President Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech on July 3 included these noteworthy lines:

There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success. These are not mere political disagreements like differences over taxes or regulations. Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty.

It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11. Uh, we’re not gonna let this happen to us. Believe me, we’re not letting it happen. Because communism is the enemy of free people everywhere, everywhere in the world. Never works. It’s the enemy of the Constitution.

President Trump is entirely correct that the U.S., together with most of the Western world, faces “the greatest threat to our country,” indeed possibly a greater threat than we ever faced before. I applaud the president’s resolve not “to let this happen to us,” and to do what is necessary to keep a pernicious enemy from conquering this country.

But I would submit that enemy we should be chiefly targeting has little to do with Marxism, which never had the resounding appeal in America that, unfortunately, our newer adversary appears to enjoy. We are fighting with our backs to the wall against woke ideology and its zealots in, among other places, the permanent state, corporate capitalism, the culture industry, and the mass media. It is therefore ridiculous to pretend we’re only dealing with a passing cultural fad or the effects of being “overly concerned” with marginalized minorities. Wokeness is not dead! Our enemy is on the march and combatting, among other targets, white men, Christians, advocates of traditional gender roles, and those who resist their country being overrun by Third World illegals.

The legions that back the woke ideologues include public administrators, entertainment celebrities, and corporate executives who impose DEI indoctrination even after it has been declared illegal. Neither should we forget the vast majority of Democratic voters, NGOs, and almost all “educators.” These ideologues have tens of millions of followers, unlike American Communists, who could only scare up about 80,000 votes in their best showing in a presidential race in 1936.

To call these woke nutjobs Marxists is to insult an older and, frankly, saner enemy. Nowhere did Communist parties favor open borders, encourage sexual perversity, try to fill cities with encampments of druggies and derelicts, or make war on gender identities. Communist parties in Eastern Europe still favor banning gay marriage and attribute the popularity of LGBTQ ideas and anti-white racism to Western capitalist decadence. One needn’t like these long-time enemies (who murdered millions of people) to notice they do not constitute the bulk of our adversaries in New York, Seattle, or Minneapolis.  The entire old left, including Communists, would have laughed at proposals from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to give out the free stuff. I can’t even imagine how an orthodox Marxist or Communist would process such DSA conceits as amnesty for all illegals and stronger government support for transgender rights. These are hardly the positions real Communists have advocated, let alone tried to put into practice.

The affluent voters in Manhattan who backed Mamdani in his mayoral race may now have buyer’s remorse. But this woke Muslim mayor, who calls himself a “social democrat,” has not called for such standard socialist positions as seizing the heights of the economy or taking over the means of production. Although the DSA may, at some future point, try to implement such measures, so far, they seem to be mostly a woke party trying to get noticed. Trying to buy off voters, as Mamdani does, with giveaway programs and then trying to meet the costs of this political extravagance by raising taxes on the rich may be economically dumb. But it’s what politicians do in all decadent democracies. It was not the kind of government that existed in Eastern Europe under Soviet control.

If we’re looking for a model of what all revolutionary leftist governments do, let’s not revive Cold War rhetoric, however much that may please Boomer Republicans.

To understand our real enemy, we would do better to learn from the counterrevolutionaries of the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, who discerned the constant features of all revolutionary movements. Wokeness  is, in fact, the latest incarnation of the revolutionary mind across the ages, not the return of a by-now outdated form of it in Marxism, which should attract our attention. All revolutionaries have one project in common, which Edmund Burke expressed insightfully in Reflections on the Revolution in France:

The decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.

On this scheme of things, a king is but a man; a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal; and an animal not of the highest order. All homage paid to the sex in general as such, and without distinct views, is to be regarded as romance and folly. … On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors, and by the concern which each individual may find in them from his own private speculations. In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows . . .

Burke ends his comment about the demolition work of all social revolutionaries with a stern warning. We should keep it in mind as we observe the woke left and other moral and cultural subversives:

Nothing is more certain than that our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are connected with manners, and with civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles; I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion.

Even more than the Communists of the past, the woke left of today is the enemy of all human refinement and civilization.