Frank S. Meyer’s book was a bit of a slog (as noted previously), but it paid off in the end.
In a nutshell, the book describes how Communists are recruited, selected, trained, and ultimately shaped into “cadre men” – true Communists. Unsurprisingly, the process follows how certain cults operate, with the same sorts of isolation from outsiders, brainwashing, jargon, consumption of free time and initiative, self-serving morality and ethics, totalizing worldview, and focus on the promotion of the interests of the organization.
While somewhat dated nowadays (my copy was published in 1961), the book nonetheless offered useful insights as to how we got to where we are today. One can read his description of how real, card-carrying Communists in the 1920s-1950s thought and behaved and find directly analogous thought and behavior patterns among the broader modern left. Modern cancel culture and political correctness are the direct descendants of practices common in Party operations in those years, but one can easily see the roots of wokeism, scienceism, climatism, and other lefty and left-adjacent ideological cults of Current Year in Meyer’s account of how the Party worked.
While they stand on similar foundations of a totalizing worldview, simplistic lenses for interpreting the entirety of reality, moral and ethical flexibility in the promotion of the Cause, rabid intolerance to dissent, etc. (things James Lindsay described in his essay Psychopathy and the Origins of Totalitarianism), these modern ideological cults look like cargo cults by comparison to the old Party – trying to apply the recruitment, propagandization, training, etc. of the old Communist movements without understanding how those things work or why the Communists did them.
Still with some degree of success, true, but without the remarkable degree of organization and competence Meyer describes – remarkable in no small part for having evolved in such a short time following the Russian Revolution.