During the earliest phases of the Cold War, the international Communist conspiracy targeted the U.S. government. Even before the Cold War, starting around 1919, Soviet operatives in the United States created an espionage network designed effect a revolution, even a “violent” revolution. (The specification of a “violent” revolution comes from the Communist Party’s own documents.)
The Cold War as generally defined started around 1946, and sometime thereafter, the shift began, moving from the overthrow of the U.S. government toward the humiliation of American society. Some historians refer to result of this shift as ‘cultural Marxism.’
Before this shift, the goals of the international Communist conspiracy were, among other things, the glorification of the Soviet Union and the subjugation of the United States into a grand Soviet empire. After this shift, the goals were, inter alia, the humiliation and weakening of the United States.
To be sure, the earlier goals and the later goals were related. But there was a shift of emphasis, as historian William F. Buckley wrote in March 1967:
Further on the question: Who are the new pro-Communists? - further evidence that the new breed is negatively defined. They are not so much pro-Communist as anti-American. But since they work at anti-Americanism feverishly and at anti-Communism not at all, the vector of their analysis and passion is pro-Communist.
The earlier generation included people like Alger Hiss, Owen Lattimore, and Thomas Arthur Bisson. Their allegiance was more directly to Moscow and the various intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union.
This newer generation of the international Communist conspiracy was typified by Frank Marshall, Bill Ayers, and others. Such men were less constrained by their affection for the Soviet Union, and more directly motivated by their desire to harm the United States.
Decades later, yet another generation of the international anti-American conspiracy would emerge: a generation of political thinkers whose ideologies were no longer framed within Cold War terms. The Soviet Union had fallen, and internationalist Communism had morphed into a version of ‘progressivist’ politics.
Cut free from the Soviet intelligence agencies which had directed earlier Communist operatives, this third generation did not trust, understand, nor appreciate the United States, its Constitution, or its people.
In effect, these people did not see the Constitution as guarantor of personal political liberty; did not see the American people as essentially freedom-loving and good-natured, if imperfect; and did not see the United States as a land which, albeit imperfectly, sincerely strove to offer equal opportunities.
This most recent generation of the conspiracy largely eliminated all ties to Moscow and to doctrinaire Marxism, embracing instead a vaguer and more flexible progressivist socialism, the goal of which was statism. Free from any obligation to promote stalinism, these conspirators instead focused their efforts on diminishing the United States militarily, economically, and diplomatically toward other nations, and internally weakening both its social institutions and its constitutional governmental institutions, to pave the way for the hegemony of non-constitutional governmental institutions.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, then, the United States finds itself threatened no longer by Soviet Socialism, but rather by a group of anti-American Americans whose goal is to weaken and humiliate their native land and their fellow citizens.
