My worry about the upcoming election is that not enough Americans understand in their bones that the nation they have known, their lives as they have lived them, might be wiped away in day.

Echoing in my head are the words of a Slovak friend who made a fateful decision in 1968: Away in England on a fellowship to study physics, he asked his wife to come join him and bring the children. She couldn't envision life in the West so he came back, crossing the border into then Czechoslovakia, August 20, 1968. Fell sleep, and woke to "tanks everywhere."

So a small factoid about the 1920s Communist Party of the USA. They were created by a mandate from the Kremlin. Their leadership was picked by the Kremlin. The Kremlin paid for their newspapers. But that wasn't all. In addition to the Communist Party and the Workers Party (essentially the same thing) there were over 100 front organizations that also worked, essentially, for the Kremlin, but with more benign names ostensibly calling for things like peace, or famine relief. But all Kremlin.