Eric Schmitt knows how to get an audience to froth in anger: mention the Declaration of Independence and the The Communist Manifesto in the same sentence. At the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, the Missouri Attorney General said that the Left is trying to “replace the Declaration of Independence  with The Communist Manifesto.”

I seriously wonder if the Attorney General has ever read The Communist Manifesto, because it has little relevance to the severing of political ties with an oppressive colonial monarchy. The Manifesto does go on a bit about liberating the proletariat from the oppressive bourgeosie, but in that respect it resembles the Declaration’s stating that,

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Except for the part about “the Creator” Marx would agree absolutely with this statement. Marx wanted people to be free and happy as much as the Founding Fathers did. He just had a different idea of what the revolution would look like.

No, we shouldn’t adopt the Communist Manifesto as our founding document, but the revolutions it inspired across continental Europe might remind us of our own Revolution.  Equality of people of all classes and races even inspired labor movements within the United States during a time when communism did not have the dark political overtones that it does today.

But use the words “communism” or “socialism” at a gathering of partisan conservatives, and you arouse the company with furious opposition. To them it means robbing the middle class to benefit the poor with programs like the Affordable Care Act  (Obamacare) or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP or Food Stamps).  In the sense that taxation is used to benefit the disadvantaged, there is some logic to their outrage, but there is no political or economic threat waged by supporting the marginalized poor of society.

So connecting The Communist Manifesto with social service programs is a bit of a reach for an educated man who implies that he has read this most influential document. And those that get their dander up at the mere sound of “Communist Manifesto” show that they can get aroused by the mere implications of a document they themselves have likely never read.  It has no potential to replace The Declaration of Independence, and yet Karl Marx would have been the first in line to sign The Declaration. Just his kind of revolution.