Ted Cruz under attack with Harvard law communist comments, now faces Joe McCarthy comparisons
Senator Ted Cruz has responded to The New Yorker’s report that he accused Harvard Law School of having had “twelve” Communists who “believed in the overthrow of the U.S. Government” on its faculty when he attended in the early nineties. Cruz doesn’t deny that he said this; instead, through his spokesman, he says he was right: Harvard Law was full of Communists.
The New Yorker now quotes the Cruz camp: “the Harvard Law School faculty included numerous self-described proponents of ‘critical legal studies’—a school of thought explicitly derived from Marxism—and they far outnumbered Republicans.” As my story noted, the Critical Legal Studies group consisted of left-leaning professors like Duncan Kennedy, who is a social democrat, not a Communist, and has never “believed in the overthrow of the U.S. Government.”
Is Ted Cruz the new McCarthy is the headline embraced by the left to target the Texas Senator.
Al Sharpton took up the story with the communist logo and the “Ted Scare” theme.
Sen. Barbara Boxer and MSNBC’s own Chris Matthews have made similar insinuations about Cruz after his aggressive questioning of Chuck Hagel and factually inaccurate allegations. But it turns out Cruz accused his own alma mater (Harvard Law School) of “harboring a dozen Communists”–and that discovery adds another plank to the argument.
In the speech, given at an Americans for Prosperity event in Texas, Cruz claimed, “There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were 12 who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.”
Cruz’s spokesman called it “curious” that The New Yorker would cover Cruz’s speech “three years” after he gave it, but Cruz’s questioning of Hagel was noted as the cause, calling it “hostile questioning” and the New Yorker was looking “at the nature of the accusations he has leveled at political opponents.”
The Huff Po now puts out: Ted Cruz poses problem for Republican Party
It’s actually a Salon article, they just got the headline to the top of the search engines again.
Cruz isn’t alone, from 2009:
Harvard Law Professor Duncan Kennedy has been quoted for the proposition thatProperty does not exist, and even more, that law does not exist. What Kennedy has beenquoted as saying is consistent with Karl Marx’s rather banal statements is the CommunistManifesto that Property should be abolished and that law is a sham. Kennedy followsthe work of Peter Gabel in asserting that Property is a reified concept. The definitionthat Gabel uses for reification, is “Where an abstract concepts is treated as if it isconcrete, then the concept is invalid and reified.” In fact, given Gabel’s definition everyconcept is reified, including reification itself. Thus, reification is itself a reified conceptand therefore invalid. Since reification is itself an invalid concept, it cannot be used tocritique Property or law in general. It should also be noted that Law itself involves theworld of meaning. (Lonergan). As Lonergan puts it, meaning is real, thus law, which is based upon meaning is real.
