I just finished watching the extraordinary Showtime series A Gentleman in Moscow, which takes place in the years and decades immediately after the Russian Revolution of 1917. A wealthy aristocrat is basically imprisoned in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow and has a front-row seat to observe how the well-intentioned revolt against the excesses of the Romanov dynasty turned into a brutal dictatorship, ultimately headed by a sociopathic Joseph Stalin. The banality of evil.The fear on the right in those days was that Soviet-style Communists were plotting to take over America, confiscate all the wealth from the morbidly rich, and then line them up against a wall and shoot them, as Lenin and his followers had done in Russia. While today there may still be a few actual advocates of Soviet-style communism in the United States, that reality hasn’t stopped as many as a hundred of America’s roughly 800 billionaires from claiming—and probably sincerely believing—that calls for social and economic justice really mean that one day liberals will rise up, come out about their secretly harbored communism, and do to the American rich what Lenin did to the wealthy in Russia in the second decade of the twentieth century.
Source: In Backing Trump, America’s Billionaires Are Digging Their Own Graves
