Lenin's "Useful Idiots" Will Always Be With Us

The Soviet collapse came swiftly and surprisingly, following decades of slow internal rot, and the "useful idiots" (Lenin's term) in America who were overt or covert enablers of the evil empire -- America's legion of fellow-travelers -- just faded into the woodwork, almost overnight. Most glommed onto "climate change" as the next available tool for attacking capitalism and advancing eco-socialism, culminating in the Green New Deal, but let's save that topic for another day.

There was no Day of Reckoning for "Fifth Column" Westerners, like the crackpot from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, who carried water for an evil regime and its puppets. They never had to account for or apologize for their complicity in communism's crimes. This may be why so many younger Americans seem so forgetful and forgiving of the wrongs American fellow-travelers helped perpetrate under the banner of socialism. 

Mona Charen wrote one book, "Useful Idiots," attempting to hold these tools of tyrants accountable, but there was no appetite for such retrospectives after the Berlin Wall fell. All was quickly forgotten and forgiven. All that sordid history was just brushed under the rug. 

And so we have a situation today, here in (what Gore Vidal called) the United States of Amnesia, in which those who helped prop-up criminal totalitarian regimes not only can run for President, with absolutely no sense of shame, but can gain a rabid following among new generations of "useful idiots."