The author of this article is falling into a trap of presentism, where one judges the past out of context in order to argue for a short term future goal; here trying to make a case to get rid of Trump.
This fellow from the 1984 interview was either deluded with the power of a nation (the Soviet Russian government) already collapsing from within, or was just trying to cash in as a former KGB agent and knew how to talk right wing Cold War lingo. The "Marxist-Leninist" generation of "hippies" taking over government in the 1980s? What a laugh. Still, this was the typical right wing cant we saw when Clinton-Gore were running together in 1992. I remember joking early in the Clinton administration circa 1993-1994, "Well, that's the last time I listen to Rush Limbaugh. He told me Bill Clinton was a Communist agent, and all Clinton has proved to be is Bob Dole with a bigger libido. Damn!" People tend to forget the rumors about Clinton's infidelities were swirling throughout most of his career, and Republicans were already trying to develop that angle to undermine him--mainly because, as philanderer Republican leader Newt Gingrich imparted to his followers, Clinton was a no-good Democrat.
But enough about Clinton in this regard. We need to look back at the last 70 years and recognize that where we are today is mostly something of our nation's own making. We had 70 plus years of corporate propaganda to the point where those of us who lived through any significant part of it have lost any language of socialism--so I am talking about pretty much most of us who are over 40 today. It is why, like Pavlov's dog, so many of us cannot accept promoting policies that Denmark and other civilized nations have because so many of us instinctively go "social democratic means socialism means Communism means Treason!" And too many of our white working class people, who have been cut off from union oriented thinking as they saturate their minds with the poison that is corporate cable news (all of it, not just some of it), get angry, but do not spout Karl Marx. Instead, they go in for libertarian tinged, and sometimes right wing Mad Max anarchist thinking, to want to tear down the entire system--and for too many in the white working class, it is the racism and fear of becoming a "majority minority" that puts them into cognitive dissonant overdrive. It is why they focus so much on their guns. They have lost hope and say, "We don't want anything that makes it harder to keep any of my arsenal or my friends' arsenal. Can't do much good nowhere else anyway..." It is why those people in this small clip of interviews stay with Traitor Trump. They know Trump speaks a language of white nationalism, and they don't care if he cavorts with Putin. And it is so late in the day to be talking nice about Trump as "entrepreneur" and "working class person's president," isn't it?
In short, Pogo was right, and it should be noted Walt Kelly, the writer-creator of the Pogo comic strip, was an ardent opponent of Red-baiting, the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, and stood against, playfully in his comic, much of the culture of Cold War. He had Pogo say, by the 1970s, "We have met the enemy, and it is us."
