Here’s an excellent essay by Rob Foot in Australia’s Quadrant Magazine, trying to get to the bottom of the deranged America-hatred that has come to dominate and define the discourse of the international left: The New Anti-Semitism? (Hat tip: AG in Houston.)

Opinions will vary on when it was the socialist dream really died: Budapest, 1956; Prague, 1968; Tiananmen Square, 1989; Berlin, 1989. For my part, I think it died that day in 1989 when Czechoslovakia opened its borders to Austria. For the first time ever, an institutional socialist state said to its people, as all the democratic states say to theirs: “You are free to leave if you want to.” As one, or so it seemed at the time, almost every physically able person in Eastern Europe packed a single bag and toothbrush, petrolled up the Trabant, and raced for the hole in the wall. Nothing could have made it clearer that socialism’s prison had never been their choice, and they wanted out.

At about that time, the Australian media reported a demonstration in Prague, which included an old Czech woman’s bitter malediction upon socialism. As I remember it, the cameras captured her shaking fists, her contorted face and angry tears attesting more eloquently than words to a lifetime lost to misery and terror as, furiously, she shouted - in English! - “They should have tried it on animals first!” It had probably never been possible to tell her that George Orwell had done just that, in Animal Farm, but had not been widely enough heeded. It seems not too bold a prediction to say that no sovereign state will ever again choose socialism for its forward pathway.

This is the font and source of the Left’s rage and hate. The wrong side, the wrong ideas, the wrong attitudes and the wrong people had somehow contrived to win. And then, on top of the political and economic victories heralded by end of the Cold War, unsupportable enough in themselves, there came the USA’s seemingly effortless military victory over Iraq in 1991 - in a war, as we remember, that the hard Left was unanimous in opposing, despite the fact it was unarguably just. The Left’s fury and frustration boiled over. Who to blame for its immense, unimaginable defeat? To its question, “Why did the right side, the right ideas, the right attitudes and the right people not win?” the Left found a single, simple, one-word answer: Amerika. The rest, as they say, is polemics: the unending regurgitation of that helpless, futile response.

Indeed, America’s victory in the Cold War seems to have opened a kind of psychic wound in the collective sub-conscious of the Left, poisoning its soul. Perhaps the anti-American pandemic represents the effluxion by which the Left hopes to purge its own pain, understand its hurt, and heal it.