Red Reps 10 Doyle Niemann : Maryland’s Marxist State Delegate

Red Reps 9 here

Doyle Neimann

Doyle L. Niemann is a Democratic Party member of the Maryland House of Delegates, representing District 47.

Delegate  Niemann has represented the 47th Legislative District in the Maryland House of Delegates since 2002, when the 47th District was created.

After serving his first four years on the Appropriations Committee, where he was a member of the Health and Human Services and the Public Safety and Administration Subcommittees, Niemann moved to the Environmental Matters Committee in 2007. He currently serves on the Natural Resources, Environment, and Housing Subcommittees and is the committee’s point person on foreclosure and other real estate issues.

As a freshman, Doyle was appointed to the Governor’s Housing Commission by Gov. Bob Ehrlich. He also served on the legislatively created Child Welfare Work Group, the Maryland Task Force on Identity Theft, and the Task Force on the Title Insurance Industry. He chaired a special two-year Work Group on Career and Technical Education in Prince George’s County and co-chaired the Task Force on Delinquency Prevention and Diversion. He represents the House of Delegates on the Criminal Coordinating Committee for Prince George’s County and is a Deputy Majority Whip.

An influential and well known Delegate to be sure.

Unfortunately, the good Democrats of Maryland,  who persistently keep electing Mr Doyle, have little knowledge of his Marxist background.

Writing in the far left The Rag Blog, in August 2006, Neimann laid out his radical journey and vision;

I left Austin (Texas)  in 1970, after I was purged in the great Erwin purge that wiped out John Silber and Norman what’s his name, the President of UT . My sin was protesting ROTC and getting arrested for it. Couldn’t have me polluting the student body as a teaching assistant any longer. But, truth be told, I was ready to leave. I had become disillusioned with academia and was convinced that there was a “real world” out there that was different.

This included a trip to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade – a known recruiting operation for terrorists and spies.;

I didn’t give up on politics — or organization — however. I went on to Houston and Space City News, then off on a Venceremos Brigade expedition to cut sugar cane (got me on a FBI list for four years, an early precursor of what we can expect from the Patriot Act). Then there was the organized antiwar movement that built up to and followed the May Day protests in Washington. I moved to Atlanta, became an editor of the Great Speckled Bird, helped organize the New American Movement (NAM), which later merged with DSA (Democratic Socialists of America), was a founding editor of the national weekly In These Times (in Chicago) and later, after I moved to the DC area, worked with Citizen Action, the multi-state organization that was created by what Dick would call the old “right wing” of the new left.

In 1996  Niemann was active in the Maryland branch of  New Party , a socialist front organization, specifically designed to move the Democratic Party to the far left.

The New Party’s most successful member ever, was of course President Barack Obama.

Neimann is clearly still a socialist, still committed to the revolutionary ideals of his youth. As he told The Rag Blog;

These were all organized initiatives that worked to mobilize people around the values and vision that motivated us all in the ’60s and ’70s. So to say that organization disappeared with the fall of sds in 1969 isn’t quite accurate. In fact, the organizational legacy of the new left continues to exist all across the country in a multitude of forms. To be sure, it isn’t spouting the rhetoric of armed revolution, but it is working in hundreds of thousands of ways to change the fabric of the world in ways most of us could support. And it continues to have a very real and positive impact.

We may have been naïve to think back then that a mass movement would somehow magically emerge out of our efforts that would somehow fundamentally transform the structure and organization of our society. That clearly didn’t happen. Nor could it, in truth, because we didn’t have any idea of what kind of society we really wanted.

And when we thought we did, I fear it was not the kind of society most of us would want to have today. To me, that was the problem with those that chose the “Leninist” model Dick was talking about — those who went into PLP, RCP, CWP, SWP, etc. I have worked with many who took that path over the years. My little town of Mt. Rainier, a nice, traditionally working class community on the edge of Washington, seems to have attracted representatives from all of them. They are great people. Many continue to do good work. But the Leninist model never offered a vision of a society that could be sold to the people who live and work around them.

But the movement that began in the ’60s continues. I have spent the last two days at a conference of several hundred people working in state legislatures around the county. Mostly elected leaders, they included many veterans of the new left. Men and women, white, black, Hispanic, Asian, gay and straight, from almost every state, who continue to fight to change things. They are part of a very real movement that carries on the kind of battles that motivated the Rag.

We underestimated the nature of the problem in the ’60s. There’s nothing new in that. It seems to be the lot of most revolutions. But the battle is not over when it comes to creating a better, more humane and more just society. I spent part of this afternoon, for example, listening to a panel of people outline how we will turn around the battle over the right for people to marry those they love regardless of sexual orientation. They acknowledged the defeats we have suffered, but they are also learning from them and are figuring out — precisely and strategically — how we can win people to our side by defining the issue in terms that people can understand and by applying our organizational resources effectively.

I know from my personal experience that this kind of discussion is going on across the country in hundreds of thousands of communities, involving tens of thousands of people, working in a multitude of organizational contexts. That’s the legacy of the ’60s.

And the good people of Maryland are paying this man to push his revolutionary ideas, in their own state legislature.

Red Reps 11 here

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