A tale of two (communist) professors and their children holding high office

Kamala Harris’ father is Donald Harris, a Jamaican-American economist and professor emeritus at Stanford University. He was born in Jamaica and has had a significant academic career in the United States, focusing on economic development and the economic challenges of developing countries.

And then there was Pete Buttigieg

Pete Buttigieg’s father was a Marxist professor who lauded the Communist Manifesto

The father of Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg was a Marxist professor who spoke fondly of the Communist Manifesto and dedicated a significant portion of his academic career to the work of Italian Communist Party founder Antonio Gramsci, an associate of Vladimir Lenin.

Joseph Buttigieg, who died in January at the age of 71, immigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s from Malta and in 1980 joined the University of Notre Dame faculty, where he taught modern European literature and literary theory. He supported an updated version of Marxism that jettisoned some of Marx and Engel’s more doctrinaire theories, though he was undoubtedly Marxist.

He was an adviser to Rethinking Marxism, an academic journal that published articles “that seek to discuss, elaborate, and/or extend Marxian theory,” and a member of the editorial collective of Boundary 2, a journal of postmodern theory, literature, and culture. He spoke at many Rethinking Marxism conferences and other gatherings of prominent Marxists.

In a 2000 paper for Rethinking Marxism critical of the approach of Human Rights Watch, Buttigieg, along with two other authors, refers to “the Marxist project to which we subscribe.”

In 1998, he wrote in an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education about an event in New York City celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Manifesto. He also participated in the event.

“If The Communist Manifesto was meant to liberate the proletariat, the Manifesto itself in recent years needed liberating from Marxism’s narrow post-Cold War orthodoxies and exclusive cadres. It has been freed,” he wrote.

Please click through and read the whole article.

And while it is true that the children may not carry the values of the father, and often do not, one cannot help but think that people like Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris have been picked for their high placement, higher than any merit in the normal sense would possibly ever justify, because they are their father’s children. Both of them have done nothing but promote communist ideology and policies since having the opportunity to do so.

Or else how did they get there?