American Conservatism and Nazism: The Economic Dimension

Welcome friends!

I suppose you may have noticed the flurry of articles comparing the political movement of our president-elect Donald Trump and his conservative Republican Party to that of Adolph Hitler and his Nazi Party so many years ago in early twentieth-century Germany?  I suspect it’s probably rather difficult to avoid noticing certain similarities.  Of course conservatives themselves have been preemptively calling their political opponents fascists and Nazis for some time now so I suspect some people must assume it’s all a bit of tit for tat but I really don’t think so.  I thought this time out I’d discuss yet another point of similarity this time involving economic ideas.

If you’re interested in history at all you may recall the little mustachioed monster of fame originally rose to power in Germany the conventional democratic way.  Yes, like vampires of film he only managed to wreak his havoc after having been duly invited in.  Of course in his case the havoc didn’t literally involve sucking blood but rather dismantling the democratic institutions of the nation and going on to murder millions of his countrymen and various other people besides.  By all accounts the initial impetus for his rise was a rather severe economic depression and the inevitable social divisions and in particular racial divisions the economic meltdown and social instability dredged up from the darkness of ages past.

In this context I think it’s important to realize one of the great and abiding mysteries for economic conservatives everywhere is why they don’t always do as well as they feel they ought to do under free markets.  It’s not much of a mystery or issue for liberals and leftists who believe markets don’t always perform that well anyway, which is to say markets can break down and exhibit instability, many types of markets have undesirable characteristics and results (monopolies, monopsonies, oligopolies, oligopsonies), certain common conditions render even gold-standard perfectly competitive markets problematic (externalities, information and other power asymmetries), and markets of any description do not necessarily do a very good job distributing goods and services to the people one might think should have them under any particular theory of social justice.  No, the problem for liberals and leftists is the relatively straightforward although obviously still quite daunting issue of how to fix the problems with markets to make things turn out better.

Conservatives are in a different mental place altogether.  They accept the free market as a panacea for all the material and distributional issues a society may face so if problems remain despite the presence of an apparently free market that’s really a rather remarkable state of affairs.  The primary way conservatives have historically attempted to explain this great mystery is that yes, market systems are inherently flawless and fantastic and so on, but someone is “rigging” the market behind the scenes as it were to make it not work out right.  Sabotage or I suppose as conservatives might say sabatoogie.  For Hitler and the Nazis the shadowy culprit was international Jewry.  One can imagine this wasn’t the most difficult sell in the world at that time and place given the rather obvious otherness of Jewish people in the context of self-adoring European nationalists and racists, the troubled history of Jewish people in Europe since the Middle Ages, and more prosaically the fact some Jewish people had managed to do pretty well for themselves under the prevailing market system.  Make no mistake about it.  Although the Nazis fashioned themselves “socialists” and talked a lot about collectives in certain cultural and military contexts when it came to economic matters they were pretty much conventional economic conservatives.  They didn’t challenge the economic elite of the nation and in return the economic elite of the nation didn’t challenge them.  They were all about keeping labor in line and leftist labor agitators out.  Their goal was an unholy merging of big business, (undemocratic) government, and the military machine.  Hitler won the support of most of the upper classes in the Germany of the day because he basically represented a potential money making opportunity for them.  Obviously it didn’t end too well.  Can’t do much with smoking rubble and a big pile of corpses.  But by the time they figured out which way the wind was blowing there wasn’t a whole lot they could do about it.

Here in the USA we have a roughly similar sort of dynamic going on right now.  Conservatives have been talking up the magic of the marketplace as they have been these past two centuries or so but as was the case in Germany in the early twentieth century some workers just aren’t doing all that well financially.  Liberals are trying to explain why that might be the case in terms of technological change and the rise of more effective international competition and more generally just trying to get people to think realistically about the distributional issues associated with market systems but of course conservatives aren’t having it.  They’re too busy looking for the scoundrels who have been rigging the markets to make them not function as they should.  They know it can’t be the economic elite or captains of industry because under conservative philosophy those are the people responsible for all good things in the world and the most deserving of our respect.  It must be someone else.  You can tell they have something like this on their minds because they’re always talking about taking the country back from someone.  But who?  And how did they get hold of the country in the first place?

I suppose a few American conservatives accept the traditional antisemitic line endorsed by the Nazis but not very many.  We just don’t have the history for that sort of thing to really take root.  We didn’t have medieval pogroms or Christian crusades.  We have lots of immigrants from all over the place and always have had.  We like to talk about religious freedom.  Some nativist groups have gotten on that wagon over the years including the neo-Nazis and KKK but it’s a bit of a hard sell for the man in the street.  No, in an American context the much more tempting and satisfying scapegoats are the so-called “black” people, the descendants of the slaves the old-timers kidnapped and brought over to work in their fields and who did a lot to build the country into what it is today.  That despicable but surprisingly long-lasting labor and social arrangement generated a type of social cancer that has proven quite difficult to eradicate or sometimes simply to contain: racism.  According to this theme markets are not working properly because our darker hued compatriots and possibly their illegal immigrant allies (and misguided liberals of course) have captured the government and are using it to wreck markets and funnel resources to the undeserving.  As I’ve noted before the story doesn’t entirely make sense to me according to the available facts because poor “black” people have been doing just as badly as poor “white” people and I think even a little worse and most illegal immigrants are struggling economically as well.  But I suppose the theory is that even though they’re trying to wreck markets and funnel resources to themselves they must not be very good at it because all they’ve managed to do in practice is wreck markets.  So in the eyes of conservatives the solution to our problems is to take the political system back from the people who have captured it, “black” people and their foreign allies, and put it back under the control of people who understand how the market is meant to work and will presumably not mess with it: rich old “white” people.  They would like to find a permanent solution and are forever thinking of ways to limit and shrink democratic government and correspondingly expand the power of the autocratic economic elite but they can only do so much at one time.

Of course, one must admit our conservatives are not nearly as bad as their historical counterparts.  No one has suggested carting anyone off to death camps in the countryside.  Not yet anyway.  I would find that reassuring were it not for the fact we’re not really comparing apples to apples.  Germany in the era of the Nazis went from the social turmoil of a lost war through an epic economic depression to the upheaval of total war.  One supposes these conditions must have had some influence on the complete moral meltdown we all remember today.  Here in the USA we’re having it relatively easy right now.  We have some economic problems that are particularly acute in some areas of the country but overall we’re not doing so badly.  We have some ongoing military conflicts but not really anything beyond what is more or less normal for us these days.  We’re basically on a pretty even keel right now and yet the person the American public chose as their president was Donald Trump. One can’t help but wonder if Germany in the 1930s had been doing as well as we are today would Hitler and his party of dimwitted goons have gotten anywhere near the reins of government.  Or would they have spent their lives railing against the system in some Bavarian beer hall?  Or flip it around.  Let’s say Trump’s economic incompetence and anti-regulatory zeal unleashes a major 1930s style depression.  People in the so-called “heartland” are out of work.  They’re going hungry.  They’re fearful for the future.  What will their philosophy suggest was the cause of the calamity and what do you suppose they will see as the solution?  Or let’s say a major war breaks out.  I mean a big one.  Nuclear.  Biological.  It’s us against them and our backs are against the wall.  But who is us anyway?  Does it include the people conservatives formerly suspected of attempting to steal the country from them?  Will we need to come up with a final solution to the enemy within?

Let’s not let our arrogance get the better of us here.  We’re not immune to the forces that blighted Germany in the not so distant past.  History can repeat itself and will unless we fight tooth and nail to make sure it doesn’t.  All pepped up and ready to argue with all your might against the ignorant and destructive forces Mr. Trump has ridden to political power and clearly plans to nourish and encourage the next four years?  Ready to stand up for our American way of life and our shared values of democracy, reason, kindness, and humanity?  Good.  Let’s meet the new year head on and fight the noble fight together.

China v Democracy

Welcome friends!

I don’t know about you but I always look forward to reading something from our Chinese friends.  Their official government spokespeople and their allies in the private realm (whatever that may be in a Chinese context) have their own way of thinking about things and the confidence to say what’s on their minds.  It’s interesting.  They don’t like democracy and they’ll tell you why.  They have the courage of their convictions.  So much easier and more pleasant to discuss things with someone like that than with someone from one of the legion of fake democracies scattered around the globe where people pay lip service to democratic ideals but obviously fail to understand or respect what real democracy is all about.  I was trying to think of an example just now and Iran popped into my head.  Why not?  As good an example as any other I suppose.  Look if you want the place to be run by religious bigwigs that’s fine with me.  I don’t live there.  Just say what you think and we can discuss it.  If you think clerics should rule because they hear voices or have special insight into the wishes of various supernatural entities or whatever then more power to you.  It all sounds a little looney tunes to me but to each his or her own; that’s my motto.  But there’s something rather annoying and disappointing about trying to discuss politics with someone who clearly supports an authoritarian theocracy but wants to pass it off as a weird sort of democracy perhaps because people can choose between a handful of candidates vetted by clerics or can discuss social issues freely with government censors crossing out every other word and throwing people in jail whenever anyone says anything a little too close to the mark.  Come on.  It’s cheesy.  I mean really.  Just talk it out.  Now when it comes to foreign cultures that dislike democracy China is to me in a whole other league.  They’re what I suppose I would call the honorable opposition.  They don’t know what the hell they’re talking about in my humble opinion but to me they seem to speak in good faith and that’s got to count for something.

The article I have in mind was published in China’s state-owned Global Times newspaper.  I’d be happy to tell you the author but the copy I read online seemed to lack a byline.  I don’t know but I suspect that might be the custom in China.  Maybe no one wants to be on record having any particular opinion on any particular subject in case some grand poo-bah gets annoyed.  Or perhaps in these state owned publications it’s understood opinion pieces express the unanimous thinking of the Party elite and the identity of whichever plebeian scribbler actually pulled these emanations from the ether is irrelevant.  Whatever.  Makes it a little awkward to talk about though.  Maybe I’ll just make up an author for purposes of this post.  I think I’ll go with Ms. Li this time around if you don’t mind.  (I looked up the most common surname in China, which is Li, and I thought I’d go with the female version to honor communist China’s long-standing support for gender equality.  Give credit where credit is due.  That’s my motto.  One of my various mottos anyway.)

The focus of Ms. Li’s criticism of American democracy in this instance was basically that it can give rise to such political figures as Donald Trump, who she describes in various places as a rich, narcissistic, inflammatory, big-mouthed, abusive, racist, extremist clown.  Ouch!  But sounds pretty accurate to me so no issues there.  Her analysis of Mr. Trump’s rise seems spot on as well.  In her opinion his job initially was to intentionally overthrow political correctness and tradition and in general act the clown to attract the attention of disaffected lower class white voters to the GOP cause.  Well, probably.  The aforementioned voters for their part “know that elections cannot really change their lives” so they support Trump to “vent their spleen.”  Hmm.  That sounds a bit cynical to me although I may have said some things rather similar myself from time to time.  I do agree money talks in US politics.  Money talks a lot.  Hard to get it to shut up sometimes.  And of course most of our political candidates do tend to come from the same moneyed and leisured class and their personal interests do generally match up pretty well with interests of the financial elite of the country, which is convenient because those are the people our Supreme Court has said the US Constitution envisioned funding political candidates anyway.  It’s like a festival of rich people out there.  But there are some variations.  I’d hardly throw Bernie Sanders in the same category as Donald Trump.  Votes still matter.  And real changes do take place from time to time.  FDR ring a bell?  So I understand what Ms. Li is saying but I really wouldn’t go that far myself.  She goes on to note that some people in Western media have likened Trump to other notably annoying political figures like Mussolini and Hitler, who she points out also initially achieved political power through democratic elections.  I can’t dispute any of that.  She then notes that while most political analysts believe the US election system will eventually put an end to Mr. Trump’s candidacy even if Trump is a false alarm the prospect of political unpredictability and imminent institutional failure he represents has left a  “dent” on the US.  That part seems fine to me.  Finally she suggests the US should “watch itself for not being a source of destructive forces against world peace” rather than “pointing fingers at other countries for their so-called nationalism and tyranny.”  I’m fine with the US watching itself.  I’m trying you know.  But I did find the last part rather humorous.  Have any country in mind?

The funny thing to me about the article was that Ms. Li didn’t really say anything I wouldn’t have said myself or not much anyway and yet I still feel democracy is the only game in town while she apparently thinks she’s really made quite the case against it.  Something weird is going on.  Let’s think it through.  I think where Ms. Li misses the mark is that no one ever said democracy was infallible.  That’s not the argument in favor of democracy.  Obviously if everyone in a particular society decides at a particular time to become irresponsible jerks and vote in some nut case like Hitler or Mussolini or whoever else might fall into that category then yes that country would indeed be in for a bit of a bumpy ride.  But stick with democracy and the same mechanism that allowed these people to get elected will allow them to be thrown back out again in short order.  That’s why although Hitler and Mussolini may have gained political power through democratic elections those were the last democratic elections they ever saw in their sorry lifetimes.  They used democratic institutions to their advantage and then got rid of them as soon as possible.  They did not support democracy.  They were foes of democratic ideals.  Democracy doesn’t guarantee optimal results every moment of every day.  It provides a mechanism to discuss things and fix things and improve things.  As long as people can talk and vote the jackasses of the world can only screw things up for so long before people wise up and decide to give someone else a go.

Now let’s contrast that to whichever undemocratic, tyrannical, and nationalistic nation or nations Ms. Li may or may not have been talking about.  The notable thing about such places for purposes of this post is that there are no reliable self correcting mechanisms at work.  Will citizens get angry and vote the bums out?  Not bloody likely.  At least not without a whole lot of shooting and explosions, that’s for sure.  Will people speak out freely about what’s troubling them?  Will they put their heads together and discuss and debate ideas about how to solve social issues?  No.  Not unless they’d like a long vacation in the basement of some concrete guest house.  More likely they’ll just nod their heads and go about their business and hope for the best.  The whole thing is actually a bit comical to me.  We all know it can’t work in the long run but no one knows when it will finally topple over.  Will it be next year?  Twenty years from now?  A hundred years from now?  I don’t think it could be much beyond that unless they have one heck of a system for choosing responsible leaders.  But anyway that’s plenty long enough for those in power today so who the hell cares, right?

Well, maybe that’s enough rambling for this week.  Summary?  Trump bad.  Democracy good.  Anonymous Chinese opinion writer confused but confident.  Keep ‘em coming China.  Always a pleasure.

References

Trump opens Pandora’s box in US.  Global Times.  March 14, 2016.  http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/973564.shtml.

I See Nazis

Welcome friends!

I suppose you read about the elderly conservative multibillionaire Tom Perkins who wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal the other day in which he claimed that Occupy Wall Street political activists and other progressives are like latter day Nazis?  Indeed, according to Mr. Perkins “progressive radicalism” is the natural descendant of Nazism.  Oh my gosh!  No, no; I didn’t mean oh my gosh we’d better start drafting people to fight against this new threat to our existence!  I meant oh my gosh what a load of c__ p!  It’s funny but it’s also a little weird, isn’t it?  Well, I suppose I might as well say a few syllables on the subject.  Everyone else has.

Of course, as many others have pointed out, the first thing that jumps out at one about Mr. Perkin’s statement is just how utterly preposterous it is.  Indeed, one can’t help but wonder if the guy is actually familiar at all with the historical phenomenon of Nazism or if he was just using the N word as a sort of generic slur.  After all, I don’t think it’s any big secret the actual historical Nazis were enthusiastically supported by people pretty much like Mr. Perkins himself, which is to say the wealthy industrialists and financiers of the time not only in Germany but other countries as well, such as Henry Ford here in the good old USA.  Yes, these economic and social bigwigs apparently saw the fascists primarily as a means to combat the encroaching Red Menace (by which I mean communism, not the type of “socialism” that appears in the term “national socialism,” which was a rather different beast indeed).  Nor do I think anyone could seriously describe the historical Nazis or their supporters as progressives or liberals in any sense.  They were not really proponents of the working man.  At least I don’t think anyone would have expected to see much in the way of unions or strikes or anything of that nature in the Third Reich.  Not unless they wanted a jackbooted kick to the head.  And I certainly don’t think anyone could claim they were motivated in any way by any sense of egalitarianism.  Their philosophy was your stereotypical elitist Ayn Rand / Friederich Neitsche / American conservative claptrap about the Great Man (and Great Woman I suppose) struggling valiantly against a sea of worthless moochers and takers.  Poor people, working people, and just average people like you and me were basically cannon fodder and units of production.  I suppose the Nazis may have tried to promote some sense of social cohesion and groupthink as a means to consolidate their political control but it was hardly the sort of thing one might hear from progressive activists here in the US.  It was more like everyone needs to get in line and follow the big shots because Germany is number one, everyone is against us, and the only way we’ll ever succeed is if everyone shuts up and does what they’re told with no further questions.  When was the last time you heard a progressive activist in the US talk like that?

But I digress.  Delving into the utter inaptness of Mr. Perkin’s remarks is not really a very interesting subject to me.  I don’t usually waste my time on such laughable nonsense.  No, I’m really more interested in why conservatives apparently feel compelled to keep saying things like this.  Let’s face it, in the past several years American conservatives have gotten into the rather bad habit of saying all manner of outlandish things, which often seem to involve Nazis for some reason.  Perhaps you recall shortly after the financial crisis of 2008 conservatives were already painting President Obama as a Nazi because he proposed some new financial regulations to prevent similar economic meltdowns in the future.  If you recall the news stories at the time I think the actual claim was that the prospect of additional regulatory oversight of Wall Street shenanigans was the moral equivalent of the Nazis invading Poland during WWII.  And then even further back we had some conservative blowhard or other talking about “liberal fascism” or some such rot.  Make no mistake about it.  This isn’t a one off by any means.  The idea that liberals and progressive are like Nazis has been a consistent theme in conservative thinking (or at least talking) for some time now.

But why?  Well, two main possibilities come to mind.  One is that contemporary conservatives are just very attracted to ludicrous histrionics and overblown rhetoric and consider saying outlandish things an appropriate way to motivate their overly excitable and apparently rather ill informed base.  The other is that there is something so unique about the mindset of wealthy conservatives in this country they honestly see themselves as about to be victimized by latter day Nazis in the guise of liberals and progressives.  Let me discuss both of these possibilities in turn.

The case for a conservative attraction to overblown rhetoric seems fairly strong to me, especially when one considers the way they’ve gotten into the habit of blowing everything and I mean everything out of proportion.  You know what I mean.  The president is a foreign Muslim radical who is determined to undermine the Constitution!  That type of thing.  One presumes they just don’t think they’d get very far saying anything reasonable about anything.  In this context the default characterization of anyone who disagrees with them may well be that they are Nazis.  After all, who really likes a Nazi anyway?  Here’s an example from an actual exchange in Congress.  Non-conservative, “The tax rate on the profits from investment income seems totally incommensurate with the tax rate on wages, which we think may raise some distributional concerns particularly in the long run.” Conservative, “You’re a Nazi.”  (That wasn’t a real exchange by the way.  Just a bit of humor to lighten the tone.  But it might have been real, don’t you agree?)

Moving up a level in terms of potential substantive content is the possibility conservatives feel liberals and progressives are like Nazis because they don’t share conservatives’ hatred of government or more accurately hatred of government insofar as it does anything beyond looking after the interests of wealthy conservatives.  If you recall the Nazis didn’t mind big government at all.  Mind you, they were famous for their antipathy to democratic government, the type we have here in the US.  Unfortunately, the distinction between different forms of government seems to be pretty much lost on modern American conservatives.  Anyway, you see what I’m saying, right?  If you set aside the bit about different forms of government you could say liberals and progressives are like Nazis because they appreciate the need for government.  That at least some conservatives may be thinking along these seems likely to me because when conservatives aren’t calling people Nazis they’re calling them commies, which again is kind of funny if you think about it in a historical context.  It would probably come as a big shock to the old timers to learn one can be both a Nazi and a commie.  But it does make one look for the commonality, which again I suppose would be that both the Nazis and the communists saw a role for government.  So that just brings me back to a theme I’ve discussed in many of my previous posts, which is that I think this argument or really insinuation I suppose is probably the biggest and most dangerous load of utter BS I’ve ever heard in all my life.  I really feel a little silly having to explain this but there’s a big difference between the form of democratic government we have here in the US and the totalitarian governments of the Third Reich and the Stalinist USSR.  If you go about glossing over this rather significant fact and prefer to talk about government in the abstract then I’m sorry to have to tell you but you’re not doing anyone any favors.  You should think about the impact you might be having on the feeble minded who may take what you’re saying at face value rather than appreciating it for the outrageous rhetorical flourish it is and I presume you mean it to be.  And if we’re talking about the proper role of democratic government then I think we’re talking about something I’ve discussed many times before.  Distributional issues involve what amounts to interpersonal conflicts of desire and, yes, we need government to resolve those sorts of conflicts if we’re going to resolve them in an ethical manner.  The question is not or at least should not be which solution generates a smaller government according to some particular metric.  I mean, if you really want to minimize government just let people shoot it out on the streets.  You don’t need any government at all for that solution.  Ask someone from Somalia.  The question is and should be how can we resolve the issue in an ethically satisfactory way and whatever size of government that solution requires is apparently the size of government we need.  In this case the real source of conservatives’ concerns seems rather obvious.  Under our current distributional arrangements they are the recipients of a vastly disproportionate share of our economic resources and they’d like to keep it that way.  So the solution that brings that about is naturally the solution they would like to convince other people involves not behaving like a Nazi or a commie, the proper size of government, and so on.  The other solution, the one where we change something up to get a bit more resources flowing to some other people, is what they would like to convince everyone is what a Nazi or a commie would do.  The size of government in that case would obviously be totally wrong.  In other words, it’s different when I do it.

Moving up to the final level of potential substantive content is the possibility conservatives are not just talking in a particularly flamboyant way but are expressing what they really feel: they are besieged by the modern equivalent of Nazis who are about to break all the windows in their various mansions in a replay of the historical Kristallnacht pogrom and perhaps even pack them off to murder camps in the countryside.  Sound pretty far fetched?  I mean, we’re talking about some of the most economically and politically powerful, privileged, coddled people in the entire country and hence world.  Ironically, however, that’s what I think makes this last possibility somewhat plausible.  You see, the most salient feature of conservatives in this country must be their massive sense of entitlement and self worth.  Remember according to the conservative social philosophy the distribution of resources in a market place and especially the particular market place we have here in the US is imbued with great ethical significance, so the fact they are multibillionaires implies to them that ethically speaking they are many, many, many times more important than average schmoes like you and me.  They’re Very Important People and no place more so than in their own minds.  That presumably is why they consider it perfectly appropriate we should allocate to them sufficient economic resources to allow them to indulge their every passing whim while other people suffer the various ills of relative economic deprivation and do things like sleep on the street, go without necessary health care, be driven to desperation and drug use and crime, witness the lives of their children and loved one being destroyed by unwholesome environments they are too poor to escape, and so on.  Given this overall mindset I don’t think it’s unreasonable at all to suppose many conservatives consider what would appear to most average people as some relatively trivial financial setback for someone in their situation, say a small decrement in their vast wealth from a change in the tax rates or what have you, as the moral equivalent of what would seem on the surface to be a much more drastic problem for people like you and me, such as being dragged off to a murder camp in the middle of a forest by a bunch of angry baboons.

Well, I just don’t know the answer.  I’ll keep an eye on this issue and see if I can make any headway.  Not that I think it should take any attention away from more serious questions such as for example what to do about the incredible wealth and income disparities that have developed in this country over the past several decades.  But it is an amusing question, don’t you think?  Do rich conservatives really see Nazis everywhere or are they just talking funny?  How could one ever tell?  I feel like I’m back in my introductory epistemology class.  Well, maybe if I can get a few more Nazi sightings in different contexts I might be able to piece it all together.  I’ll keep you posted.

References

What in the world: Comparing progressives to Nazis and free speech in the UK.  January 27, 2014.  BBC.  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-echochambers-25922096.

Billionaire apologises for Nazi comment in bus row.  January 28, 2014.  BBC.  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25930215.

Liberalism and Chinese Communism

Welcome friends!

A few weeks back (January 6, 2012) I did a post on liberalism and communism in which I talked about communism exclusively in a European context and mostly in the past tense.  However, I guess that isn’t really the whole story because there are still nominally communist countries in Asia with China the big kahuna in that respect.  And then I just happened to read an interesting article by a Chinese fellow that was all about why the Chinese political system is superior to the US system.  So I suppose I might as well complete my initial take on the whole communism theme and talk a bit about China... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Liberalism and Communism

Welcome friends!

A few weeks back I did a post on what I see as the relationship between modern conservatism and fascism (November 11, 2011), so this week I thought I’d do the right thing and write up a little companion piece on what I see as the much weaker relationship between modern liberalism and communism.

Now for me communism has always seemed like a sort of flip side to fascism.  Just as fascism arises when conservatives feel they can no longer control democratic political systems and use them to their own advantage, communism arises when liberals give up on democratic political systems because they see them as too beholden to economic elites to express the interests and needs of anyone else.  I think this is pretty much what happened in Russia in the early part of the twentieth century.  Basically, you had a bunch of poor, hungry, desperate people living under a rather brutal authoritarian regime who just sort of gave up on democratic government as a means of bettering their lives and hence gave up on the liberal ethos.  Of course, I’m not sure they actually had a lot of experience with it, so I’m not sure they really knew what they were talking about, but I guess they gave up on even the idea of it.  Although I obviously disagree with the path they chose I feel I’m not really in a very good position to judge these people because I never experienced what life was like as a down and out peasant in Tsarist Russia.  I’m guessing it wasn’t all that and a bag of chips.

Anyway, as was the case with fascism, I feel this rejection of democracy was really communism’s fatal flaw.  Once you stop going through the hard work of making arguments and trying to convince people of things and instead start talking about a special vanguard of know-it-alls, or a leader with a capital L, or whatever it is, then my friend you’re in deep, deep trouble.  Because history has shown all manner of incredible things are liable to happen once one eliminates the checks and balances of a democratic political system and the liberal intellectual framework associated with democracy (i.e., an interest in individual liberty, freedom of conscience, freedom of thought, freedom of the press, etc.)  Instead of the worst case result under democratic systems of a pack of confused and ignorant people talking endlessly and entirely beside the point and then stumbling willy-nilly into misguided policies that regress to the mean level of ignorance and incompetence, non-democratic systems move relatively efficiently and quickly to whatever idiotic and usually self-destructive destination some self-proclaimed political elite happens to have dreamed up.  In the case of the USSR, of course, we famously ended up with all manner of purges, pogroms, famines, gulags, secret police, foreign adventures, and what not.  I’m sorry, but it wasn’t a pretty picture.

Then another huge flaw with communism for me was simply its radicalism, in particular, the idea that to solve social problems one had to entirely remake society, change the nature of man, rewrite economics, and take on all manner of other implausible and Herculean tasks.  I mean, come on.  Let’s keep one foot in reality, shall we?  If you have a problem, for the sake of argument let’s say a few million starving peasants and a brutal and corrupt government that doesn’t really give a damn, let’s just work on it one step at a time.  If your democracy isn’t really functioning the way it should then take that up.  If you’re concerned about distributional issues then take those up.  If you see natural monopolies and oligopolies at work then take those up.  I understand it’s a little callous to the people who aren’t going to make it while we slowly inch and claw our way toward a better society the democratic way but sometimes that’s the best we can realistically manage.  Take a shortcut in the dark and you’re liable to walk right off the edge of a cliff.  Of course, if you’re one of the people who aren’t going to make it then I guess you wouldn’t really have anything to lose, but I’m talking from the perspective of society at large now.

And then I suppose the last big flaw with communism to my mind is that over time the fundamentally anti-democratic nature of the whole enterprise led it finally to express the values I associate with social and economic conservatism so in a sense it gradually transformed into its opposite.  This certainly seems to have been the case with respect to social conservatism at least.  Once one loses the liberal appreciation of the importance of diversity and freedom of thought and action one ends up with this incredible pressure for everyone to get on the same page (which is social conservatism all over), even if that page happens to involve doing things that are historically unusual like doing away with organized religion or whatever.  And I’m actually not even sure communism managed to prevent a weird sort of economic conservatism from developing as well.  From what I’ve read the USSR seems to have ended up with their own economic bigwigs who ostensibly deserved special consideration in terms of the distribution of goods and who ended up being quite cozy with the government, etc.  I don’t know, maybe overall they still had a greater concern for generating a just and humane distribution of goods than one sees in places like the US, where many people don’t even like to talk about it, let alone think about it, but I suspect they had at least some of the same type of elite status quo economic conservatism going on albeit in an unusual non-market formulation and with different people doing all the talking.

I think all of these elements of communism put it firmly at odds with liberal and humanist values.  So to state the obvious, unlike conservatives, I don’t feel at all that communism represented some type of ultimate expression of the liberal humanist ethos.  Not even close.

However, let me consider if there was anything at all I liked or at least didn’t particularly mind about communism in terms of either theory or practice just as a little case study for the conservative idea that liberals tend to be soft on communism.

Well, in terms of social philosophy, I suppose I don’t really mind the egalitarian and socialist ethos that was expressed in official communist ideology.  In fact, I tend to agree with that bit.  I think one does have to keep one eye on distributional concerns and I don’t think simply having a market system ensures everyone will be just fine.  Now I never really understood or thought very much of Marxian economics as a scientific theory but I have to say I did find it somewhat interesting simply because it looked at economic relationships with different value premises than one typically finds in discussions of neoclassical economics, which was rather refreshing and thought provoking.  Of course, I think one can discuss different value premises in the context of neoclassical economics, as well.  But let’s face it, we usually don’t.  Well, liberals do, but try discussing some of the usually unexpressed value judgements implicit in common presentations of neoclassical economic theory with a conservative some time and see what happens.  Then I suppose I also agree with communists’ assessment of religion, not in the sense of using non-democratic means to stifle it obviously but in terms of their overall intellectual attitude toward religion.  I mean, let’s face it, religion does function in many ways as the opiate of the masses.  And not just of the masses.  So I think they were right on that one.

Now I guess that for most economic conservatives in the US I’ve just declared myself a big old commie because I think the main problem most economic conservatives in this country had with communism was not its anti-democratic nature but the fact that it expressed a socialist ethos.  Indeed, it’s become rather obvious recently that many conservatives are pretty suspicious of democratic government themselves albeit for different reasons of course.  No, I think conservatives’ main beef with the communists was that the communists did not agree with them that the primary role of a political system is making a small economic elite of Special Worthies happy and keeping working people in line but were instead interested in raising the economic welfare of the entire society in a more or less equitable fashion.  (Well, I think many of the early communists were interested in that, anyway.  As I said before, I’m not so sure about the later ones.)  In other words, the big crime of the communists in the eyes of most economic conservatives was not that they were anti-democratic but that they did not accept the market definition of economic and social justice, and that’s the type of thing that I think gives economic conservatives nightmares.

In contrast, social conservatives in this country are all about religion so I suppose I don’t need to say much more about how social conservatives felt about communism and why.  Again, I think the big crime of communists for social conservatives was not their anti-democractic nature but the fact that they were atheists.  Of course, I’m sure they secretly applauded certain other elements of communism, such as the persecution of sexual minorities and things like that, but the main issue for social conservatives in this country is usually their ability to force other people to follow their religious precepts and I’m not sure they thought they would be able to do much of that under the old communist regimes.

Then in terms of history rather than social philosophy I suppose it may indeed be the case that I have a bit of a soft spot for the old USSR.  Not that I’m a big fan by any means.  As I hope I’ve already made clear, I understand they were fundamentally foes of the liberal humanist ethos so, you know, good riddance.  However, at the same time, I feel I understand how they got there.  That is, I suppose I understand why they might have felt the need for a revolution, and I suppose fighting a violent revolution against an entrenched social and economic elite and then fending off all the inevitable hostility from conservative forces in other countries didn’t exactly make for a sunny and optimistic disposition.

And, of course, I would like to add that I also appreciate the USSR’s role in taking down old Adolf and his posse of conservative bully boys.  It was obviously a horrible, horrible time in human history, I’m really glad I managed to miss it all, but there is something rather satisfying to me about how it all played out.  Here we had these great uber-conservative proponents of brute force, violence, cruelty, and intimidation knocking heads together and kicking down doors all across Europe until they got to the end of the block and finally kicked in the wrong door: the door to a society that not only didn’t see eye to eye with their social philosophy but that was even more brutal, violent, and determined to succeed at any cost than they were.  And we all know what happened after that.  Yes, they basically had their own assess (excuse me) kicked right the way back across Europe and their psychotic King Rat had the door to his own underground hiding hole kicked in.  You know, a Hollywood scriptwriter couldn’t have come up with this stuff.  Of course, I’m not sure the USSR was up to the task because of Joe Stalin and his thuggish henchmen or in spite of them, but they were running the show at the time and usually those running the show get at least some credit for any good things that happen on their watch so why should this case be any different?  Anyway, one thing’s for sure: you have to admire the sacrifice and determination of the common man and woman who managed to pull it off.  I know we played a role in ending the war as well, but I think rather a smaller role than we often like to take credit for.  And, yes, of course I realize the people of Eastern Europe weren’t exactly overjoyed at the ensuing decades of foreign communist domination but come on, it had to have been better than what they would have seen under the fascists with their open adulation of aggressive warfare, their racism, and their murder factories.  My thinking is were it not for the USSR the world could very easily have become a much, much uglier place than it is now, so no matter what else you might think about them you have to at least give them credit for that.

Finally, let me conclude by saying I personally find what happened after the fall of the USSR to be a little tragic.  You know, like many liberals, I guess I wish the place could have had some type of liberal democratic political and intellectual transformation while holding true to its historical socialist ethos.  I think it would have been interesting at the least and potentially instructive.  Instead, some of the countries involved seem to me to have gone into a sort of intellectual and cultural free fall.  Russia, in particular, seems to have devolved into a sort of third rate conservative market state with an ex-KGB strongman presiding behind the scenes over a motley parade of billionaires, oligarchs, organized crime syndicates, the Orthodox Church, all manner of xenophobic, homophobic, and racist social conservative skinheads (and mayors), a horde of unemployed poor people, and everything else one naturally expects to find in such a place.  I think at this point Russia should probably just apologize to the old revolutionaries who gave up the ghost trying to make their society a better place.  You know, sorry guys, we gave it a shot, but in the end we gave it all up for a quick ruble. Something like that.  I don’t know, sometimes I think they should just bring back the Tsar and get it over with.

Yes, it’s a funny world.  As a liberal and humanist, I feel I have precious little in common with the old time communists and indeed I seem to see rather more parallels between communism and modern conservatism than between communism and modern liberalism.  Yet I see how, for conservatives, I probably seem to have a great deal in common with communists.  So which is it, really?  Well, I don’t know.  I suppose it depends what you’re looking at.  Let’s just say whatever you like and leave it at that.