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What my father would've thought

In my article below on yesterday’s events at the U.S. Capitol, I wrote: “American left-wingers of a certain age must have felt the irony: once upon a time, Republicans had blacklisted or imprisoned Americans who supposedly advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. Now the Republicans themselves had gone far past advocacy to violent overthrow itself.” Having grown up in the Cold War as part of a blacklisted American family, I was shocked but not surprised to see real subversion in action, on a scale the old American Reds could never have imagined.

The attack on the Capitol would have shocked my father as well. He was embarrassingly patriotic as well as Red, and the sight of working-class Americans pillaging the halls of their own government would have broken his heart. — Crawford Kilian, contributing editor