When the Revolution Becomes the System
The quiet Panther in Wolfe’s Radical Chic wrote the memoir we all need to read—because we keep falling for the same script.
Ironically, the ideological basis for the internal destruction of the Black Panther Party was laid with the first book we studied. It was Joseph Stalin’s The Foundations of Leninism. That text was used to instill love for the party above everything else — even, eventually, the struggle, as it turned out. We didn’t know then that Stalin had massacred millions in the name of the party, and I must admit that, at the time, I’m not sure it would have mattered. That thought is very frightening, but it is one I cannot deny. One thing proved certain: if you can get an African American lumpenproletariat to love Stalin, you either have a true revolutionary or a cold-blooded killing machine.
As the ideas of Marxism-Leninism spread throughout the party, it quickly became afflicted with avant-gardism and elitism, considering itself the sole possessor of the truth. Anyone who didn’t adhere to Marxist-Leninist ideas was treated as an inferior being, worthy of being despised. Adopting the Marxist Leninist structure of the party, with democratic centralism as its soul, all power was then confiscated in the name of the central committee, which, in reality, meant just David Hilliard, the party’s chief of staff, and Bobby Seale, the party’s cofounder. In name I was a member of the central committee from the time I met Bobby at the beginning of 1968 until I resigned in the autumn of 1973, and during that time there was never one meeting of the central committee, nor were there ever points at which members of the central committee were asked to vote on any proposition. Or, if there was, I was never told about it.
Whenever David or Bobby thought up anything, it was simply sent down through the organization as a directive from the central committee. Frankly, I did not object to that way of doing things at the time because I didn’t know what else to do. I was aware of my intellectual limitations and had no pretentions of being a political analyst, so I blindly went along with the usurpation of power, as did most everyone in the party at that time.
That quote hit me like a punch in the gut—not because I’m a historian of Stalin or a former Panther, but because of who said it: Don Cox. “D.C.” wasn’t a performative radical. He wasn’t trying to brand himself. He wasn’t posing for photo ops with a raised fist and a shotgun. He was inside the machine—and eventually, he had the courage to call it what it was.
I didn’t discover Don Cox in a textbook. I found him in Radical Chic—Tom Wolfe’s razor-sharp satire about white elites playing revolutionary dress-up. Picture Leonard Bernstein hosting a fundraiser for the Panthers in his plush Manhattan apartment—champagne flutes clinking while revolutionaries stand by the piano. And in the middle of that bizarre scene: Don Cox. Silent. Still. Watching.
Wolfe barely mentions him, but something about Cox felt different. So I kept digging and found his memoir, Just Another Nigger. That’s when it all changed. No slogans. No romanticized nostalgia. Just brutal honesty about how power twists even the most righteous causes.
What Cox described wasn’t just the unraveling of a movement. It was a blueprint for how every cult of personality collapses under the weight of its own unchecked power.
Start with charisma. Add ideology. Remove dissent. And then watch as the “liberation movement” begins to resemble the very thing it claimed to be fighting.
The FBI’s COINTELPRO didn’t just take down the Panthers. That’s the easy story. The harder truth? They were hollowed out from within by authoritarian structure, inflated egos, misogyny, and blind allegiance to an ideology that turned critical thought into heresy.
“Democratic centralism”—the Marxist-Leninist model they adopted—was supposed to mean collective leadership. But in practice, it meant two men handing down decisions like commandments. And most members, like Cox, went along with it. Not out of belief. Out of fear. Out of habit. Out of not knowing what else to do.
That’s the scariest part.
Because we still do it.
Over the past century, we’ve seen cults of personality rise and crumble—Stalin. Mao. Mussolini. Franco. Castro. The names change. The playbook doesn’t.
It always starts with a man who promises salvation. Who claims only he can fix it. Who turns criticism into betrayal. Who centralizes power in the name of the people, then uses it to silence them.
And now? We’re watching the same thing in our country right now. Another leader, another cult. Surrounded by handlers, insulated from press scrutiny, shielded from real questions. He’s presented as a unifier, a savior, a wise elder guiding us through darkness. But the truth is: the machinery around him demands silence and loyalty—and punishes those who ask too many questions.
Don’t talk about age. Don’t talk about who’s really making decisions. Don’t talk about how policy is being shaped by unelected advisers in backrooms. Just clap. Smile. Vote blue no matter who. Get in line.
We love messiahs. We love movements that feel like family. We love stories with heroes. But we forget that every hero can become a tyrant when no one holds them accountable.
Don Cox saw it happen. He lived through it. And he told the truth, even when it hurt.
“If you can get an African American lumpenproletariat to love Stalin, you either have a true revolutionary or a cold-blooded killing machine.”
That line isn’t just about the Panthers. It’s a warning.
When we worship leaders instead of principles, when we silence dissent in the name of unity, when we trade skepticism for safety, we build systems that will eventually eat us alive.
We don’t need more idols. We need more honesty.
It’s not Stalin I’m afraid of.
It’s not people like Huey.
It’s not even Biden or Trump.
It’s gullible humans and the leaders they keep putting in positions of power.
It’s the same story over and over again and people keep falling for the same script.
Trying to decode the T***p cult from this vantage point in the OK Panhandle, as solid-red a region as exists anywhere in the USA, has been a vexatious and nonsensical experience. Clearly the man's rise to power has been driven nationally by some kind of grievance narrative, but in trying to figure out just exactly what it is the all-white, mostly evangelical, mostly middle-class, more suburban than you might think, conservative base in Oklahoma actually feels threatened by, I remain at a loss.
Joe Biden, for instance, is the man personally responsible for taking my children out of my life. Yes, I have had a real-world grievance against the man, though I didn't know it yet, since before either of them had been born, since the summer of 1994 when he sponsored the thrice-failed Violence Against Women Act through Congress as a personal favor to First Lady Clinton (and his wife, the actual president at the time) using the OJ Simpson case as a smokescreen. Years later I spent many hundreds of hours researching the real-world functions and results of that feminist vanity project, and it became more than clear to me that neither Biden himself nor the Clinton cult had ever given a rat's ass about the safety and well-being of women from the lower castes.
Enough said on that. The book that topic deserves, the one I never was qualified to be the one to write, would easily reveal that VAWA had been a silly exercise in ideological boilerplate all along, until it finally passed, and then it became just another grant-writing instrument, which in turn just clattered along as yet another cash-cow federal program, handing out free money for the asking. But it had been the atmosphere of self-administered, notionally feminist, ideological caution the thing had set in motion throughout the legal system, purely in the interests of receiving the next batch of that lovely free money to spend at will once received, which had made it just a matter of time before both of my kids took it upon themselves to simply stop wanting anything further to do with me, because they'd been debriefed and interrogated into believing I was too weird, or dangerous, or something, to remain in their lives. The VAWA-funded lawyers and cops and judges and social workers had all seemed to think so, so it must be true, or something.
So yeah: by the time that senile old apparatchik actually was awarded his gold-watch, Happy-Retirement-Joe, symbolic post as President At Last, I knew more about the ravages upon manhood itself his career had represented for half a century prior, than any ten middle-class Oklahomans I knew by then.
But not one bit of that knowledge I'd worked so hard to gather added up to my willingness to slap on the red hat and become any 'T***p supporter.' As a lifelong conservative raised in the Bible-Belt traditions myself (kinda), I could spot an imposter and pretender to the conservative cause from a mile away. After all, had I not endured through eight years of a movie cowboy pretending to be an evangelical sympathizer, and all the breathless Limbaugh-esque claims, ever since, that he had personally 'won the cold war' by making angry speeches about tearing down border walls (!) in other people's countries ?
So even though by 2016 I already knew full well just how deep the GOP monopoly on power in Oklahoma had already run for generations, it still took me by surprise when, long before the national GOP convention that year, my local acquaintances (or at least the more well-off ones) began to say things like, 'you know, this T***p guy might just be the one to lead us out of this mess..." Et cetera.
Passing through their living rooms with tools in my hands while fixing up their already-nice-enough homes for bottom dollar (because my living on as little money as possible had already been a lifetime quest, for many, many reasons, with the entirety of American life and its pagan worship of money providing my endless working examples of what I wanted no part in), it was easy to see where they'd got that message from: right there on their shiny new Chinese-made 52"-70" flat screens bolted to the wall, and permanently tuned to Fox News (when they weren't watching NASCAR, college ball, or old episodes of Gunsmoke, that is...)
These are my friends, mind you.
Good, decent, kindhearted people. And each of them has proven their friendship to me, personally, over many years, repeatedly. My neighbors, longtime associates, fellow believers in (what I'd thought was) a commitment to a quiet and unobtrusive way of life centered on family, and raising kids who wouldn't turn out to be drug dealers and pimps, owing to those 'traditional values' they all exhibit such utterly sincere everyday faith in.
How any one of them, much less all of them plus the other seventy-odd voting districts across Oklahoma without exception, could have fallen for such an obvious con artist, womanizer and money-grubber as this T***p creature, even back in early '16 when there were still other options of whom to nominate to run against my old enemy Joe Biden, remains a mystery to me to this day.
What mess? What threat? What danger to the Republic, exactly, were these prosperous and stable and permanently-secure conservatives out here in Bible Belt farm country getting themselves so worked up about, that they would so readily prop up a grotesque buffoon from Queens (!) and appoint him as their backup Personal Savior, even while professing that the first one, that Galilean dropout who'd gone around Palestine several centuries ago, recruiting ordinary fishermen to quit their jobs, abandon their families, and join his march on Jerusalem, might be coming back to Rapture them all out of danger from them damn libb'ruls any day now??
The reason, or one of many, that I have now devoted so much similar effort as my old VAWA project, over the past year-plus, to trying to decode what had actually led up to the killings of Veronica Butler and Jilian Kelley last spring (thirty miles up the highway), is that the story of the brutal slaughter of a nice redhead single mom struggling to get her kids back and her life in good order, and her traveling companion the preacher's wife with her flame-red motorcycle and her love of guns and college ball, is in truth the story of just how catastrophically this GOP-evangelical unholy alliance has gone on and lost its way, since falling for that movie cowboy forty-five years ago. (Another thousand-page book I alone am far from qualified to write, but that IS the story these 'Kansas Moms' killings should have already been telling, to the whole world, already...)
That former minor-league radio announcer, mediocre sorta-movie-star, FBI snitch, & Kennedy cheerleader turned soap salesman, was going to save them all from liberals too. He was as close as anyone could get to a #2 Personal Savior back then too. He rose to power on the backs of Bible-Belt voters going around saying 'I believe we're living in The End Times', too. And they were as stable and secure and prosperous, here in former Indian Territory, as the only middle-class anywhere in sight and all of them voting GOP, back then, as they are now.
So what exactly are they so afraid of, that they need a cult-guru raving about a Palestinian Riviera and annexing Canada (or Greenland, or Panama, or whatever, depending on his social-media-junkie mood-swing at 3AM...) to save them from it? Isn't Jesus supposed to arrive any day now?
If you read the Gospels as thoroughly as I had been taught by my own dad from the Southern Baptist pulpit to do over half a century ago, what I see in those stories is a warning: this is what happens when you form a personality cult and march on the capitol....
But I guess my church-attending, GOP-monopoly-cheering fellow Oklahomans didn't read it that way. Or something. smh