Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty Images
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) has some very strange ideas about history. In justifying his vote for a controversial aid package to Ukraine and Israel, he called Russian President Vladimir Putin “the modern Marx.”
There are so many layers of absurdity in that statement that it’s hard to keep them all straight.
Karl Marx was the most important thinker in the history of the socialist movement. He advocated an egalitarian society in which ordinary workers would democratically run the “means of production”—think farms, factories, and other engines of economic activity. He was bitterly opposed to imperial wars in which the lives of poor and working people were thrown away to further the interests of wealthy business-owners. Oh, and he was an adamant atheist who advocated a strict separation of church and state.