In a bleak election season, Bill Kristol takes comfort in dingbat Marxism.

Like many establishment Republicans, Kristol has been having a tough time as the Trump typhoon runs rampage through the party. Over on Twitter, he offers a consoling scenario outlined to him by a “friend”:

Kristol’s tweets are incoherent both as election analysis and as Marxism. Why would the challenge of Trump strengthen Ted Cruz, while the challenge of Bernie Sanders weaken Hillary Clinton? Why are we to assume that a solid consensus will form in a party where the largest vote-getter is displaced? As with much Republican election analysis, Kristol is putting a lot of faith in a deus ex machina intervention by the FBI.

As for Marxism, Kristol’s unnamed friend seems to know some jargon from Hegel (“the dialectic” and “synthesis”) and Lenin (“infantile disorder”) but no real sense of how a materialist reading of history works. The dialectic is not a puppet-master pulling the strings of history, but a process involving contradictions within social and economic forces playing themselves out. Since Kristol isn’t interested in looking at such social and economic forces, his so-called Marxist analysis is simply his usual wish fulfillment with some half-remembered jargon thrown in.