From today’s Front Page Magazine:

Being endorsed by scary, hateful, self-marginalizing extremists isn’t necessarily the kiss of death in American politics.

After presidential candidate Ronald Reagan was endorsed by a Louisiana chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in 1980 –an endorsement he quite correctly and forcefully rejected— he prospered and went on to evict Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter from the White House.

But it’s different when the endorsee shares the core tenets of the fringe-dwelling endorsers.

It really shouldn’t be altogether surprising that Occupy Wall Street is now endorsed by both the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and the American Nazi Party.

After all, the rhetoric at Occupy Wall Street events is only superficially distinguishable from the communiqués that the Communists and the Nazis recently released to express solidarity with OWSers across the nation.

Every day news reports show bigoted OWS speakers ranting against Jews, the rich, bankers, corporate chieftains, and the Tea Party, and calling for bloody revolution.

In a similar vein, the neo-Nazis said they welcome the “‘Occupy Wall Street’ fervor that has been sweeping the land like a breath of cleansing air!”

This issue is TAYLOR [sic] MADE for National Socialists, as well as WN [white nationalists] who are serious about DOING SOMETHING – MORE – than shouting “racial slurs” and acting like “poster boys of hate” loons. After all – JUST WHO – are the WALL STREET BANKERS? The vast majority are JEWS – and the others are SPIRITUAL JEW materialists, who would sell their own mother’s gold teeth for a PROFIT. And MORE and MORE people are AWARE of this truth, are not only NOT afraid to TALK ABOUT IT – they’re shouting it on WALL STREET! [caps in original]

The Communists view the OWS movement as class struggle, American-style. As the CPUSA pontificates about the movement,

No doubt the “Arab Spring” demonstrations and those that exploded in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere have inspired it. But underlying it all is the economic crisis, the massive unemployment and growing realization that nothing is getting better, and in fact we may be slipping into a “double dip” crisis. The crushing student debt and the feeling of being locked out of society with no future compound this. The movement is the newest wrinkle in the all-people’s upsurge against the banks and corporations and reflects a new level of class-consciousness.

As Jonah Goldberg reminded us in his opus, Liberal Fascism, the differences between fascism and communism are mostly superficial.
Both ideological camps demonize capitalism and seek to replace it with an iron-fisted command economy that makes the state the center of everything.

This pathological hatred of economic freedom animates not only American Nazis and Communists, but also the radicals of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The movement’s official demands largely approximate those of the modern Democratic Party whose leaders reciprocate by openly embracing it. OWSers demand open borders, card check, massive public make-work projects, a guaranteed “living wage,” free college education, single-payer health care, and the abolition of fossil fuels.

But there is only one demand on the OWSers’ list that would unleash unprecedented chaos and turn America into a Third World country virtually overnight.

Perhaps the media-savvy anarchists who non-hierarchically, non-patriarchically dominate the garbage-strewn landscape of lower Manhattan drew inspiration from the 1999 movie Fight Club which railed against so-called consumerism. Demand number 11 of the movement calls for America to become a post-capitalist society in a hurry:

Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now! All debt must be stricken from the “Books.” World Bank Loans to all Nations, Bank to Bank Debt and all Bonds and Margin Call Debt in the stock market including all Derivatives or Credit Default Swaps, all 65 trillion dollars of them must also be stricken from the “Books.” And I don’t mean debt that is in default, I mean all debt on the entire planet period.

Although it’s difficult to imagine even today’s Democratic Party going along with such a clear-cut prescription for national suicide, the fact that President Obama and congressional Democrats aren’t running away from Occupy Wall Street over the movement’s demands should give all Americans pause.
Democrats will be punished by American voters for not distancing themselves from the radical movement, according to Democratic pollster Douglas Schoen.

The Occupy Wall Street movement “reflects values that are dangerously out of touch with the broad mass of the American people,” Schoen wrote in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.

That’s an understatement.