Gringrich sounds a lot like Stalin regime

Newt Gingrich's criticism of courts for not ruling according to Americans' wishes rings a familiar and ominous bell. It resembles the legal philosophy of Andrey Vyshinsky - Stalin's chief prosecutor and the theoretician of the Soviet legal system. The analogies are striking: Vyshinsky talked about the people's will and the law as the tool of the proletariat. Gingrich complains about judges being out of step and un-American. Both, in effect, want law to serve those who define themselves as embodiments of the ”people” and/or history.

The dominant trait of communism was the quest for subordinating reality to ideology. When reality refused to cooperate, communist rulers used slogans to enchant it and when this did not work, they looked for plots and scapegoats

Something similar is happening among Republican politicians and pundits. They use the word “market” to enchant the economy. While communists refused to accept the existence of environmental threats because of their commitment to the expansion of heavy industry, Republicans refuse to acknowledge environmental threats because the very idea of the environment does not fit into their belief of expanding individual consumption as the universal problem solver. And they refuse to accept global warming because it, too, does not fit into their ideology.

Republicans, too, look for scapegoats that can be blamed for reality's failure to fit their utopia: the liberals, liberal judges, illegals, the Muslims.

Jozef Figa

Cedar Rapids