It never made sense for me to study Marx. But any honest reflection upon my father’s political ideals will recognize a populist undercurrent despite the apparent radical transformations in his political opinions. My father’s political sensibilities have continued to evolve as he has begun to accept a new ideology grounded in Trump’s populism. He remained the radical of his youth despite the revolution in his political world view. His faith in capitalism lacks the pragmatism of traditional conservatives. It does not help that my father was a former hippie who had converted to libertarianism. It is not always clear how much I knew then compared to what I learned years later, but I cannot recall any memory of communism without a sense of it as a catastrophic failure. I learned of the Cold War as a distant memory. When the Berlin Wall fell, I was still too young to understand its implications. My mother recalls how I supported Ronald McReagan as a child. (Photo by Roger Viollet Collection/Getty Images) CIRCA 1865: Karl Marx (1818-1883), philosopher and German politician.
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