By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, September 01, 2017
Well, as Bob Menendez said when he walked through the
door of a certain Hoboken “social club,” I’m home. And as the New Jersey
senator said when the electronic cash-counting machine broke down, I’ve got a
lot of work to do. So, as the former vice chairman of the Senate Democratic
Caucus said when the bed in his hotel suite was covered in various Las
Vegas–area “hostesses,” I’m gonna jump right in.
As everyone should, I was reading the new essay by my old
friend, Matt “Two-Drink Minimum” Labash. He writes about Antifa and all that
jazz. One passage stuck out for me. Matt “I Only Carry Stacks of Single Dollar
Bills” Labash profiles a couple of anti-Antifa activists who get called
fascists and white supremacists, despite the fact one is half-Japanese and the
other is Samoan and neither is a fascist nor white supremacist (more on that in
a bit). The Samoan guy goes by the name “Tiny” and serves as a kind of
bodyguard to Joey at various protests and counter-protests. Matt “If Only You Could
See My Tattoos” Labash writes:
Tiny, 21, also came to politics
through anger. Convinced all Trumpkins were racists, “I’d drive around and beat
them up,” he says nonchalantly. When he couldn’t find any to sass him back in
street encounters after he’d provoked them, he’d go home and watch other Trump
supporters get pounded online. “It made me happy. F—in’ racists getting beaten
up,” he said. While looking for more anti-Trumpkin-violence to enjoy, he
clicked one day on video from one of Joey’s rallies. “He gave a speech” about
love and unity, says Tiny. “Everything he said made me confused. I thought all
these f—ers were violent and racist. So I kind of had a change of heart and
reached out to Joey. If I had found out about antifa before finding out about
him, I’d have been antifa, too.”
This reminded me of a passage from Michael Burleigh’s
wonderful book, The Third Reich: A New
History (which you can also find in my book). He recounts a story of a
young Patrick Leigh Fermor, a British guy traveling around Germany in the early
1930s. One night, he made some drinking buddies in a Rhineland workers’ pub.
They were still all wearing their nightshift overalls. One of the guys he met
offered to let Fermor crash at his pad. Fermor climbed a ladder to the attic
where the guest bed was, and he found “a shrine to Hitleriana”:
The walls were covered with flags,
photographs, posters, slogans and emblems. His SA uniforms hung neatly ironed
on a hanger . . . When I said that it must be rather claustrophobic with all
that stuff on the walls, he laughed and sat down on the bed, and said: “Mensch!
You should have seen it last year! You would have laughed! Then it was all red
flags, stars, hammers, sickles, pictures of Lenin and Stalin and Workers of the
World Unite! . . . Then, suddenly when Hitler came to power, I understood it
was all nonsense and lies. I realized Adolf was the man for me. All of a
sudden!” He snapped his fingers in the air. “And here I am!” . . . Had a lot of
people done the same, then? “Millions! I tell you, I was astonished how easily
they all changed sides!”
Now, I don’t think a lot of Antifa types are poised to
become Trumpers, never mind alt-righters or fascists or Nazis (all of these
things are different, by the way). Nor do I think there will be lots of
conversions the other way.
But I do think there’s a tendency to take all of these
people too seriously. Put aside the question of whether Antifa is “morally
indistinguishable” from neo-Nazis, as my friend and colleague Marc Thiessen
writes. Also, leave aside whether they’re ideologically similar.
It seems to me the elephant in the room people that keep
breezing past is whether or not these people are psychologically similar. I remember when Antifa types first started
showing up on television breaking stuff, setting fires, punching people, and
the like, my wife said, “Those are just idiot boys looking for an excuse to
break stuff and get in fights.”
Can anyone really dispute that this is a huge part of
what’s going on with all these radicals on the left and the alt-right? A big
swathe of the bad things that have happened over the last 10,000 years can be
attributed to hormonally charged young men pulling stupid crap. Yes, yes,
before the feminists get mad at me, plenty of young women have done stupid
crap, too (indeed, there’s a weird school of thought that thinks it’s a great
triumph when women live down to the lowest standards of men, but that’s a
subject for another time).
If you want to get all Darwinian about it, you could
chalk it up the common behavior of male chimpanzees and humans alike of getting
into fights to impress females. If you want to get all Moynihanny about it, you
can blame the degradation of families and fatherhood. Or you can blame
secularization, or the ennui that comes with late-stage capitalism, or the
frick’n influence of Nietzsche or Mr. Rogers. The point is young people,
particularly males, love to create drama, defy authority, and anoint themselves
the heroic warriors of their tale.
In that passage from Matt “Those Aren’t Pillows” Labash’s
essay, Tiny admits he would have joined Antifa if he had stumbled on a
different YouTube video. That pretty much tells you all you need to know. Some
people just want an excuse to act on impulses that have remarkably little, if
anything, to do with ideology. Radicalism is better understood as a
psychological drive than a serious intellectual position.
The best analogy is to criminal outfits. I’m sure if you
talked to a Crip or a Blood, they’d be able to talk your ear off about how
different Crips and Bloods are from each other. But I think all rational people
understand the differences are smaller than those between Coke and Pepsi. My
hunch is that if you held everything else constant, a Crip born in Blood
territory would grow up to be a Blood. If Tony Soprano had been born a
Lupertazzi instead, how much would change? And if Millhouse had been born in
Shelbyville, he’d be saying those damn Springfieldians are the ones addicted to
sweets.
Trying Too Hard
Intellectuals and ideologues of various stripes tend not
to like these kinds of explanations, for the largely laudable reason that they
make a living working with ideas (and partisans like to make hay wherever they
can). This is why conservatives often place too much emphasis on bad left-wing
ideas to explain the breakdown in morals, marriage, etc. As I’ve written many
times before, the car and the birth-control pill have — for good and ill — done
more to overturn settled institutions and customs than Nietzsche or Marx ever
could. But pills and automobiles are hard to argue with, so like drunks
searching for their car keys under the street lamp because that’s where the
light is good, intellectuals focus on the stuff they can argue with.
Take this fairly representative Twitter thread
from a writer trying to insist that there are deep and profound ideological
differences between Antifa and the alt-right, particularly this bit:
does this also apply to those who
beat people in service of an ideology that gave us chattel slavery
(capitalism)? because that’s the police pic.twitter.com/EyD3AA0y2j
— Abi Wilkinson (@AbiWilks)
September 1, 2017
I’m not about to defend Stalin, but
there’s a difference between an *ideology* that’s genocidal and one that’s
based on idea of equality
— Abi Wilkinson (@AbiWilks)
September 1, 2017
Before I get to my actual point, a few clarifications.
First of all, Stalinism was genocidal (so were Leninism,
Maoism, Jacobinism, Pol Potism, etc.). The only legitimate retort to this is
immorally legalistic. The Soviets successfully lobbied the U.N. to exclude the
kinds of mass murder the Soviets were guilty of from the official definition of
genocide.
Second, capitalism did not “give us chattel slavery.” I
don’t know where it started, but people who peddle this line seem to think the
word “chattel” only applies to American slavery. But all “chattel” means is
“property,” and people kept slaves as property on every continent — save
Antarctica — since the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution. The Ancient Greeks,
Romans, Aztecs, Chinese, Native Americans, et al. all practiced “chattel
slavery” for thousands of years. It even exists today in the Islamic State. You
know who else had slaves? Stalin. If
you want to call it “forced labor” that’s fine — though I doubt it would be a
meaningful distinction to the millions sent into bondage by Stalin.
Third, the idea that an ideology being based on
“equality” somehow exonerates it is ridiculous. It, of course, depends on what
you mean by equality. Equality under the rule of law is the bedrock principle
of liberal democracy. Enforced economic equality is the stuff of
totalitarianism. And not just economic equality; if you’re confused on this
point, you should read Harrison Bergeron.
I don’t want to start cannibalizing my forthcoming book,
but the simple fact is that most of these ideological rationalizations for why
Antifa is so very different from the alt-right or “fascists” are morally obtuse
distractions. Sure, the ideological arguments invoked by Antifa and the
alt-right are different. Fine. Also, who cares? Let’s say for the sake of
argument Antifa is “better” than the alt-right? Congrats! You’ve established
that you’re better than Nazis. Good for you. The relevant question is whether
Antifa’s behavior is morally or legally justifiable and the obvious answer is
“Of course not.”
But as Irving Kristol once said, “When we lack the will
to see things as they really are, there is nothing so mystifying as the
obvious.” And so supposedly serious people expend enormous energy trying to
explain why their pet goon squads are morally superior to other goon squads.
Never mind that the people exhausting themselves trying
to justify Antifa’s antics consistently steal a base. As Matt “Smell My Fingers”
Labash demonstrates, many of the people these self-styled Roter
Frontkämpferbund are beating up aren’t
fascists, save in the sense Orwell had in mind when he wrote that “the word
Fascism has now no meaning except in
so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’” Sure, Antifa will beat up
fascists, and my dog will chase squirrels. But my dog will also chase
chipmunks, rabbits, mice, crows, deer, and — given the chance — gnus. Antifa
appears equally discriminating.
And, unlike conservatives who condemn the white
supremacists and neo-nazis, the leftists defending Antifa are actually lending
aid and comfort to them by crafting ridiculous rationalizations for their
behavior. As we’ve seen, that’s all these shmucks need.
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