{"id":20647,"date":"2013-06-12T13:03:01","date_gmt":"2013-06-12T18:03:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=20647"},"modified":"2013-07-28T10:24:09","modified_gmt":"2013-07-28T15:24:09","slug":"corey-robin-refutes-david-brooks-the-last-stalinist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/06\/12\/corey-robin-refutes-david-brooks-the-last-stalinist\/","title":{"rendered":"Corey Robin refutes David Brooks, “The Last Stalinist”"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Brooks wrote a column the other day that got lots of applause from the communitarians on both sides of the aisle for blaming Edward Snowden’s atomistic individualism and his “inability to make commitments and connections”. At Jacobin<\/em>, Corey Robin<\/a> explains why:<\/p>\n

This is an old argument on the communitarian right and left: the loss of social bonds and connections turns men and women into the flotsam and jetsam of modern society, ready for any reckless adventure, no matter how malignant: treason, serial murder, totalitarianism.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s mostly bullshit, but there\u2019s a certain logic to what Brooks is saying, albeit one he might not care to face up to.<\/p>\n

In the long history of state tyranny, it is often those who are bound by close ties of personal connection to family and friends that are most likely to cooperate with the government: that is, not to \u201cbetray\u201d their oaths to a repressive regime, not to oppose or challenge authoritarian rule. Precisely because those ties are levers that the regime can pull in order to engineer an individual\u2019s collaboration and consent.<\/p>\n

Take the Soviet Union under Stalin. Though there\u2019s a venerable tradition in social thought that sees Soviet totalitarianism as the product of atomized individuals, one of the factors that made Stalinism possible was precisely that men and women were connected to each other, that they were in families and felt bound to protect each other. To protect each other by cooperating with rather than opposing Stalin.<\/p>\n

Nikolai Bukharin\u2019s confession in a 1938 show trial to an extraordinary career of counterrevolutionary crime, crimes he clearly did not commit, has long served as a touchstone of the manic self-liquidation that was supposed to be communism. It has inspired such treatments as Arthur Koestler\u2019s Darkness at Noon<\/em>, Maurice Merleau-Ponty\u2019s Humanism and Terror<\/em>, and Godard\u2019s La Chinoise<\/em>. Yet contrary to the myth that Bukharin somehow chose to sacrifice himself for the sake of the cause, Bukharin was brutally interrogated for a year and he was repeatedly threatened with violence against his family. In the end, the possibility that a confession might save them, if not him, proved to be potent.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

Back to David Brooks. Brooks likes to package his strictures in the gauzy wrap of an apolitical communitarianism. But Brooks is also, let us not forget, an authority- and state-minded chap, who doesn\u2019t like punks like Snowden mucking up the work of war and the sacralized state. And it is precisely banal and familial bromides such as these \u2014 the need to honor one\u2019s oaths, the importance of family and connection \u2014 that have underwritten popular collaboration with that work for at least a century, if not more.<\/p>\n

Stalin understood all of this. So does David Brooks.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

H\/T to Radley Balko<\/a> for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Brooks wrote a column the other day that got lots of applause from the communitarians on both sides of the aisle for blaming Edward Snowden’s atomistic individualism and his “inability to make commitments and connections”. At Jacobin, Corey Robin explains why: This is an old argument on the communitarian right and left: the loss […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,84,7,10,53],"tags":[780,925,139,433],"class_list":["post-20647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-government","category-history","category-liberty","category-politics","tag-communism","tag-edwardsnowden","tag-psychology","tag-sovietunion"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5n1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20647"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20647\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21359,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20647\/revisions\/21359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}