far more than it was “Communistic”. Whatever else one might say about them, Communists have a vision of something they want to create. It can no longer pretend to be a healthy vision of any sort, but it is a vision. The Weathermen and Weather Underground never had any such thing. They were only ever about “tearing it down”, never really addressing what would rise from the ashes. It was the quintessential “movement” mentality: the “movement” and “rebellion” are all that is important. This corresponds to the Alinskyite approach, and you can see it as well in how Obama addresses events in Egypt and Libya: what matters is that “the people” (however defined) are moving against “their oppressor” (or in Alinskyspeak: the “have-nots” are moving against the “haves”).

The fact that these folks identify with Che Guevara, Mao Tse-Tung and their like doesn’t really change this. The identity is with the revolution as such. It isn’t that they don’t support the resulting state, but they just don’t care or think all that much about it. This is why Lenin called their kind “useful idiots” — they are useful because they create the climate in which the communists can come to power, and idiots because they don’t understand that they are doing so, all the lessons of history notwithstanding.