You might be forgiven for wondering who won the Cold War, so prevalent have Stalinist and even Maoist ideas and procedures become in the West, especially in the academy and among intellectuals. It seems almost as if we are reliving the 1930s, when similar groups of people, in response to the economic crisis and dislocation of the times, were captivated by the supposed charms of totalitarianism. Recently, for example, there was a paper in the journal Academic Medicine, the official publication of the Association of American Medical Colleges, titled “Addressing and Undoing Racism and Bias in the Medical School Learning and Work Environment.” The paper is a strange amalgam of evangelical uplift, bureaucratic “langue de bois” (the type of language used by the late Leonid Brezhnev and other such luminaries), and proposals for Stalinist social engineering and Maoist re-education—necessarily leading to the increased power of an apparatchik class of what …