Is Socialism Part of the American Tradition? An Answer to The Nation magazine’s John Nichols
Next Nichols writes that what is needed is:
…a social democratic critique frequently combined with an active Socialist Party and more recently linked with independent socialist activism in labor and equal rights campaigns for women, racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, gays and lesbians, and people with disabilities — has from the first years of the nation been a part of our political life. This country would not be what it is today — indeed it might not even be — had it not been for the positive influence of revolutionaries, radicals, socialists, social democrats and their fellow travelers.
Look at the above sentence carefully. First, Nichols gives us the refrain of the litany of left causes — not any kind of a critique, and indeed, nothing that is similar in any way to the old socialist left and the kind of programs it espoused. This is but a politically correct reassertion of the bromides of the current far Left.
Later, Nichols presents the late Michael Harrington, who adhered to a rather traditional Marxian politics of class, as an exemplar of the kind of American radical whom he respects. Harrington, he writes, “recognized that it was possible to reject Soviet totalitarianism while still learning from Marx and embracing democratic socialism.” This is highly misleading and disingenuous. As time passed, Harrington moved further to the ranks of the pro-Communist fellow-traveling left. He enthusiastically endorsed the Sandinistas and rejected his comrades making any criticism of them, and on foreign policy, he moved to supporting the peace movement of the 70s and 80s although in effect, it stood for unilateral Western disarmament and no action to force a similar result from the Soviets.
Harrington also, in fact, provided just the strategy for the American Left that Nichols starts out his article rejecting. Nichols criticizes the Obama administration for not being socialist, and in effect, argues that the president is a sell-out. Harrington espoused what I termed a strategy of “Browderism without Earl Browder and the CP’s Moscow tie.” In the 1940s, Browder dissolved the American CP and recreated it into a non-political so-called “association,” in which the comrades were ordered to enthusiastically support FDR, to run in campaigns as Democrats if they were vying for office, and to function as a left-wing of the liberal FDR coalition. In New York City, they took over the American Labor Party, originally founded by anti-Communist socialists as a separate line in which the NYC labor movement could cast their ballot for Roosevelt.
At an event run by Democratic Socialists of America in the 80s, Mike asked me to debate the leader of the Labour Party left-wing in Britain, the extremist MP Tony Benn, who at the time was seeking to become its top leader in a fight against Labour moderates, which Benn eventually lost. Benn argued that in the U.S., the democratic socialists should run on their own tickets and platform, espouse socialist transformation, and build a movement dedicated to that independently.
I took the Harrington position, arguing that Benn’s proclaimed strategy led straight to defeat. Rather, I argued, the democratic Left should enroll en masse in the Democratic Party, fight for advanced socialist positions within its ranks, and support and back all Democrats, in order to make it in effect the social-democratic party that it could become. I invoked the name of Earl Browder, and noted that his strategy was correct, even though it was purely motivated at the time by making American Communism non-threatening because Moscow demanded that, at a moment when it needed FDR to help the Soviets win the war against the Nazis.
I also provided the blurb for a pamphlet DSA published in defense of the moderate and very inconsequential so-called Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act, which stated that it was the goal of government to create a full employment society in which all Americans had jobs. We knew that was chimerical, but as I said in the blurb (unfortunately, I now cannot find the actual pamphlet) this was a method to endorse a goal that was itself meaningless, but could lead to a hegemonic shift that would produce demands for policies actually socialist in content, and that would have real political meaning and lead to incremental steps towards socialism.
The strategy Harrington and I advocated was itself a model of the Gramscian strategy of stealth socialism that Stanley Kurtz lays out so well in his book Radical-in-Chief. That is why Nichols, who does not comprehend this, fails to understand that despite his many disclaimers, Obama is actually a socialist who does know that the way to “fundamentally transform America,” as he said he favored during the campaign, is accomplished by the tactics he now is using. But his socialism is not a libertarian socialism in which the individual rules, but one based on creating an American version of a state-command economy.
Nichols goes on at great length at the influence Harrington had both on John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, after he wrote the best-selling book The Other America that helped create the War on Poverty. If you read the book, you will find that as Harrington later acknowledged, there is not one single word in it about socialism or social-democracy, although Harrington was at the time a major leader of the socialist movement, the chosen successor of Norman Thomas. This was a conscious decision on Harrington’s part, made to help promote an essentially socialist policy, by not alienating those who opposed socialism and would not support him if he revealed his own political views. He knew that the kind of program he wanted, although later he would criticize it for not going far enough, was socialist in content, and if it worked, would push the nation further to the left.
Harrington did, as Nichols write, succeed “beyond his wildest dreams.” But he did that by doing what Obama is doing now, not what Nichols himself advocates. In Nichols’ terms, Harrington too was a sell-out. He does, somewhat unconsciously, know this. He writes that “Americans would not have gotten Medicare if Harington and the socialists who came before him…had not for decades been pushing the limits of the healthcare debate.” True enough — but that is because they hid their socialism in advocating universal health care, claiming that it was anything but socialist, simply advancing upon what the New Deal already created. (On another matter, Nichols goes out of his way in listing the great socialists who fought valiantly not only Thomas and Debs, but Margaret Sanger and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn — the later a hard-nosed Stalinist who as far as I know never did anything at all other than support the Soviet Union over and over.)
He ends appropriately quoting the words Ted Kennedy spoke at a testimonial evening to Harrington shortly before he died, held in New York City at The Village Gage, when Kennedy said: “Some say Mike is advocating socialism; I see him delivering The Sermon on the Mount.” The view that Christ was a socialist is, of course, a long-standing claim of Communists, epitomized by Woody Guthrie’s balled “Jesus Christ,” sung to the tune of “Jesse James.” Kennedy, at least, did understand how socialism could be brought to America.
At the conclusion of his article, Nichols writes that “programs ‘organized along socialist lines’ [he is quoting historian Patrick Allit] do not make a country socialist,” but he argues that America “should continue to be informed by socialist ideals and a socialist critique of public policy.”
Actually, there is a historian and socialist who has a different view of this, and that is Martin J. Sklar. Ironically, had Nichols looked in back issues of The Nation, particularly the issue of Sept. 4/11 2000, he would have found a very important article by an economist name Marc Chandler, who lays out a very different perspective, one that leads to quite different conclusions about socialism in America than that he has delivered in the current issue of his magazine.
That will be the subject of the second part of this essay, which should be up by Wednesday.
The ALP enabled left leaning unions such as the needle trades to vote for FDR. The AFL building trades, ILA etc had no problem voting for FDR on the Tammany Democratic line – although in their heart of hearts they preferred Smith in ’32 and someone like Farley in ’40.
Dear Mr. Radosh:
Thanks for article because it answers a question that I have had for a long time years which is “What happened to John Nichols?” I remember him as a kid when he was a columnist and “labor reporter” for the rag serving my part of the world, the Toledo “Blade.” He left that paper about twenty years ago to write on “labor issues” and I always wondered where he went. His columns in those days were almost parodies of a certain type of condescending liberalism that is loftily patronizing toward it’s friends and viciously snide toward it’s enemies. Reading his stuff was one of my first introductions to the bottomless contempt that the left has for the rest of us.
Nice to see that he did, in fact, develop into a full-blown socialist and that his efforts have been rewarded with a place on the editorial staff of “The Nation.” He always struck me as one of those individuals who still envisions the “working man” as a faceless laborer in Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” endlessly shuffling along in the bowels of the earth between giant dials and huge hissing machines. For the socialist that is an extremely comforting view of the world. Of course that sort of person always needs a John Nichols (or The Nation magazine) to tell them what to think. For Mr. Nichols it is always 1932 and Woody Guthrie is always riding the rails. Boy will he be upset when he hears about the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact.
I look forward to the next installment.
Mr. Radosh: In Nichols’ statement about, ‘Social Security, public housing, public power, collective bargaining, “and other attributes of the welfare state,” you call out public housing. I would call out all of them. Two in particular would be social security, which is a ponzi threatening the US with bankruptcy, and collective bargaining (of the kind enforced by unions) which is downright anti-democratic.
As for Mr. Nichols statements on the history of the US and socialism, I would only note that the Constitution provided the federal government with only very limited powers. That is certainly not a prescription for government control of the economy. (What has allowed the federal government to become so expansive and intrusive is the misinterpretation of the commerce clause, and that is something that must be undone.)
To the extent socialism is part of the American tradition then, precisely to that extent, count me proudly un-American. Liberty is my country. If America ever becomes a free country I will be proudly American. If some other country in the world becomes a free country, I will promptly move there and never look back. Until then, I am a dissident fighitng for liberty in America.
A quick glance at names referenced in any discussion of Leftism in America will reveal that Leftism is primarily a creation of non-Americans. Americans being, of course, those original colonists and their descendants — English, Scots, German, French, Swedes, and Dutch. Since the mid-19th Century New York City and Philadelphia have been, not just non-American, but anti-American enclaves. Today, the whole Bos-Wash corridor, big cities everywhere, and major college towns have joined the list of the anti-Americas. Check a map of voting by counties to get the low-down. Leftism is one rationale for the destruction of Western Civilization and American society. Normal people do not want to destroy their own culture and tradition. There are always a few misfits in any population, but the backbone of Leftism everywhere is the alien. This is all genetic, which is why the Left can endure continuing social/religious/economic/political resistance. It isn’t an idea that is the threat, but the existence of alien peoples in your environment. Victory comes when those people no longer exist.
So, I guess this is ‘fancy’ for ‘blame (and kill) the Jews’.
Are there also alien immigrant populations whose presence is responsible for the socialism that exists in Europe?
Just checking.
Just guessing, but the answer is “yes” and might they be Jews also?
“Socialists and the left in general wanted not only equal, universal, and obligatory schools, social health service, progressive taxation, and religious tolerance…”
There is the rub with the socialists. State a bunch of more or less “good things” and then throw obligatory in. This means, that we think these things are good, but no matter your evaluation, for social reasons you will be a participant, or your children will be. A more un-American concept could scarcely be crafted for fiction, but there you are.
T
Socialism is not a part of the American tradition. Here, if it is required for one person to assist another, for whatever reason, they do it out of their own sense of charity or duty.
Socialism forces this requirement on you, no appeal. Pure coercion, or else.
Further, I note all of the categories you’d mentioned, Ron, that Socialists “traditionally” pursued: schools, abolition, opposing rampant militarism – these are (yet again) the Left co-opting these concepts, as if they are the only ones who understand them, and the only ones who have fought against them.
I can’t say I’m surprised. Consider if you try to get into a serious debate with a Liberal on, say, the meaning of “Racism.” Every single possible meaning of this word that opposes a Liberal interpretation will be utterly rejected. Because in their minds, only they have the “right” to define them. Those who have a different interpretation will, of course, have something seriously wrong with them – they are racist themselves, or a damned neo-con, what have you.
You know what? This is THE arena Conservatives have lost the battle in. Because these weepy socialist kumbayaa bastards have been allowed to be the standard.
Edit: Oops. Should end with, “…and the only ones who have fought against them or for them.”
Post in haste, repent at leisure.
I am going to spin up a little hypothesis story to see what you think about the roots of socialism in America.
Socialism in America began in Jamestown when Captain Smith issued his famous order, “Those that don’t work, don’t eat, and will be set outside of the gates.
The socialists formed their first party meeting when outside of the gates they organized to bemoan Smith’s lack of charity and compassion. They promised to do other types of work as they saw fit, and added ambiance, entertainment, worker rights, and style. Smith let them back and the first socialist party was started.
It is easy to see that socialism is all about absolute government control. All one must do is read what this idiot writes.
After all, one must only relinquish all peronal responsibility and freedom to be enveloped in the all encompasing blanket of government protection.
That has to be one of the most frightening things. It can keep me awake at night.
That is exactly what it’s all about: abrogating your personal responsibilities to someone else. Who pretty much lies their way into your confidence by representing themselves as the source of the best possible outcome for you, and because they’re so much more expert at this stuff than you are. Not to mention, if you are not responsible for your support in life, neither are you responsible for your failures. One flows from the other.
And let’s face it: many people are fundamentally lazy. Not, I think, because it is inevitable for them to become so, but because the social system, our mutual compact with each other, has been altered and skewed by Liberal dreams of a “perfect” society with them in charge. So it’s “OK and normal” to be some welfare-sucking parasite. Hell, it’s even to the point that there’s a definite inner-city kitsch to being so.
I tell you this, from within the social service world I work in, there’s a deep strain of smug with people who have worked the system to become beneficiaries of this entitlement system. And there is one hell of a lot of them.
Let me know when it’s time to throw bricks thru windows in DC.
These politicians are selling America down the river; our President is doing all he can to bring our country to its knees. It’s time we went all 1776 on their @$$es.
Yes, Socialist thought has been around America for awhile and opposing it or no should not be based on a perception of it’s being homegrown or not.
Like all modes of dogma, pedantry does not address the human condition and when it tries to as a type of gov’t it will fail because it ignores reality. Socialism is not like Kings and Princes who held things together by brute force. One didn’t need faith to believe in a dictator.
Modes of gov’t do need faith but faith doesn’t equal success. Socialism only became an accepted form of gov’t when the American zeitgeist enabled it to and not the other way around. Without the connivance of a culture, pedantry is few guys with pamphlets on a street corner.
The Soviet Union bought into Communism wholesale and it tottered along for awhile until reality reared its ugly head and then it crashed.
America is crashing now and in many ways because it has subscribed to socialism on a bureaucratic level which was enabled by the 60s. Reality is rearing its head for us too.
Democracy is the only long term gov’t that can succeed because its dogma is really no dogma at all. It is based on the belief in the human spirit and not in what form it should take. Democracy enables as much success for as many people as possible without dictating it. The rest is up to you and me becuz Democracy doesn’t define us, it acknowledges us.
“Democracy doesn’t define us, it acknowledges us.”
Damned Skippy.
James….there are all kinds of ‘democracies’ defined. American has now become a social democracy. The fundamental democracy of the United States was built around a hybrid liberal democracy to include the definition and system of a constitutional democracy…..with checks and balances. The latter constitutional is today, the basis of many countries democracy systems around the world to include the likes of China, Russia, Iran……..just read their constitutions.
There are many tenents and interpretations of what constitutes the U.S. democracy system providing very interesting reading and analysis….however, I personally tend to see and believe we’re heading for what is defined as a social democracy….if not already.
What we’re heading for is, well, a top-down fascist command economy.
Ask any of Chrysler’s bondholders, who after being looted to benefit Obama’s cronies in the UAW, might observe that if it’s not that sort of economy, it’s no better than an antisocial democracy.
Unless ‘social democracy’ condones legalized theft-by-government.
I have to submit that socialism is antithetical to our Republic.
I compare it to Islam, where Jihadi’s can lie dormant until called upon for their instructions to attack.
American Socialists are constantly working covertly, like a virus, that can relapse after a period of perceived improvement.
That brings to mind that Congress, and the current ‘regime’, seems to be acting more like an antibiotic resistant infection, rather than an entity that is supposed to be beneficial for the People.
Putting the events leading to ‘government’ socialism in the 30′s, socialism began to rise as a national ‘peoples’ agenda in the mid 60′s forward. From this era forward, it is the people who have driven the advances of socialism…..not the government. Government is only conducted in this country by those persons chosen by the people to represent their States districts and ideologies. Though the electoral college has the power to nullify the results of a general election for president they too, follow the peoples majority vote.
So, while folks can blame the government, the fact is, they have nobody to blame in government but they, themselves….the people! This country is broken from the bottom up…not the top down! The people perpetuate the advances of socialism! The society is indoctrinated into socialism, driving its advances…even those who so boldly deny they are a part of that driving force.
I have to disagree. Bad legislation, enacted by rogue legislators has become the norm.
Example; Obama, and his rogue Congress.
Is there any campaign promise he has not broken yet?
Politicians, today, go rogue, once they get empowered to make legislation that perpetuates and increases their own power and influence. e.g. “redistricting”.
Too many legislators are changing parties in desperation to maintain their positions.
The People that have elected these individuals, are ambivalent to recall, believing things will turn out for the better. They seldom do.
These Democrat/Socialists have their tentacles in many organizations that are operating out of sight, because they get no media exposure until they have a quarrel with the establishment; e.g. Wisconsin, teachers, police, and firefighters.
geezer….a rogue legislator here and there did not advance centralized government, consolidated economies, centralized economies and expansions of centralized socialist handouts. Rougue legislators are not the originators of the thousands of corrupt special interest groups that corrupt government…the people formed the corrupt self serving special interest groups that in turn, corrupted government. The systemic and systematic indoctrination of a majority by a minority allowed for the transformation of America, bringing it to the cliffs edge of today…..not rogue legislators. The constitution as the steering wheel, has long been replaced by the people, for socialism’s ideology…. in their personal lives and for their government and nation.
…the people who have driven the advances of socialism…..not the government.
Let’s fix that. Factions of the people have demanded the ‘advances’ of socialism, and the government from time to time has pandered or sold out to them. For example:
ACORN stages riots in banks and council meetings. Government emplaces, then White House metastasizes, the Community Reinvestment Act. Whereby bank A lends money of depositor B to deadbeat real-estate borrower C, who eagerly credits, and votes for, political party D – while the whole market collapses.
NOT the government, hey? Ask the crooks Barney Frank, Jamie Gorelick, Rahm Emanuel et al, who have grown very wealthy from the scam.
Very well put. I think the problem is that we have been converted as you say, almost unawares, not realizing the cost that came along with our 60s joy ride. We threw out too much too soon and we are struggling to recross that gap of lost knowledge as reality is forcing us to do.
Other forces, led by Obama, don’t want that gap crossed because they believe what lies there are de facto aristocracies of privilege rather than a spark of human genius that cannot be denied, tamped down, blamed, excused or engineered. Obama’s fundamental belief in what creates success is fundamentally flawed.
The socialization of the public life in the democratic state never brings to the “socialism” as the western socialist and social- democratic parties` practice shows, though socialization is connected with the leftist actions in the past.
But the socialism as the state`s ownership of means of production is the synonyme of the violence against the population.
Nevertheless the socialists are ineradicable as the permanent(free) socialization of public life is the objective necessity, while the civilization`s progress depend on creative minorities who act in the conditions of capitalistic freedom.The socialist`s violence is the menace.
The issue of socialism vs democracy is truly a nonstarter. Even our founding fathers understood the obligations in society that one person has to another. It is how colonial society was run. It did not have to be legislated. However, later as we became an industrialized nation with a larger population did the idea of societal obligations to all change and become a dirty word. While yes, the foundling fathers also warned against a larger federal government, they did not foresee how the nation and society would change from what they were living. It is why the Constitution of all things, is written so vaguely in major policy areas (read Madison in the Federalist Papers).
The social contract that is so often cited by socialists is not a foolish idea, yes Franklin castigated it, but the idea that if citizens owe allegiance to a government, including taxation, then that government needs to be there for a citizen when that citizen is in need. The problem is not the concept but the practice. It is the politicians who turned this universal idea of person to person obligation on its head and use it to further their own careers and in today’s world create identity politics, thereby polarizing the electorate inorder to maintain power. The truth is that we are a large society without true failsafe methods of helping those unable to help themselves. We have a bureaucratic system that prevents the least able to access a system that they do not understand. (Think about it, if you are unable to complete even a highschool degree how are you able to wade through the bureaucracy of the welfare system).
I also submit that the reason that many reject the idea of the “socialism” within our society is because it is associated, and rightly, with submission to those that are evil. The socialists and the left continually make excuses for the most evil tyrannies on the planet while castigating those that promote freedom and democracy. If a politician or a political thinker for that matter, could come along and conjoin the belief that people in society owe each other a helping hand when necessary while ultimately defending and supporting a strong foreign policy then the entire idea of socialist may not be such a dirty word afterall.
The reality is that we need government and government needs taxes. We need roads, treasury, military, postal service, etc. Congress does need to oversee those in society that would take advantage of the less educated and manipulate a system to the detriment of others. Yes, I do believe that the federal government has gone overboard in recent years, that is why I say there has to be a middle ground. Sorry but pure laissez-faire economics really does not work. I think we need to go back to the early twentieth century progressives, ala Teddy Roosevelt who had a strong national identity, love of country, understood societal obligations and didn’t think that evil was something to coddle.
The we’re-all-in-this-together, give-your-neighbor-a-helping-hand, what-would-Jesus-do vision of socialism strikes most conservatives as monstrously naive. It ignores the complexities of power, money, human nature, and human motivations.
Independent Patriot….enjoyed reading what you wrote. However, it makes assumptions based on revisionist history.
Putting aside the circumstances of the 30′s government social introduction, there was a ‘single’ fabric that bound American’s together. Albeit unpopular today, to include in any dialog, a driving force of that fabric was Christian values for each other and mankind. It worked pretty durn good through decade after decade of American progress until the latter 40′s through the late 50′s early industrial expansion that you spoke of. It was during this time that the culmination of an earlier era of communist and socialist activism, once again began to raise its ugly head among the young of the nation.
Prior to this era, the nation was predominately family unitized, non transient and the nations economies remained non consolidated and non centralized. There was no health care insurance, the nations economies received no government subsidies other than defense contracts. Up into the early 60′s I know of no persons who knew of or partook of any government subsidies from the 30′s social act except for the ‘crippled’ provisions because of polio of the times. Everybody in most of America received the very same kinds and levels of health care, money or no money. Be it tornado’s, fire, death or whatever, ‘people’ provided the help necessary to each other. The value for essential goods and services were largely centric to the needs of the people over any profit line.
In the late 50′s everything began to change with consolidations and centralization of many of the economies sectors prepping the advance for many tenents of socialism. From that point and especially from the 60′s and 70′s the rest of the decline process is well known and observed history.
Now, the people not only rely upon, but demand more and more economic and personal services assistance from a centralized government. Again, the nation is broken from the bottom up…not the top down.
Your perspective is very interesting. however, I do take exception to the idealized version of life before government failsafes were in place. While people helped each other and had extended family and life long friends that were there for them, not everyone lived that life and as the economy changed so did family composition and reach. While the problem is in many respects from the bottom up, those that think they are entitled to certain support, I would also hazard a guess that citizens feeling that government should support and help them in their time of need directly corresponds to the implementation and growth of the federal income tax and amount paid into FICA.
You’re probably right. At 82, I most likey haven’t the personal insight to be speaking as I did.
No need to be snide, but at 82 you should really understand that your perspective is just yours and your life is only your example of what happened. I do have elderly relatives and their version of America back in the day, differs greatly from yours.By the way, I am no sprig chicken myself.
It’s obviously no longer a question of whether we should have government assistance but of how much government assistance is enough and how much do we want to pay for it. Helping old people is nice. Helping sick people is nice. Helping unemployed people is nice. Subsidizing a healthy person’s entire life from cradle to grave is absolutely repugnant. Such a person is no longer a citizen (a term that used to mean a lot more than it does now), he’s a client – a dependent, someone whom the government controls, not the other way around. You may want to live that way. People who favor a “social-democratic” system of government definitely want you to live that way. Personally, I’ll take my chances with a more limited system of government.
Man to Duck: “Say, you look just like a Duck, feathers bill and all. You must be a Duck!”
Duck to Man: “I don’t consider myself a Duck, and I resist being labeled and classified as such. Therefore I an not a Duck”.
Man (to no one in particular): “I guess it’s not a Duck, then”
Duck to Man; “You are a racist”.
An excellent treatise on how ‘socialism’ can ruin a country by dominating it’s government, is “There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters”, by Claire Berlinski.
This book illustrates the death grip that powerful organizations, like unions, can impose upon a nations government. And these organizations do so at the expense of it’s membership.
NO NOT EVER !!!!
Socialism per se didn’t have much influence in American life until the 60s, but the roots of socialism are in Romanticism, along with all the other evil religions that have done such harm to the world. Jacobinism, Nazism, Communism, Intellectualism, Socialism, and even radical Islam, all grew from the Romanticism of the late 16th century, the ’2nd track’ of the Renaissance. The underlying beliefs they share is that human nature is malleable, and especially malleable to the intelligent or educated. The essential vanity is the divine right of the wise (self-styled), who believe they should rule us all due to nothing more than superior smarts. I go with Theoden of Rohan (via JRR Tolkien) on this one: “Even if your war upon us was just–as it was not, for were you ten times as wise you would have no right to rule me and mine for your own profit, as you desired…”
The supposed superiority of the Romantic over the rest of us is his awareness of injustice and suffering, and this awareness makes him somehow able to remedy the wrongs, because he is not willing to simply do what is within the reach of his arm, such as feeding the hungry himself as best he can so far as his money lasts, but instead results in a condemnation of all society and thus must be reshaped according to his superior awareness. It rests upon compassion and real injustices, but includes an unwarranted belief in the natural goodness of human beings, and an even less warranted belief in management, that one human can understand enough about others to manage their affairs better than those most interested. From these two conceits arise all the evil that has plagued the world since the Jacobins first began their ‘reign of terror.’ I call them conceits, but they are of course combined simply intellectual pride, and that has a long and storied history of wickedness. Every priestcraft that ruled any land did it for the good of the people, they supported kings and generals to keep order, and kept writing and knowledge away from the ‘unwashed masses’ both to protect the poor ignorant slobs, and to line their own pockets. Nothing has changed except the rhetoric, and whether they call themselves socialists or the Holy Priesthood of Nergal doesn’t matter in the slightest.
And despite the many evil perpetrated by priestcrafts all through history, they also did a lot of good. It’s always a mixed bag, because there are always idealists mixed with the venal. The same goes for socialism and every other Romanticist belief system. The trouble is differentiating between the good causes they espouse, often for purely tactical reasons, and the underlying beliefs. It is the beliefs that must be resisted at all cost, because they are anti-human and antithetical to freedom. Strange but true, but making man the measure of all things is anti-human and anti-humanist, because it takes real humans and turns them into abstractions that can then be abused at will. It is only a seeming contradiction that so many who profess love for humanity are personally misanthropic.
I am very grateful for those who have awakened to the evils they once espoused like Mr. Radosh. It’s one of the hardest and most courageous of acts to admit to an error of worldview and adapt according to the newly perceived reality. I honor all those who have made such a great navigational correction.
It is difficult to take seriously a writer who claims that Truman was more of a socialist than Obama.
But leaving Mr. Nichols aside, I’d like to comment on a few sentences from Kolakowski’s otherwise brilliant essay:
It would thus be a pity if the collapse of Communist socialism resulted in the demise of the socialist tradition as a whole and the triumph of Social Darwinism as the dominant ideology.
There is no such thing as “Social Darwinism”, except as the product of the morbid imagination of the charlatan Richard Hofstadter.
we should not discard the concept of “social justice,” much as it might have been ridiculed by Hayek and his followers.
Leaving aside the concept of “social justice”, it is as difficult to imagine Hayek using ridicule as it is to imagine Chris Christie leaving any doubt about what he means to say.
without [the concept of human dignity] we would be unable to answer the simple question: What is wrong with slavery?
Perhaps Kolakowski was unable to answer that question without the concept of human dignity, but I think that many other people could think of other reasons to oppose slavery. Failing that, one could simply postulate that slavery is wrong, and leave it at that.
Well said, and same to an earlier commenter who also pointed out something similar. Leftists have co-opted morality. They believe themselves to be the spiritual heirs of everyone who ever did anything nice for anyone else ever since the first ape-like ancestor shared a breadfruit with another ape-like ancestor. Socialism is about sharing, therefore sharing must be about Socialism. And, therefore, if someone doesn’t like Socialism then they must not like sharing. QED.
For example: Jesus taught us to care for the sick and the needy. That’s just what the Socialists are trying to do with their comprehensive welfare state! Wow, that means Jesus was a Socialist! It follows, therefore, that any Christian who disagrees with Socialism must be a hypocrite who doesn’t follow Jesus’ teachings about caring for the sick and the needy. Mean ol’ Christians…
It’s a useful rhetorical device. It’s not a logical argument, it’s an attack on one’s self-esteem. It takes some discipline to recall that compassion and generosity can exist and be expressed outside the context of Socialism, that people can be selfless givers without surrendering their will and the property to the State, and that going along with Socialist plans and schemes will not necessarily put one on “the right side of history.”
Socialism is NOT part of American tradition. It IS part of the treasonous anti American rhetoric. To answer the question simply as the article states it; NO. Socialism is nothing more than a death wish for socialists, and I do believe many freedom loving Americans will oblige them when the time comes.
I think this is related to what Snorri says above. Socialism is NOT part of the American tradition. Labor struggles and unionism ARE part of the American tradition – unless you think all those striking miners and Pullman Porters and steel workers and auto workers over the years weren’t “real Americans.”
The trouble is, Socialists have pretty much co-opted the whole field of labor relations in American history, taking credit for all of it when a lot of it was homegrown. The formula is: Socialism is interested in workers’ rights; Americans workers have fought for their rights throughout American history; therefore, Socialism is an old American tradition.
This is the historical equivalent of Pete Seeger dressing up as an old New England potato farmer and singing “Jimmy crack corn & I don’t care” in order to convince you that Communism is as American as apple pie & baseball…
As far as I know, “traditional” mainstream American labor was never about establishing a cradle-to-grave welfare state. Socialists would have us believe that the American labor movement was one current within the larger stream of Socialism. I prefer to think that Socialism was a minor current within the stream of the American labor movement.
The US was set up as a nation that embraced natural law (the law of nature and natures God). These concepts are at odds with socialism no matter how one obscures the subject with fancy propaganda and revisionist history. According to Lock, the cardinal rights of a free man are life, liberty, and property. The purpose of a just government is the protection of same. Socialism denies property rights, bestowing all property rights to the state, thus making slaves of all who toil therein. According to Locke, life is the cardinal of ALL rights, being a mans chief property. Socialism is an unholy marriage of church and state just as vile as the state churches our founders sought to escape.
It is kind of funny that the socialist, like the islamist, always seem to shower their religion with the blood of their fellow human beings(born or not). Any dissenters, are to be silenced by ridicule or destruction. You WILL pay your alms. You will not be left alone in peace until you do.
Let freedom ring?
I love learning history..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Theodore_Roosevelt#Progressivism
Is that Obama in the editorial cartoon?
Progressivism hasn’t changed in over 100 years.
I keep thinking of “The Road to Wellville” when I try to envision ancient American socialists…