Quotulatiousness

June 21, 2024

Fractal dissidence

Filed under: Europe, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Fortissax notes some historic parallels between the many, many factions in Spain leading up to the catastrophe of the Spanish Civil War and the many, many factions of the dissident right in the Anglosphere and the rest of the diminishing western world today:

The Spanish Civil War, approximate Nationalist (pink) and Republican (blue) areas of control in September, 1936.
Map by NordNordWest with modifications by “Sting” via Wikimedia Commons.

We have serious issues on our hands. We must each contribute through our respective projects and instigate real-world change by pen, sword, or ploughshare. We don’t have time to split, fracture, insult, belittle, destroy each other’s reputations, or engage in character assassination. I liken the factionalism of the (terminally) online right to that of the factions in the Spanish Civil War. The online right is important because the internet is the new “public square”. As influential or more, as mass-action in living, breathing cities. The influence of discourse, media, and content on the internet is insurmountable. While small locally, the impact of each content maker, producer, writer, poet, and videographer is huge. We are part of a civilizational, some would even say global, culture, yet not of it. I will provide examples of some similarities I notice while reading through Peter Kemp’s “Mine Were of Trouble”.

In the buildup to the Spanish Civil War, you had conservative patriots (populists, anti-woke patriot-normies), traditionalist Christian monarchists (who parallel Christ-Is-King people), and the Falangist (who parallel the Vitalists, secular-right). This roughly, parallels the groupings of the Dissident Right today. I believe this is a good case study. History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes. All of them had a lot more in common than they opposed. For example, consider the following points:

  • Anti-Communism: Both the Falangists and the Requetés were strongly anti-communist and opposed the Spanish Republic, which they associated with communism, liberalism, and anarchism. They viewed the leftist factions as threats to Spanish traditions, religion, and social order. Today, the Managerial Elite of every single western country has weaponized the New-Left of decades past to use as shock troops against the good people of each nation. We all agree the mass psychosis of capital backed DEI civic cult, their nihilistic, suicidal anti-life acolytes are the most destructive group the human species has ever seen.
  • Support for Strong Leaders: Both groups eventually supported General Francisco Franco’s leadership, despite some initial differences in ideology and goals. Franco’s ability to unify the Nationalist forces was crucial to their eventual victory. In many Western countries today, people are rallying behind Trump, Bardella, Farage, Bernier to name a few. They are not perfect, but they are increasingly influenced by Dissident Right ideas, and culture.
  • Nationalism: The Falangists and the Requetés were deeply nationalist, believing in the unity and greatness of Spain. They were committed to preserving Spain as a single, undivided nation-state. Today, Dissidents of all stripes support nationalism an civilizational cooperation against outside threats like China, the emerging Republic of India, and the Islamic world, who seek to make excursions in Europe.
  • Militarism: Both factions believed in the application of force when necessary to achieve their goals and restore order in Spain. They were heavily involved in the Nationalist military efforts during the civil war. Both the religious right, and the secular Vitalists ostensibly believe a strong body, mind and soul are necessary to enact change. Both hold excellence as a core value, although perhaps one more than the other.
  • Benevolent Authoritarianism: Both the Falangists and the Requetés supported authoritarian forms of government. While the Falangists leaned towards a Nietzsche inspired model, the Requetés, rooted in traditional Christian monarchism, were also supportive of strong, centralized authority to maintain order and uphold traditional values.
  • Natural Social Order: Both groups believed in a natural social order or organic hierarchy. This concept held that society should be structured according to natural, hierarchical lines, which they saw as inherent and beneficial for maintaining stability and harmony. Do the religious right, and the Vitalists not believe this? That the strong, the beautiful, healthy, are fit to lead? That the most capable should be given the opportunity to advance socially?
  • Community Over Individual: While recognizing and respecting the Western man’s innate streak of liberty and individualism, both groups prioritized the needs and values of the community over the individual. They believed that individuals found their true purpose and identity within the larger community and that communal values should guide social and political life. When everyone is doing their part, all prosper.

June 16, 2024

Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four at 75

Filed under: Books, Britain, Europe, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ed West on the attempts by many different parties to claim the legacy of George Orwell for their own purposes:

No writer’s legacy and approval is so fought over as George Orwell, whose final — and most celebrated — work Nineteen-Eighty-Four was published seventy five years ago this month.

The most influential piece of political fiction in history, such is the success of the dystopian novel that its themes have been recited to death by columnists, often by people I imagine he would have loathed (including me).

Orwell’s nightmare became a particular focus of conservative commentators from the 1990s with the rise of “political correctness”, which might be seen as both a form of politeness and at the same time a way of policing opinions by changing the language. As Orwell’s Newspeak was described, it was to ensure that dissent cannot be voiced because “the necessary words were not available”. Newspeak, along with thought police and doublethink, has become a part of our political vocabulary, while even the proles have Big Brother to entertain them. No one can doubt that Orwell has won the final victory, and the struggle for the writer’s soul forms part of Dorian Lynskey’s entertaining and informative The Ministry of Truth, a biography of Nineteen-Eighty-Four which was published at the time of the last significant anniversary.

Lynskey, a hugely gifted writer who specialises in the relationship between arts and politics, is very much on the Left and sees the modern parallels with the Trumpian disdain for truth, although the great man himself is now often more cited by the Right. Indeed the anniversary was recently celebrated by the free-market think-tank the Institute of Economic Affairs with a new edition and an introduction by my friend Christopher Snowdon.

Orwell was a paradoxical man, contradictory, sometimes hypocritical (aren’t we all?). In the preface to his book, publisher Victor Gollancz wrote that “The truth is that he is at one and the same time an extreme intellectual and a violent anti-intellectual. Similarly he is a frightful snob – still (he must forgive me for saying this), and a genuine hater of every form of snobbery.”

As Lynskey writes: “Until the end of his life, Orwell acknowledged that microbes of everything he criticised existed in himself. In fact, it was this awareness of his own flaws that inoculated him against utopian delusions of human perfectibility.”

Such awareness is surprisingly rare among intelligent journalists and commentators, especially when ideology takes a grip — and Orwell was introduced to this reality in quite brutal form.

The background to both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm was Orwell’s disillusionment during the Spanish Civil War. The conflict between Nationalists and Republican galvanised western intellectuals and marked the turning point when the intelligentsia became firmly wedded to the Left. Over a thousand writers went to fight in Spain, and while few entirely understood the political situation they did grasp, as Malcolm Muggeridge said, that “it seemed certain that in Spain Good and Evil were at last joined in bloody combat”.

In reality it was a conflict in which both sides committed appalling atrocities, although Franco’s forces certainly outdid their enemies in murderous scale. That ruthlessness partly explains their victory, but the Republicans were not helped by the seemingly endless factionalism that saw various squabbling leftist acronyms fight each other, and which makes the war hard to follow. There was the socialist UGT, the Russian-backed PSUC, the anarchist FAI and anarcho-syndicalist CNT, and also the POUM, Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification, which rather belied its name by falling out with both Stalin and Trotsky.

Spain was an education for Orwell. Witnessing in Barcelona a Russian known only as “Charlie Chan”, allegedly an agent of NKVD, he wrote: “I watched him with some interest for it was the first time I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies — unless one counts journalists”.

He recorded how, with the honourable exception of the Manchester Guardian, “One of the dreariest effects of this has been to teach me that the Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right”. Welcome to the Intellectual Dark Web, George Orwell.

May 17, 2024

QotD: Canadian socialism

Filed under: Cancon, Politics, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

Canada is being destroyed by a form of socialism, but it is not called socialism. Even the NDP shy away from the s-word, and did so long before the fall of the Berlin Wall. How do you fight an idea, or even examine it, when there is a tacit social convention not to speak about it. Forget the Victorian morality brigades fainting at the mention of sex or women’s suffrage. Our modern moralists, who, in this country, are mostly on the left, will not let you use the s-word when talking about issues of public policy. To do so is to be an extremist. A sin at least as bad as immodesty a century ago.

We are a nation of muddlers. Until we grow out of that I’m afraid the words “American-style” and “ideologically driven” will continue to frighten us away from seriously debating issues of public policy.

“Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”, Gods of the Copybook Headings, 2005-05-14.

May 16, 2024

The Thüringen Project – “where our greatest legal minds are at this very moment brainstorming ways to defend Thuringian democracy from the grave threat of ordinary people expressing their political preferences via voting”

Filed under: Germany, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

eugyppius on the brave defenders of German democracy in Thuringia (and Brandenburg and Saxony) who are doing everything they can to ensure that the unwashed masses don’t disturb the stately progress toward their long-dreamed-of utopia:

“German flag” by fdecomite is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

To live in Germany in 2024 is to be lectured constantly about democracy. An endless parade of doubtful personalities – pundits, experts and a lot of very shrill women – appear on the television every night to tell you which parties are democratic, which people are democratic and therefore who enjoys democratic legitimacy. As we have seen, however, the whole concept of democracy is very confusing. Those people and organisations who want to mute free expression and ban political parties are all held to be extremely democratic, while those parties that demand more direct democracy and talk constantly about respecting the popular will are the direct modern equivalent of illiberal antidemocratic fascists.

To make all of this even harder, we are told that the upcoming September elections in Thüringen, Brandenburg and Saxony present a grave threat to democracy. To counteract this threat we have things like the Thüringen Project, where our greatest legal minds are at this very moment brainstorming ways to defend Thuringian democracy from the political preferences of actual voters. Crucially, the very existence of the Thüringen Project means that democracy must still reign supreme in Thüringen. Otherwise, there would be nothing for the democratic police of the Thüringen Project to defend. We therefore need only study Thuringian politics in their present state to gain a better idea of what this mysterious, shape-shifting, elusive phenomenon we call German democracy might be.

We will start at the top. The current Minister President (i.e., governor) of Thüringen is a highly democratic man named Bodo Ramelow:

Ramelow is a member of Die Linke, or the Left Party, which is the direct successor of the Socialist Unity Party (or SED) that used to govern the DDR. That might seem baffling, as the SED and the DDR were anything but democratic. Still more baffling is the fact that the constitutional protectors suspected Ramelow of antidemocratic tendencies and even surveilled him for many years. But democracy as we have learned is extremely complicated, and whatever antidemocratic essence Ramelow may have harboured in the past, he is a stalwart democratic politician today. He is also a huge fan of the mobile game Candy Crush, which he enjoys playing during government meetings. That at least seems unambiguously democratic, and perhaps it is even enough to overcome Ramelow’s political unreliability in other respects.

[…]

In summary: A constitutional protector who owes his office to a Minister President who was appointed to a second term via the anti-constitutional interventions of outsiders is now vowing to use his office to forestall political developments that may deprive his Minister President of power in the future. It is almost like “democracy” in Thüringen is synonymous with left-wing government. Elections which threaten to deprive Bodo Ramelow of office or his left-wing coalition of power are by definition anti-democratic, deplorable and perhaps even illegal.

Thuringians can vote for whichever party they want, but their votes are only democratic if they are cast for those specific parties. If Kramer has his way, Thuringia will soon achieve the democratic end-state – one in which the sad reality of popular sovereignty in practice will be replaced with a theoretical popular sovereignty that exists entirely in an ideal, Platonic form, unchanging and as it ought to be, now and forever.

February 4, 2024

Civil strife in Spain before the full civil war broke out

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Niccolo Soldo continues his in-depth look at the situation in Spain leading up to the outbreak of the civil war in 1936. It’s clear that bloodshed was in the immediate future — so much so that it’s almost surprising that it took as long as it did for the war to start in earnest:

Flag of Spain during the Second Spanish Republic (1931-1939).
Image by SanchoPanzaXXI via Wikimedia Commons.

In 1930, almost half of all Spaniards over the age of 10 were illiterate. The country was still overwhelmingly agrarian, with a small number of very wealthy landowners owning about 2/3rds of all the arable land in Andalusia alone, employing almost a million landless campesinos at barely subsistence-level wages. Industry was almost entirely found only in the north and northeast. Industrialization was beginning to pick up pace by the turn of the century, but was still very far behind the rest of Western Europe by the time the Second Spanish Republic came into being in 1931.

Despite Spain having one foot in the past, its other foot was in the present, a present that was rapidly changing and very unstable politically. The loss of confidence in King Alfonso XIII on the part of the middle and upper classes led to his abdication which opened the door to the establishment of the Second Republic, a democracy in a time when democracy itself was under attack throughout Europe, having already lost in Russia and Italy, and on its way to disappearing in other countries, most notably Germany.

The end of the monarchy was celebrated throughout the country (with some exceptions), but not always for the same reason. Yes, anti-monarchist forces viewed the monarchy as retrograde and out of step with the modern era, but only the liberals and various republican parties were committed to democracy and parliamentary politics. The Socialists (PSOE) for example, were riven by factionalism and a generational divide whereby there were those who sought to use power in office to both settle scores with their old enemies in the military, the landowning class, and especially the Catholic Church, and to actually launch a revolution along Marxist lines. For them, the Second Republic was a vehicle for a larger goal, and not an end goal in and of itself. Anarchists celebrated the end of the monarchy, but they were opposed to any and all government on principle. For Anarchists, the Second Republic was also a path towards revolution as well. For Catalan separatists, the Spanish Second Republic was a stepping-stone towards independence, or at least towards as much political and economic autonomy as possible.

Conservatives were in a state of disarray upon the establishment of the Second Republic. Despite this condition, all the factions that could be grouped as “conservatives” largely supported the new regime … at least at the outset. Once the agenda of the first government of the Second Republic was made public, opposition began to harden.

Rather than trying to generate a grand consensus among the various factions that dominated Spanish politics, economics, and society in 1931, the liberals, republicans, and socialists who led the country from 1931-33 instead chose to attack the core interests of their political rivals to the right. The military was to be slashed via the retirement of a large number of its officer class, land was to be seized from wealthy landowners in order to redistribute it to the poor and landless, and the Catholic Church was to be stripped of its role in educating young Spaniards, with the Jesuits expelled from the country altogether, and many churches, convents, monasteries, episcopal residences, parish houses, seminaries, etc. expropriated by the Spanish state. Private Catholic schools were also expropriated and turned into government-run ones instead. The Church was also forced to pay taxes and was banned from all industry and trade, “… enforced with strict police severity and widespread mob violence”.

These attacks on the Catholic Church (which also saw the torching of churches, monasteries, and convents in 1931 as we saw in the previous entry in this series) resulted in the release of a Papal Encyclical by Pope Pius XI on June 5, 1933 entitled “Dilectissima Nobis“. In this encyclical, Pius XI decries the persecution of the Church in Spain, and asks Spanish Catholics to defend themselves and the Church from attacks by the government. He describes the attacks as “… [an] offense not only to Religion and the Church, but also to those declared principles of civil liberty on which the new Spanish regime declares it bases itself”. As we already saw previously, then-Minister of War in the Spanish cabinet, Manuel Azaña, famously declared that “All the convents in Spain are not worth a single Republican life“.

There was no attempt to build a solid democratic foundation for the Second Republic whatsoever. Instead, a cultural revolution was quickly ushered in, and an agrarian revolution was threatened, but only implemented half-heartedly. The first government of the Second Spanish Republic managed to alienate the military, the landowning class, conservatives, and the Catholic Church overnight.

On the other side of the political divide, the centrists were attacked from the left for not going far enough, fast enough. Campesinos and small landowners demanded immediate expropriation of latifundia estates to be redistributed to them. The youth wing of the PSOE urged the nationalization of all industry, which led to factionalism within the socialist groupings. Less radical socialists pointed to the extension of voting rights to women, to the enshrining of the eight hour workday in law, and to the increase in wages for industry workers as the biggest successes of the first two years of the Second Republic. These radical factions were not content with these incremental gains, and demanded “more, now!”

This radicalism culminated in the “Casas Viejas Incident”, which I described in the previous entry:

    Staying true to form, the anarchists were restless and, as is their nature, opposed the present government in Spain as they opposed all governments, viewing them as inherently oppressive. Their massive labour union, CNT, led by the vanguard of FAI, began demonstrations in various locations across the country, with the greatest actions taking place in Andalusia. Political violence ensued, with two Civil Guards wounded. The Assault Guards, set up by the new Constitutional authorities in the Republic to provide a new force to purportedly protect those who lacked protection under the Monarchy, raided the village of Casas Viejas near Cadiz. They encountered a group of anarchists locked in a house and set fire to it (while disarming others in the village who were armed), and then executed them.

This act of state violence was committed not by fascists, nationalists, royalists, or even conservatives. It was committed by a liberal-socialist regime and its purposely-created security force, against anarchists. All the parties involved in this incident would find themselves on the same side in the not-too-distant Spanish Civil War.

January 26, 2024

Javier Milei to the parasites in Davos – You are the problem

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jon Miltimore on Argentine President Javier Milei’s visit to the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this month:

Argentine President Javier Milei speaking at the World Economic Forum gabfest in Davos, Switzerland, January 2024.
Photo by Flickr – World Economic Forum | CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Javier Milei went to Davos to attend the 54th annual World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting last week.

Attendees of the meetings — often derided as global elites who bask in their pomp, privilege, and luxury as they try to address global problems with collectivist solutions — received a jarring message from Argentina’s newly-elected president: you are the problem.

“Today I’m here to tell you that the Western world is in danger,” Milei said in his prepared remarks. “And it is in danger because those who are supposed to have to defend the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism, and thereby to poverty.”

[…]

This is just a sprinkling of the topics discussed in Davos, of course, but you’ll notice a common current that runs throughout them: the solution to virtually every problem requires more government and “collective action”, and less freedom.

This is precisely the kind of thinking Milei, a self-described libertarian, took aim at in his speech, which was a clarion call for leaders to reject collectivist thinking and embrace individual freedom.

“The main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism,” Milei told the audience. “We’re here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world; rather they are the root cause.”

As Milei pointed out, few can better attest to the failures of collectivism than Argentines. The country surged to prosperity in the latter half of the nineteenth century, only to experience a massive drop in prosperity due to its embrace of Peronism, a blend of fascism and socialism named after the left-leaning revolutionary Juan Domingo Perón (1895–1974) who dominated Argentine politics for decades following his initial ascent to power in 1946.

While many of Milei’s predecessors, such as the jet-setting Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, a self-described Peronist and progressive, were delivering international speeches in Copenhagen about tackling climate change through “a new multilateralism”, Argentines watched their country slowly collapse into poverty.

By embracing protectionist trade policies and rampant government spending, Peronists set Argentina’s economy on fire. By 2023, 40 percent of the population was in poverty and inflation had reached more than 140 percent due to massive money printing. Because of the constantly eroding value of pesos, Argentine merchants are compelled to update prices on chalkboards throughout the day.

The human disaster in Argentina was not caused by climate change or AI or “misinformation”.

It was caused by Argentine politicians and bureaucrats abandoning free-market capitalism, an economic system that brought about unprecedented human prosperity across the globe, and a stark contrast to its various collectivist counterparts — fascism, Peronism, communism, anti-capitalism, etc.

This is why Mr. Milei called capitalism the only “morally desirable” economic system, and the only one that can alleviate global poverty.

December 9, 2023

Venezuela’s renewed imperialism

Filed under: Americas, History, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Like many of us, Colby Cosh is trying to figure out what’s going on in Venezuela these days, as the government “won” a plebiscite to push its long-standing claim for a huge chunk of next-door neighbour Guyana’s territory:

Map showing the two disputed land areas of Guyana. The red region is disputed with Venezuela (Guayana Esequiba) and the yellow region is disputed with Suriname (Tigri or New River Triangle)
Map by SurinameCentral via Wikimedia Commons.

I’ve been plunging into the weeds — as some of my readers perhaps are — trying to figure out why Venezuela is trying to take over three-quarters of the land area of neighbouring Guyana. I mean, yes, duh, the simple answer is “oil”. The relevant part of Guyana — the sparsely populated, heavily Indigenous Essequibo region west of the river of the same name — has been claimed by Venezuela with varying degrees of vigour and indignation since it became independent from Spain. In the last decade or so, it has come to light there is abundant oil beneath the continental shelf belonging to the Essequibo area.

It might, in fact, be enough oil to make Guyana the world’s largest crude producer in a manner of months. Such an event would almost certainly create an unbearable crisis for the radical-left Venezuelan government, which has fouled up its own oil industry, obliterated its currency and created the single largest refugee crisis in the recorded history of the Americas. And so, the North Korea of the Western Hemisphere is suddenly behaving in an awfully warlike — one might say imperialistic — manner towards a tiny neighbour. Which is, in turn, why the United States is rattling the sabre in Guyana’s defence.

The basic situation in the Essequibo region in the centuries after Columbus was that the territory de jure belonged to Spain but was often really in the hands of Dutch mariners and colonists. There was a long cycle of Dutch incursion and Spanish retaliation. Venezuela inherited and pursued the Spanish claims upon independence — originally as part of the Republic of Gran Colombia (1811) and then as a sovereign state unto itself (1830). Britain gained the Dutch territory in the Napoleonic Wars and incorporated Essequibo into the unified colony of British Guiana in 1831.

The two countries recognized that they had a big disagreement over where the Venezuela-British Guiana border might actually lie. But Venezuela wasn’t in a position to pick a fight with the British Empire, and British public opinion couldn’t be convinced to care very much about the problem. The two countries kicked the can down the road and mutually agreed not to colonize the area.

Fast-forward a bit: in the 1870s, gold was discovered in the disputed zone, waaay over toward the Venezuelan side, and in the 19th century, gold meant a gold rush. British and American privateers started turning up with shovels and pickaxes in the interior, sovereignty be damned. Venezuela eventually began to lobby the U.S. executive branch for redress, reminding American politicians of their precious Monroe Doctrine (which was technically incompatible with the existence of a “British Guiana”). Britain, coming under uncomfortable diplomatic pressure, agreed to submit the border question to neutral arbitration.

And here we come to the heart of the quarrel. The U.S. and Britain set up an arbitration panel of the classic 19th-century kind — the same kind of panel, in fact, that fixed up much of the U.S.-Canada border during the same period. This panel had two American Supreme Court justices representing Venezuelan interests; two equally high-ranking British judges; and a neutral fifth man borrowed from the Russian Empire — the Estonian international-law scholar Friedrich Martens (1845-1909). Throughout the 19th century, Russia had often been used in this way by western powers as an honest broker, and arbitration was seen as a universal means of peaceful dispute resolution — the great hope of the world’s future.

And yet, like what seems to be every border dispute in South America since the Spanish skedaddled, an agreement doesn’t seem to last more than the lifetime of one of the governments that negotiated it and some of them aren’t even that durable. Ed Nash has a video summarizing the economic and military state of affairs that helps explain why this dispute is potentially of global concern.

November 5, 2023

Hugo Chávez

Filed under: Americas, History, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The most recent entry in the Dictator Book Club at Astral Codex Ten looks at former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez:

Former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.
Photo by Roberto stuckert Filho/PR via Wikimedia Commons.

All dictators get their start by discovering some loophole in the democratic process. Xi realized that control of corruption investigations let him imprison anyone he wanted. Erdogan realized that EU accession talks provided the perfect cover to retool Turkish institutions in his own image.

Hugo Chavez realized that there’s no technical limit on how often you can invoke the emergency broadcast system. You can do it every day! The “emergency” can be that you had a cool new thought about the true meaning of socialism. Or that you’re opening a new hospital and it makes a good photo op. Or that opposition media is saying something mean about you, and you’d like to prevent anyone from watching that particular channel (which is conveniently bound by law to air emergency broadcasts whenever they occur).

This might not be the only reason or even the main reason Hugo Chavez ended up as dictator. But it’s a very representative reason. If Putin is basically a spook and Modi is basically an ascetic, Hugo Chavez was basically a showman. He could keep everyone’s attention on him all the time (the emergency broadcast system didn’t hurt). And once their attention was on him, he could delight them, enrage them, or at least keep them engaged. And he never stopped. Hugo Chavez was the marathon runner of dictators.

    He was on television almost every day for hours at a time, invariably live, with no script or teleprompter, mulling, musing, deciding, ordering. His word was de facto law, and he specialised in unpredictable announcements: nationalisations, referenda, troop mobilizations, cabinet shuffles. You watched not just for news value. The man was a consummate performer. He would sing, dance, rap; ride a horse, a tank, a bicycle; aim a rifle, cradle a child, scowl, blow kisses; act the fool, the statesman, the patriarch. There was a freewheeling, improvised air to it all. Suspense came from not knowing what would happen.

    There would be no warning. Soap operas, films, and baseball games would dissolve and be replaced by the familiar face seated behind a desk or maybe the wheel of a tractor … it could [last] minutes or hours. Sometimes Chavez wouldn’t be talking, merely attending a ceremony … One time Chavez decided to personally operate a machine on the Caracas-to-Charallave rail tunnel. A television and radio announcer improvised commentary for the first few minutes, but gradually ran out of things to say as the president continued drilling, drilling, drilling. Radio listeners, blind to Chavez pounding away, were baffled and then alarmed by the mechanical roar monopolizing the airwaves. Some thought it signaled a coup.

In 2012, while he was dying of cancer, Chavez gave “a state of the nation address lasting nine and a half hours. A record. No break, no pause.” Put a TV camera in front of him, and the man was a machine.

If he had been an ordinary celebrity, he would be remembered as a legend. But he went too far. He became his TV show. He optimized national policy for ratings. The book goes into detail on one broadcast in particular, where he was filmed walking down Venezuela’s central square, talking to friends. He remarked on how the square needed more monuments to glorious heroes. But where could he put them? The camera shifted to a mall selling luxury goods. A lightbulb went on over the dictator’s head: they could expropriate the property of the rich capitalist elites who owned the mall, and build the monument there. Make it so! Had this been planned, or was it really a momentary whim? Nobody knew.

Then he would move on to some other topic. An ordinary citizen would call in and describe a problem. Chavez would be outraged, and immediately declare a law which solved that problem in the most extreme possible way. Was this staged? Was it a law he had been considering anyway? Again, hard to tell.

Sometimes everyone in government would ignore his decisions to see if he forgot about them. Sometimes he did. Other times he didn’t, and would demand they be implemented immediately. Nobody ever had a followup plan. They expropriated the mall, but Chavez’s train of thought had already moved on, and nobody had budgeted for the glorious monuments he had promised. The mall sat empty; it became a dilapidated eyesore. Laws declared on the spur of the moment to sound maximally sympathetic to one person’s specific problem do not, when combined into a legal system, form a great basis for governing a country.

But Chavez TV was also a game show. The contestants were government ministers. The prize was not getting fired. Offenses included speaking out against Chavez:

    Chavez clashed with and fired all his ministers at one time or another but forgave and reinstated his favorites. Nine finance ministers fell in succession … it was palace custom not to give reasons for axing. Chavez, or his private secretary, would phone the marked one to say thank you but your services are no longer required. Good-bye. The victim was left guessing. Did someone whisper to the comandante? Who? Richard Canan, a young, rising commerce minister, was fired after telling an internal party meeting that the government was not building enough houses. Ramon Carrizales was fired as vice president after privately complaining about Cuban influence. Whatever the cause, once the axe fell, expulsion was immediate. The shock was disorienting. Ministers who used to bark commands and barge through doors seemed to physically shrink after being ousted … they haunted former colleagues at their homes, seeking advice and solace, petitioning for a way back to the palace. “Amigo, can you have a word with the chief?” One minister, one of Chavez’s favorites, laughed when he recounted this pitiful lobbying. “They know it as well as I do. In [this government] there are no amigos.”

… or taking any independent action:

    [A minister] was not supposed to suggest an initiative, solve a problem, announce good news, theorise about the revolution, or express an original opinion. These were tasks for the comandante. His fickleness encouraged ministers to defer implementation until they were certain of his wishes. In any case they spent so much time on stages applauding — it was unwise to skip protocol events — that there was little opportunity for initiative. Thus the oil minister Rafael Ramirez would lurk, barely visible, while the comandante signed a lucrative deal with Chevron […]

    But upon command, the stone would transform into a whirling dervish … the comandante‘s impulsiveness demanded instant, urgent responses. He would become consumed by a theme. Rice! Increase rice production! The order would ricochet through [the government]. The agriculture, planning, transport, commerce, finance, and infrastructure ministers would work around the clock devising a scheme or credits, loans, cooperatives, mills and trucks to have it ready, at least on paper, for the comandante to unveil on his Sunday show. Thus was born the Mixed Company for Socialist Rice. Then, the next week, chicken! Cheaper chicken! The same ministers would forget about rice while they rushed to squeeze farmers, truckers, and supermarkets so that the comandante could say, on his next show, that chicken was cheaper.

… or, worst of all, not enjoying Chavez’s TV shows enough:

    [Ministers had to] arrange their features into appropriate expressions when on camera or in the comandante‘s sight line. This was tricky when the comandante did something foolish or bizarre because the required response could contradict instinct … Missing a cue could be fatal. During a show the comandante‘s laser-beam gaze swung from face to face, spotlighting expressions, seeking telltale tics. Immediately after a broadcast, Chavez reviewed the footage, casting a professional eye over the staging, lighting, camera angles — and audience reaction.

    The comandante‘s occasional lapses into ridiculous were inevitable. He spoke up to nine hours at a time live on television, without a script … Being capricious and clownish also sustained interest in the show and underlined his authority. No other government figure, after all, dared show humour in public. But on occasion this dissolved into absurdity. Who tells a king he is being a fool?

    Ministers faced another test of the mask in September 2007, when the comandante announced clocks would go back half an hour. The aim was to let children and workers wake up in daylight, he said. “I don’t care if they call me crazy, the new time will go ahead, let them call me whatever they want. I’m not to blame. I received a recommendation and said I liked the idea.” Chavez wanted it implemented within a week — causing needless chaos — and bungled the explanation, saying clocks should go forward rather than back. If ministers realized the mistake, they said nothing, only smiled and clapped […]

    On rare occasions the correct response was not obvious, sowing panic. In a speech to mark World Water Day in 2011, the comandante said capitalism may have killed life on Mars. “I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilisation on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet.” Some in the audience tittered, assuming it was a joke, then froze when they saw neighbors turned to stone. To these audience veterans it was unclear if it was a joke, so they adopted poker faces, pending clarification. It never came; the comandante moved on to other topics.

How did a once-great nation reach this point? I read Rory Carroll’s Comandante to find out.

September 5, 2023

QotD: “Karl Marx was right after all”

Filed under: Government, History, Politics, Quotations, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Alas, as my fictional namesake said somewhere, time has a habit of turning all our lies into truths. It turns out Karl Marx was right after all. Who, I ask you, is more cartoonishly evil, more like the caricature capitalist of paranoid Communist fantasies, than Jeff Bezos? Mark Zuckerberg? Tim Cook? Jack Dorsey? Sundar Pichai?

We’re actually living, comrades, in the class-warfare world Marx preached in the 1840s. Everything Marx said about the factory owners of the First Industrial Revolution, that seemed so luridly absurd that even other Socialists criticized him for it, is true of the tech fascists of the Biden-Harris Revolution. Solzhenitsyn cites Russian writers from the late nineteenth century noting that Marxian socialism would end up as nothing more than dialectically-constructed feudalism, and lo, here we are. America in 2021 looks almost exactly like the USSR looked upon Lenin’s death …

… that was 1924, gang, and in case you’ve forgotten, what happened next was a vicious intra-Party civil war, in which Stalin crushed his enemies. AOC makes a pretty unlikely Trotsky, but it’s no less ludicrous than the thought of Nancy Pelosi as Koba … but that’s just the thing, isn’t it? We’ve been noting here for years that the modern Left is dedicated to being the Hollow Men in all things. They’re Revolutionaries without a Revolution — they go on and on (and on and on and on) about fighting the power and sticking it to the Man, even though they, themselves, have been the Man since at least 1974. They’re moralizers without morality — you’ll be scolded for not being as perverse as humanly possible. And, of course, their politics is a cult of personality without the personality — not even Orwell or Kafka could’ve come up with the Party installing an obvious dementia patient as its figurehead, not even if you’d dropped LSD in their tea.

As always — and yes, even in the depths of Stalin’s terror — the real rulers are the nomenklatura, the apparatchiki. Not even Koba the Dread can be everywhere. Being Hollow Men, our Postmodern Leftist masters have decided to dispense with the whole Kremlin thing. Who needs the NKVD, the gulag, the dreaded Lubyanka? The Junior Volunteer Thought Police “fact checking” everything on social media will do it for free, and much more efficiently, at which point their fellow travelers in the banking system will simply cut the badthinkers off. The only reason the gulag persisted after Khrushchev’s “secret speech” was that the Soviets, those fools, wanted to exploit their natural resources themselves, to build things themselves; labor camps were thus integral to the Soviet economy. Our masters don’t care about that, and their masters, the Chinese, certainly don’t. Much more efficient, and psychologically effective, to let the unperson simply starve in the middle of the town square, pour encourager les autres.

But hey, at least we’ll have some fun figuring out who the new Trotsky is. Again, my money’s on AOC — she’s so stupid that she’s bound to do something irrecoverably dumb sooner or later, after which she gets the digital icepick. That’ll be a hoot. Enjoy what parts of the spectacle you can, comrades – if you’re a student of human folly, you’re going to love the next few decades, because Marx was right about that too, the bastard — second time as farce.

Severian, “Marx Was Right After All (on ongoing series”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-01-12.

June 2, 2023

The idiocy of trying to portray political systems on a single spectrum

Filed under: Economics, Education, Government, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Lawrence W. Reed explains why trying to illustrate the similarities and differences of political systems using only a single axis conceals more than it reveals, especially for students:

In classes on Government and Political Science, with few exceptions, students in both high school and college are taught that the so-called “political spectrum” (or “political/economic” spectrum) looks like this: Communism and Socialism reside on the Left, Capitalism and Fascism dwell on the Right. Various mixtures of those things lie somewhere in between:

This is not only false and misleading, it is also idiocy. Toss it into the trash bin and demand a refund from the teacher who presented it as fact, or as any kind of insightful educational tool.

At the very least, a spectrum that looks like that should raise some tough questions. Why should socialists and fascists be depicted as virtual opposites when they share so much in common — from their fundamental, intellectual principles to their methods of implementation? If a political spectrum is supposed to illustrate a range of relationships between the individual and the State, or the very size and scope of the State, then why are systems of Big State/Small Individuals present at both ends of it?

On any other topic, the two ends of a spectrum would depict opposites.

[…]

My contention is that if Communism, Socialism, Fascism and Capitalism all appear on the same range line, it is terribly misleading and utterly useless to place the first two on the left and the second two on the right. The placement that makes the most sense is this one:

The perspective represented in this sketch immediately arouses dispute because its implications are quite different from what students are typically taught. The inevitable objections include these three:

1. Communism and fascism cannot be close together because communists and fascists fought each other bitterly. Hitler attacked Stalin, for example!

    This objection is equivalent to claiming, “Al Capone and Bugs Moran hated and fought each other so they can’t both be considered gangsters”. Or, “Since Argentina and Brazil compete so fiercely in football, both teams cannot be composed of footballers”.

    Both communism and fascism demonstrate in actual practice an extremely low regard for the lives and rights of their subject peoples. Why should anyone expect their practitioners to be nice to each other, especially when they are rivals for territory and influence on the world stage?

    We should remember that Hitler and Stalin were allies before they were enemies. They secretly agreed to carve up Poland in August 1939, leading directly to World War II. The fact that Hitler turned on Stalin two years later is nothing more than proof of the proverb, “There’s no honor among thieves”. Thieves are still thieves even if they steal from each other.

2. Under communism as Karl Marx defined it, government “withers away”. So it cannot be aligned closely with socialism because socialism involves lots of government.

    Marx’s conception of communism is worse than purely hypothetical. It is sheer lunacy. The idea that the absolutist despots of the all-powerful “proletarian dictatorship” would one day simply walk away from power has no precedent to point to and no logic behind it. Even as a prophecy, it strains credulity to the breaking point.

    Communism in the sketch above appears where it does because in actual practice, it is just a little more radical than the worst socialism. It is the difference between the murderous, totalitarian Khmer Rouge of Cambodia and, say, the socialism of Castro’s Cuba.

3. Communism and Fascism are radically different because in focus, one is internationalist and the other is nationalist (as in Hitler’s “national socialism”).

    Big deal. Again, chocolate and vanilla are two different flavors of ice cream, but they’re both ice cream. Was it any consolation to the French or the Norwegians or the Poles that Hitler was a national socialist instead of an international socialist? Did it make any difference to the Ethiopians that Mussolini was an Italian nationalist instead of a Soviet internationalist?

Endless confusion persists in political analysis because of the false dichotomy the conventional spectrum (Sketch 1) suggests. People are taught to think that fascists Mussolini and Hitler were polar opposites of communists Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. In fact, however, they were all peas in the same collectivist pod. They all claimed to be socialists. They all sought to concentrate power in the State and to glorify the State. They all stomped on individuals who wanted nothing more than to pursue their own ambitions in peaceful commerce. They all denigrated private property, either by outright seizure or regulating it to serve the purposes of the State.

April 17, 2023

Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier

Filed under: Books, Britain, Economics, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Daniel Nuccio on one of George Orwell’s early works that prefigured the bestsellers he is best known for today:

Written for a group of British socialists known as the Left Book Club, the oeuvre is part documentation of the life of Britain’s impoverished working class with particular focus on the dignity and importance of coal miners and part autobiographical account of Orwell overcoming his own class prejudices, united by themes developed throughout regarding the economic commonalities of and social distinctions between Britain’s low-level bourgeoisie and working class, as well as the downside of industrialization and hypocrisy of fashionable socialism.

By Orwell’s account, Britain’s class system at the time, partly based on economic stratification, partly in an unofficial caste system, fostered a seemingly contradictory world in which middle-class bourgeoisie and the working class might experience little difference in income, but drastic differences in their respective places in British society. Yet, even as unemployment and poverty festered and spread, with the middle class eventually “feeling the pinch”, social distinctions, Orwell reported, naturally won out over the narrowing economic gap between classes. Lower-level middle class Brits, despite being working class by any objective economic metric, still chose to identify as bourgeoisie.

Rampant industrialism likely exacerbated these problems as it fundamentally transformed Britain into a machine society, likely to its detriment, according to Orwell’s description. Consequently, these and other factors, Orwell argued, positioned Britain at a crossroads at which the country and its people inevitably would be forced to choose between socialism and fascism.

From his depiction of 1930s British society, it would seem fascism was perhaps going to win out (and perhaps would have if not for later events unbeknownst to Orwell at the time). His prescribed antidote was socialism. Yet, Orwell claimed, the hypocrisy, offensiveness, and buffoonish self-satirizing nature of many socialists tended to drive most normal people away.

Reading The Road to Wigan Pier as an American more than eighty years after its publication, the world Orwell depicts in some ways seems foreign. In many others it is amusingly, if not unsettlingly familiar.

Although not as ingrained as in Britain, the United States maintains its own version of a class system in the form of a superficial yet meaningful distinction between middle class and working class that many Americans yoke to personal character and economic reality.

Nowhere is this more obvious than America’s approach to higher education and the jobs afforded to those with a college degree versus those without. Attaining a degree from a four-year college or university, at least to many members of the American middle class, is seen as something of a sacrament that affirms one’s position in the American middle class. Receiving the sacrament of higher education signals one’s position along with one’s sophistication, respectability, and intelligence. It saves one from the indignity of blue-collar work and the impecunious state with which such work is associated.

March 3, 2023

Progressives have steadily transitioned to the movement that denies that any personal conduct rules should apply

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Freddie deBoer challenges his fellow leftists to identify who were the theorists that introduced the notion that personal responsibility is an anti-socialist position:

The woman whose account appears at the top of this picture started a Twitter storm, somehow, by publicly wishing that she could take her child onto the subway without exposing them to secondhand smoke. She was beset by a certain online species of ostensible leftist who is against ever trying to enforce any kind of rule, anywhere, ever. See, rules are the hand of oppression, or something, and since most of society’s rules are meant to be enforced by the police, trying to enforce them (merely wishing that they be enforced) is an endorsement of the police and their violence …

I find this attitude has become inescapable. It’s not just the attitude that the enforcement of societal rules and norms is bad, but that this is the default assumption of all right-thinking people — it’s not just a left-wing perspective but the left-wing perspective. Like so much else in contemporary left-of-center discourse, it demonstrates the total ideological poverty we’re working with. Nobody has read anything, so nobody knows anything, so you’re constantly getting yelled at by self-described radicals who have no solid footing in any systematic approach to left politics at all. Like I said before, we’re living in definitional collapse; the struggle right now is not merely that socialism can’t win but that so many self-described socialists have no deeper ideological moorings than whatever they’ve absorbed from Tumblr and “breadtube”. They think that to be a socialist means to disdain all rules because there is no substance to their socialism at all.

Chris Hayes considered the subway smoking problem last year.

Conceptually, I don’t think these problems are hard at all: the left, the socialist left, has never advocated for a system in which there are literally no expectations on personal behavior. It’s quite bizarre to suggest that this was ever a thing! Only certain extreme forms of anarchism have ever implied that society should have no rules. Go back through the history of socialist theorists and number all of the ones who believed that there should be no laws and no police to enforce them. You won’t find many! Instead you’ll find people who believed in the need for both laws that govern human behavior and constabulary forces to enforce those laws. That’s the solution to the conundrum, my friends — you have rules and you have police that enforce those rules. The belief, and the hope, is that a socialist society is one with far less need for aggressive policing, thanks to far greater economic equality, and maybe someday, after the end of material need, we can consider a policeless society. But not having any social rules or people who enforce those rules is not a socialist concept and never has been. What I would ask Chris Hayes and people like him is … what is the leftist tradition that you’re drawing from that implies that there should be no enforcement of behavioral norms? What thinker? What book? What philosophy? Or, could it be that you’ve developed this totally substance-free approach to basic order because you’ve been habituated to talking this way through exposure to people on social media who know nothing about anything in particular?

Of course, there’s big problems with American policing. Very big problems indeed. So what we do is reform policing. (I address this at length in my next book, coming this fall from Simon & Schuster.) Alternatively, if you’re really committed to this “no rules, no enforcement” thing, you become an anarchist of a very particular stripe — most versions of anarchism have both rules and enforcement mechanisms for them — and you and your compatriots can try to change the system. All twelve of you. In the house your wealthy parents bought for you.

November 21, 2022

QotD: Socialism is nihilism

Filed under: History, Politics, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… Socialists are all about equality, and if everyone ends up equally broke, hungry, and dead, well, fair’s fair. Igor Shafarevich flat out declared that Socialism is a suicide cult. Take your pick — Socialism simply is Nihilism.

That seems bizarrely wrong, considering how much effort Socialists put into saving the world. But look at it objectively, comrade (heh heh), and you’ll see that Save-the-World-ism, of whatever flavor, always boils down to Destroy-the-World-ism. Always. It doesn’t matter how the world gets “saved;” it always gets blown up in the process. You still can’t find a better primer on chiliastic psychology than Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium. The specifics of each loony doctrine changed, but the underlying presumption was always the same: Kill everyone, destroy everything, and then Jesus comes.

This is true even of millennialists whose doctrines don’t obviously entail killing everyone. Calvinists, for example. I spent decades trying to explain Calvinism to undergrads, and never once succeeded. The gulf between their words and their actions is too vast for the adolescent mind. There are only two logical responses to the doctrine of “double predestination”: quietism, or hedonism. They knew it, too, which is why they started burning people at the stake the minute they got any real power. Look at what they did, not what they said, and you’ll see nihilism plain as day. Calvin’s Geneva was the nearest thing to a police state that could be achieved with 16th century technology. The ideal Calvinist would say nothing, do nothing, think nothing, as he sat in the plain pews of his unadorned chapel, waiting for death and the Final Judgment. Calvinists wanted to grind the world to a halt, not blow it up, but once again the mass extinction of the human race is a feature, not a bug.

Take Jesus out of the equation, and you end up at pure shit-flinging nihilism in less than three steps. Marxism is perhaps the most exquisitely pointless doctrine ever devised. It’s more pleasant to have than to have not, I suppose, but no matter how much everyone has, we’re still just naked apes, living the brief days of our vain lives under an utterly indifferent sky. Marxists are a special kind of stupid, so they don’t realize it, but … they won. Modern Western “poor” people keel over from heart disease while fiddling with their smartphones in front of 50″ plasma tvs. While wearing $200 sneakers. We’re so far from being “alienated” from the fruits of our labor that “labor” is an all-but-meaningless concept for lots of us — and the further down the social scale you go, the more meaningless it gets. The modern ghetto dweller simply is Marx’s ideal proletarian. Does he look self-actualized to you? Ecce homeboy.

I assure you, the SJWs know this. Calvinists to the core, they know better than anyone the utter futility of all human effort. So they do what the original Calvinists did: Displace, displace, displace. Don’t take it from me, take it from a card-carrying Marxist. The end result is the same: Whether you’re a Puritan or an SJW, the only way to escape the crushing meaninglessness of your condition is to spend every moment of every day contemplating your pwecious widdle self.

Throw in the transitive property of equality, and you’ve got people like Hillary Clinton. If Socialism is Nihilism, then Nihilism is Socialism. Far from arguing against the idea … that Hillary et al are motivated solely by hatred, I’m 100% behind it. In fact, I’d argue that the Nihilism comes first — people who have convinced themselves that life is pointless always, always, embrace the biggest and most all-encompassing form of collectivism on offer. What could be crueler, than to be given all this for nothing? It’s not even a sick joke, since a joke implies a joker.

How can you not hate this world, then, and everything in it? More to the point: how can you not hate yourself, for seeing the world as it really is? Ignorance is bliss … but how can you not hate them, too, those poor deluded motherfuckers who still think stuff like God and love and family and the designated hitter might somehow mean something? Vanity, vanity, all is vanity … and if I have to face the existential horror of it all, then fuck it, so do you. “Capitalism,” the “free market,” “representative government” — call it what you will, it’s all just vanity, just another way for the sheeple to keep deluding themselves. Fuck it, and fuck them. Burn it down. Burn it allllll down.

Severian, “A Tyranny of Nihilism”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-10-22.

October 28, 2022

“Real Trussnomics” has never been tried, cry the disgruntled free-marketeers

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Kristian Niemietz investigates the economic theories that Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng attempted to implement during their very brief moment in power:

British Prime Minister Liz Truss, 1 May 2022.
Official portrait via Wikimedia Commons.

Over the past couple of years, I have written a lot about how socialists always disown every socialist project as soon as its failures become apparent, and then go on to claim that the project was never “really” socialist to begin with. The idea of socialism is pure, noble and flawless. It cannot fail. It cannot be refuted by real-world evidence. It can only be “badly implemented”, “distorted” or “misappropriated”.

In recent weeks, however, the rhetoric of “Yes, but … not like that!” has not come from socialists talking about Venezuela or Nicaragua, but from disgruntled free-marketeers [https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/trusss-demise-ends-revival-thatchers-libertarian-economics-2022-10-20/] talking about the ill-fated Truss/Kwarteng government.

Whenever this happens, inevitably, within a few minutes, my Twitter notifications fill up with comments like “Oooh, so what you guys are saying is, Trussism-Kwartengism wasn’t real free-market economics? Real free-market economics has never been tried? Hmmm, what does this remind me of? An idea for your next book there, eh, Herr Niemietz?”

Fair enough, I suppose! It would be a bit rich of me to complain about that. My work on socialism was, after all, was not just about socialism per se, but also, more broadly, about the lack of accountability in the world of ideas. If you argue that people should be held to account for the track record of the ideas they advocate, you cannot credibly complain when you find yourself at the receiving end of that.

And, yes, admittedly, in recent weeks, disgruntled free-marketeers really have sounded very much like Continuity-Corbynites. “Truss and Kwarteng had the right ideas, their plan was just terribly executed”; “Truss and Kwarteng were never given a chance, the entire media establishment immediately ganged up on them”; “Truss and Kwarteng were undermined by their own party at every step of the way” – we have heard this all before, just substitute “Corbyn” for “Truss”, and “McDonnell” for “Kwarteng”.

So I cannot blame people for making this comparison. But that does not mean that I have to accept it: I believe that this is a fundamental false equivalence, and I would like to explain why.

(I should, at this stage, make clear that the IEA has no corporate view, so I cannot speak for any of my colleagues or ex-colleagues, or people from other pro-market think tanks. Where I refer to what other people have said, I will specifically say so.)

October 12, 2022

The two traditions of the American political left

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray responds to a post by Leighton Woodhouse that declares that “left libertarianism” has won the battle for the soul of the American left:

I see two traditions on the American political left.

One is a tradition skeptical of authority, or aggressively hostile to it: Striking miners battling Coal and Iron Police, or Pinkertons, or Colorado sheriffs, or the National Guard; Wobblies fighting cops in the street; Great War-era socialists attacking the military draft, and going to prison for it; the Weatherman planting bombs in police and military offices. This tradition on the left views government as authority, a repressive servant of the status quo — “the executive committee of the bourgeoisie”. Leftists in this tradition say that of course government serves capitalism and corporate power, and of course the government isn’t on our side. Go back to the Coal and Iron Police to see how radical labor activists saw them: state-sanctioned police, with badges, on the private payroll of the industrialists. The young radical George Orwell, writing about his time fighting in Spain: “When I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.”

The other is a tradition centered on the supposedly inherent decency, wisdom, and fairness of government, a tradition that runs through the capital-p Progressive Era and Woodrow Wilson, to the New Deal, and onward into the Great Society. In this tradition, state power is benevolence itself, and points its kindness downward. Government interposes itself between the downtrodden worker and the power of the wealthy, ensuring the dignity of the poor. Tax the rich! In this tradition, government represents our best selves, our highest yearning for a better world. Why, just look at how much more equitable the progressive income tax made our social order, back when marginal tax rates were so much more fair at the top. Government serves, protects, nurtures: It’s the tool of the ordinary man, offering the noble guarantees of Social Security and Medicaid. Of course government is on our side, fellow downtrodden, and we need more of it.

Those two traditions don’t fit together, though the obvious way to square the circle is to say that a Bill Ayers opposes the power of the state when it opposes him, and embraces it if he thinks his side has come to control it. This would mean that there aren’t two ideological traditions — just two different instrumental postures. But no one who survived the Ludlow Massacre thought the government was a benevolent servant of the working man.

As Leighton Woodhouse notes, we have a good deal of what looks like anti-authority leftism in our cities, in the form of movements that call for the end of mass incarceration, the defunding of the police, and the transition to a social services model in response to homelessness and drug addiction. In this view, rising crime and growing homelessness are signs of urban leftists rejecting authority as a tool. Homelessness is not a crime, you fascists!

But I’ve written before about the incredible strangeness of progressive political columnists denouncing Donald Trump’s vicious authoritarianism, and then proudly pivoting to an expression of their approval of the warm and caring Justin Trudeau — who cracked down on incipient Trumpism in his country by boldly freezing the bank accounts of dangerous participants in the evil right-wing truck convoy. When government freezes the bank accounts of protesters, government is fighting against authoritarianism, obviously. More government power means less authoritarianism!

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