Johnson and his comrades in the Youth Brigade of the Revolutionary Communist Party had stolen and besieged an American flag. Johnson doused the cloth in kerosene and set it ablaze. As the flag disintegrated, Johnson’s group chanted “America, red, white, and blue, we spit on you.” They planned their demonstration to capture media attention. The RCP and its Youth Brigade chose Dallas at the time that Texas city was hosting the Republican National Convention. In 1989 the Supreme Court found flag burning to be a constitutionally protected First Amendment right of symbolic speech. In overruling the statute from the Lone Star State, it also invalidated in effect similar laws in many other states. Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia, two Reagan appointees, joined liberals William Brennan , Thurgood Marshall, and Harry Blackmun to make up the slender 5–4 majority.1 The hostile reaction to the high court’s flag-burning decision could not have surprised anyone inside the Revolutionary Communist Party. Much of the public, along with President George H. W. Bush, demanded action. Many in Congress said that what was needed was a flag-protection amendment inserted into the Constitution. Doctrinal Parties 1 173 Instead Congress passed a flag-protection act much like the state statutes the Court invalidated in 1989. In 1990 the Supreme Court declared this congressional act to be unconstitutional too.2 The Other Red America: The Socialist and Communist Left In today’s political lexicon, blue states are reliably Democratic. Red states, by contrast , are safe Republican turf.What a curious irony. Red now is shorthand for America ’s major conservative party. To people on the Far Left, that may seem like theft. For many years now, in America as abroad, red has been a proud emblematic color for just about everyone left of liberal except for the Greens. Socialist Party nominee Eugene V. Debs campaigned for the presidency through whistle stops made on his Red Special train. Red Chicago is a recent book on the Depression-era Communist movement in the Windy City.3 From 1844 until the death of Karl Marx in 1883, Friedrich Engels was Marx’s friend, intellectual collaborator, and frequent patron. A letter of lament the elderly Engels sent in 1893 to a Communist comrade living in the United States has been published under the title “Why There Is No Large Socialist Party in America.”4 Engels’s answers to the question may be subject to challenge, but the premise of his letter is not. Unlike almost every other Western democracy, in the United States no party labeling itself Labor, Socialist, or Social Democratic, much less Communist, has ever become a major national party. The Socialist Labor Party Many have tried. Although historically the most significant, the Socialist Party and Communist Party USA are far from being the only national parties in this red America. They are not even the oldest. Having emerged in 1876–77, the Socialist Labor Party in 2008 ranked fourth— behind the Democratic, Republican, and Prohibition parties—in longevity among living American parties.5 Although it rejected Leninism, the body of thought associated with the principal founder of the Soviet state, the SLP considered itself to be revolutionary Marxist. Daniel De Leon (1852–1914), a brilliant but rigidly doctrinaire figure, joined the party in 1890. The distinguishing features of the SLP outlook over the nearly 120 years that followed were De Leonist. Heavily influenced by French syndicalism, De Leon was convinced that the agency for the workers’ revolution to come lay in industrial unionism, and he...

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