Steve King, who reps for the district adjacent to my own, appeared on CPAC, and offered a helpful list of "who we are up against":

The list, for easy consumption, includes the following:
-Liberals
-Progressives
-Che Guevarians
-Castroites
-Socialists
-Gramsciites
-Maoists
-Stalinists
-Leninists
-Marxists
-Democratic Socialists

We can remove several of these designations as wishful thinking on the part of Rep. King. The number of legitimate "Leninists" in this country has to be approaching zero, and Stalinism, insofar as it ever actually existed (Solzhenitsyn doubted so), died a few years after Stalin. Similarly, one is unlikely to find any legitimate adherents for Maoism.

As for "Democratic Socialism' (mentioned not by King but someone in the audience), we do have at least one member of Congress who considers himself such, Senator Bernie Sanders. So in this case King's relentless strawman bashing has a slight whiff of truth. And yet the teabaggers never manage to focus very much of their ire on Senator Sanders. This may have more to do with his location in a liberal stronghold than it does any real differences with his agenda.

Castro and Che Guevara both have their adherents and their own cults, none of which have any remote pull on modern electoral politics.

One name popped out at me: Gramsciite. Of all the names Steve King chooses to call me, I would perhaps be most proud to call myself a Gramsciite. I think that Antonio Gramsci, like Trotsky, really resists the sort of blanket pejorative designations that Lenin and Stalin deserve far more. His wasn't a deliberately oppositional or radical form of socialism--rather, he came to see that the working class not only had the rights to question the system that held them captive, but they also had to foment their own intellectual development as a means of carefully considering capitalism as a system. Unlike Che or Mao, Gramsci wasn't really "rejecting" anything, other than rule under Mussolini.

I'm both bewildered and gladdened by the fact that Steve King mentioned Gramsci, and not only because I'm sure now that his average number of Wikipedia visitors will increase dramatically. Conservatives may have a more difficult time arguing with adherents of a philosophy who are capable of standing outside the sort of debate as an exercise in coercion and subjugation. Then again, this is not a philosophy that would be easy to spell out on cable news.

At another time, I will provide a much more strident analysis of Steve King as a human being, and how inexplicable it is that Iowans keep reelecting this guy.